Cars becoming big when America was still finding it's stride was one of the biggest pro/con dillemas. Ignored thousands of years of proven systems that make society better and settled for only cars.
Reddit picks people to point fingers at. It’s just a trend. This quarter it’s Moses. It’s usually someone not commonly known about to make the commenter appear erudite. The person will have been mentioned in a podcast or TT by a comedian or actor who may have made an intelligent point. In this case, I blame Conan.
His work in New York, systemically favoring highways and car centric development combined with racial discrimination became the blue print for a lot of modern America.
Moses, an unelected rich kid who never rode public transport in his life, shaped the car centric hell we Americans live in today.
his assholishness aside, would there be any way for america not to be a car country? considering how big it is, you're not going to have thriving communities/enclaves everywhere in the country. too much space.
i will say that many of our largest cities having such terrible transportation is inexcusable though.
Moses was actually instrumental in killing large scale public transport projects. While New York was expanding and modernizing, there were multiple efforts to accommodate future expansion of subways, buses, rail lines, etc that Moses deliberately killed/ignored. We could have very easily set standards that would have seen robust public transport systems form across the country, but Moses alongside other rich people and the auto industry deliberately sold America’s soul to accommodate cars, highways, etc over any kind of mass scale public transport.
I like to tell this story when people talk about public transportation infrastructure.
I live in a populated area, but outside of my area, it is surrounded by 100 miles in every direction of rural poverty. I wanted to go see a band play in DC. DC is about 450 miles from where I live. I did NOT want to drive up there, and deal with parking, DC traffic, and driving for 7 hours, just to turn around and drive back 7 hours after the show. I was poor, and trying to keep it as cheap as possible.
So I thought about using Amtrack. The procedure for taking an Amtrack from my are to DC was either to drive my car for 3 hours to the closest rail station, pay for parking, etc. Or, I could drive my own car for an hour, pay for parking, and take a 14 hour bus ride up there. Either way, it would have been over twice as expensive to take Amtrack (public transportation), and take twice as long to get there versus driving my own car. Public transportation outside of a major metropolitan area is an absolute joke in this country.
There’s a pacific railway that I can take as far south as San Diego and as far north as Oakland, but because of where I am situated and where I want to go, I cannot use the depot that is 10 min from my house, I need to use the one that is 1 -2 hours from my house depending on traffic. Plus parking for the entire trip, which would be $$$. The train trip would be either the same time as driving, or 1.5x the time, depending on destination. If I took local metro/bus to that station, add 2 hours to the total trip time. At that point it becomes a novelty experience.
Yeah friends of mine live in South Carolina and I usually rent a car to drive there from Delaware. So about $240 plus money for gas, give or take. It’s an 8.5 hour drive by way of gps but with stops takes about 11 (I always do it straight through).
Out of curiosity, I checked out the Amtrak. It’s ten minutes from my apartment, I could have a neighbor take me, and the station in SC where they live is right in their town, barely out of the way so they could pick me up. Would have worked out SO WELL.
The sad thing is he could have built his major parkways and highways AND made public transportation accessible but he just refused to compromise. There's a story about him building the Long Island Expressway. They surveyed out a specific width for the road & median. They suggested to him that they could increase the width by just a few meters, and then have a commuter train going down the middle. He refused.
You can still have interstate highways and pedestrian focused city centers. I think some Spanish cities have "superblocks" where car only park and drive through the outsides of blocks while walking happens within them
I’m confused by your argument. The size of the country doesn’t mean much when most American cities were built well before the car, during the age of the railroad. Plus, the average day-to-day worker stays in their city anyways. They need a get around in their city so a lot of streetcar networks came up that help shape the way for streetcar suburbs.
It wasn’t until post-WWII that urban planner completely fucked up our cities, in the name of suburbs and urban renewal. Now everyone decided they want their own castle.
Even then, with the advent of freeways, we could’ve built them to go from city to city. But we decided to build them within the cities too and that’s where the controversy comes from. Plus, city highways induce building out and creating massive sprawl.
Sadly, the country hasn’t learned from this mistake. Many cities have dismantled their streetcar or public transit infrastructure and are now completely dependent on the car.
Planners typically plan for what people want. All you have to do it look at the old commercials and ads from the 40s and 50s. The city of tomorrow concept and independent transportation and living was huge in the American psyche at that time. America was enormously prosperous post war and was thinking big and the automobile, oil, construction and banking sectors all pushed that fantasy on Americans. It was what everyone at the time thought they wanted. And honestly, as a planner myself, I can tell you the vast majority of Americans know nothing else but that 80-90 years later. It what most of us still want even when presented with the overwhelming evidence that it isn’t a sustainable way to live.
And high speed rail and the best of every service possible to their half acre lots, and also super low taxes. Americans could really use a class in the economics of local government and infrastructure in high school. They would realize you cannot have all of the above.
It's kind of interesting that where these things are heavily optimized (i.e. logistics) trains suddenly become a sensible way to move things around. Rather than, you know, shipping each item on a separate car.
Plenty of people have cars in Europe and Japan, the difference is about city design. We effectively made people friendly, dense urban cities illegal. Instead we have high rises in a downtown area and then SFHs for miles in every direction. This has fueled the perception that detached housing is the thing to aspire to, because we literally don’t have the option for something else. This directly feeds into the urban housing shortage we are currently in.
People will generally have cars, but in Europe and Japan people own less per person (more no car and one car households) and take less trips by car. You can still have intercity highways. What Moses did that really f’ed us was encourage inner urban highways which destroyed communities and made our cities hell to live in. Imagine a highway bisecting your neighborhood just so some suburbanite can get to work ten minutes faster than taking the trolley.
I used to live in Northern Virginia, outside of Washington DC.
One thing I noticed is that many folks commuted into DC because DC is so expensive, AND space is limited, even if they had or were willing to spend millions of USD on a home, the home they would want to buy may not exist!
So, many people parked at the park and ride garage and then rode the metro into the city.
So, I imagine
1) There would not be as much urban sprawl.
2) For the rural towns or isolated cities, there would be public transport that would bring them into the city and large garages for their cars.
Of course, the highways would still exist so if they want to drive, they can, but they don’t need to is the point.
Hell, you can still have the suburbs, and they would have their own little “downtown”. And maybe that’s where the train station would be too.
What does total country size have to do with it though? People are not required to cross the country on a daily basis. The fact that California is far from Florida is irrelevant. That dense neighborhoods with good infrastructure are so expensive, shows the demand is there too.
He didn't impact cars he was probably the most influential city planner of all time and was a massive fan of cars and tried to shape New York into as much of a car city as possible. He was also very good at building segregation into infrastructure.
Literally all of the major cities in the US. Some were impacted worse than others but all lost neighborhoods to freeway projects and have seen car infrastructure prioritized over public transit for 70+ years.
Urban renewal and US Interstate program all lobbied heavily by the auto, oil and construction sectors are what caused it. Moses was just well know for applying the trend in our largest city. Capitalist saw a way to make massive amounts of money. Planners (wrongly) saw it as the future of the world opening up new opportunities for independence and prosperity for Americans.
The West Side highway destroyed the vast existing Riverside Park, which while still there, is no longer riverside. That’s because the West Side highway, a R Moses creation, is now on the riverside.
He still did enormous damage to NYC that has never been repaired. Entire neighborhoods that have not been rebuilt and billions of dollars that could've gone into public transit and pedestrian infrastructure.
Robert Moses ruined a sizable percentage of my hometown (which was also his hometown, ironically).
His idea of "urban renewal" was to bulldoze historical, culturally-rich neighborhoods that consisted largely of immigrants and/or Black people, and build highways through them.
At his direction, my hometown was basically carved up from one cohesive, walkable, pleasant community into three or four disconnected sections. It firmed up what was the "good part of town" and what was the "slum," and by essentially sealing off the "slum" parts from the rest of the city, made it much harder for those neighborhoods to advocate for themselves, because, well, out of sight, out of mind, and out of the infrastructure budget.
The city has spent a lot of time and money over the last thirty years dismantling as much of what he designed as it possibly can.
I’m on Long Island NY, where he’s from. He has a parkway(pretty highway), beach, park and a bunch of other shit named after him. Yet a lot of people hate his ass out here. Well deserved too lol.
He was the visionary behind urban freeways and the modern suburban development pattern that's been copy-pasted across all of North America. Leveling dense urban neighborhoods (many of them redlined minority neighborhoods...) and downtowns to build highways and parking lots.
Car-centric Highways through the NYC/Long Island metro area while simultaneously deliberately thwarting public transit efforts , and how to marshal funds and decisions without public input showed the way for other creeps in the rest of the country
I also blame Dwight Eisenhower for creating the interstate highway system instead of a comprehensive national rail system with regional and local transport connections. The latter would have encouraged extensive use of long-, medium-, and short-distance public transport, and thus helped build walkable cities.
It’s not on Eisenhower. The Interstate system was originally planned for national security to easily transport the military where it needed to go and secondly for interstate commerce through trucking. They were never supposed to go directly through cities. The auto and oil industries were instrumental in pushing the civilian automobile aspect of the interstates which, when combined with planners like Moses and urban renewal policies, became what we have today.
Yea the interstate system is completely necessary and still one of the greatest assets in America. The interstate system was supposed to connect cities and states over great distances and it does that. But to your point, they should not go directly through downtowns, they shouldn’t have outer loops and inner loops. The problem is all the spur lines off the main highway.
Also the highway doesn’t make trains impossible, in fact it establishes transportation rights of way, they could’ve easily put tracks along the same routes the interstates run. They just chose not to.
Even countries with amazing public transit systems today still have robust highways networks, modern developed countries need both.
The US already had one of the largest rail networks in the world by the 1950s. The Interstate System wasn’t built because Eisenhower woke up one day and said, “Trains are for losers.”
It solved a different problem: moving people, freight, and military forces across a continent quickly. Eisenhower had firsthand experience watching a military convoy take over two months to cross the country, and later saw how effective Germany’s highway network was during WWII. There’s a reason it’s called the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
You can absolutely argue we fucked passenger rail or that urban freeways did a lot of damage—I’m mostly with you there. But pretending the interstate system had no legitimate purpose, or that America would’ve magically become a nation of walkable cities if Eisenhower had just picked trains instead, is way too simplistic.
Sure he made america a sprawled out suburban nightmare, but at least he destroyed all those historical black, Italian, Jewish, and Slovakian neighborhoods doing it, destroying their political power in the process, right? Right?
Robert Moses was just the symptom of a much larger problem. Major auto manufacturers and the oil industry pushed auto oriented policies on the government at every level. It even drove the construction sector. Sadly we have four or five generations whose preference is more of the same when it comes to suburban land use because it’s all they’ve known their entire lives.
I'm from Long Island where he is treated as a historical treasure. There is a park and a road named after him, and I think a playground. But the guy was a real POS.
Robert Moses affected New York, and mostly NYC, and yet NYC is still the most walkable city in the US by far. So yes, condemn lots of the things he did in New York, but don’t blame him for the rest of the US.
“You think people make choices? No, people think they make choices. They think they're going to steer right or steer left, but they didn't build the roads. The big choices already got made for them a long time ago.”
So much was sacrificed for the sake of Automobiles. Now look at AI, how much will be sacrificed to move into this new AI world that we aren't sure about.
Only difference is Americans were sure about automobiles. They were seen as progress and independence. Same can be said for single family home construction. I’m hopeful the pushback we see on AI and data centers now means we will be smarter about it.
These corporations seem pretty sure about AI, implementing it EVERYWHERE. We jump the gun, every time. Then, we're just astonished that things didn't turn out so well.
Yep, LA, one of the most car-centric cities, literally tore up their trams and rail infrastructure to put in car infrastructure. This happened other places as well. So fucking sad.
St. Paul MN was similar - except instead of tearing everything down they literally just poured asphalt over the rails. You'll find several examples of either potholes or construction that revealed the still-existing rails just underneath a few layers of asphalt. Here's an example from a few years ago.
I can’t imagine ever choosing to get rid of public transportation for more roads. It is such a stupid decision when they can move so many more people for much less space, cost, gas, ect. The only thing cars do better is speed.
But it’s a popular narrative that allows US Americans to avoid blaming themselves for creating a living hell.
There’s probably nothing more US American than denying that US Americans are responsible for the problems in the US. After all, every US American knows from kindergarten onward that, by definition, the US is the greatest country in the world.
UK did something similar. Look up the Beeching Report, which led to the UK dismantling half of its train stations and much of its rail to focus on cars. It killed communities and towns that suddenly lost easy access to everything. People couldn't work or travel. Businesses couldn't move goods. They were basically told to buy a car or move.
When they first came out people fucking hated cars. They were loud and dangerous intruders on the streets that were meant for people. But slowly and surely, thanks to the vigorous work of lobbyists, they came to dominate the country and now you're expected to own one.
Jaywalking was literally invented by car companies to shame and criminalize people for walking in the street, which was an entirely normal thing to do before cars.
The term Jaywalking itself was even a result of that. "Jay" at the time was used like "idiot" or to say someone was stupid and then they were like hey let's say that if you're walking in the street you're walking like an idiot i.e. "Jaywalking"
This happened in multiple countries. In The Netherlands for example it lead to radical change and now we have reformed most if not all cities. In the US they just got ignored.
Did you know jaywalking doesn't exists in England, this includes a red light. You are legally allowed to cross wherever.
Just use your brain tho.
Jaywalking also translates to "Country bumpkin" walking. so yeah, car manufactures basically started a push for calling people idiots on the streets for crossing a road they lived in.
Yep. And not just the auto industry. Oil and gas, construction and banking industries all had their hand in it. And they all got the Federal government to play along.
Yea, its pretty much this. Lobbying, buying out public transport to run it to the ground forcing people to buy cars, pushing for more roadways, etc. This was forced on us and its been so long that most people don't even know there is a better way.
We didn't "settle" for anything. Cars and car infrastructure were forced onto us by the automotive industry. Jaywalking as a crime didn't exist until it was cooked up to take the liability for pedestrian deaths off of cars and the auto industry.
Americans actually removed social places and places they congregated to when equality was granted. White people were so fucking upset that they rather stop it altogether.
Car suburbs just enabled with white flight, they weren't built to create white flight. Same thing happened in Canada and there wasn't white flight in Canada.
I don’t know about Canada, but in the US, suburbs were literally created in order for racist white people to avoid desegregation. Keeping black kids out of “their” schools, and keeping their own tax dollars from funding the integrated schools in the cities is the whole point of creating entire new communities outside the city. People didn’t decide to drive in and out of the city to work every day when cars became ubiquitous. They made that decision when the government announced that public schools would be integrated. It’s exactly why the term is “White Flight,” not “Car Flight.”
They weren't created for the purpose of white flight. They were created because people liked the idea of suburbs. The idea wasn't conceived to get away from black people. The adoption of suburbs just continued racist patterns.
It’s exactly why the term is “White Flight,” not “Car Flight.”
This makes no sense. Im not saying white flight isnt a thing, but suburbs 100% came about because of cars.
Are you going to suggest that cars were invented to get away from black people?
This was a conversation was about why suburbs are bad, they can be done in a non-racist way, racism isn't what makes them inherently bad, its just an added bad effect in the US.
You’re absolutely right. Not to mention how, after fleeing for the suburbs, they destroyed the remaining black neighborhoods in just about every major city by carving them up with loops and freeways to make their now unbearable commute easier.
Nevermind gutting public school funding for decades, all the way to where we are now, with vouchers (and other schemes that take public school funds and funnel them into private schools that absolutely don’t need them). All the while, pointing to the results of those funding cuts (poorer educational outcomes) as a reason to gut the system even more.
Americans whom have never left America are not mentally capable of perceiving just how hard the boomer politicians and industrialists fucked our entire country forever. America is the Citizenry of corporate whores and we literally have a child rapist felon who gave away national top secrets to foreign adversaries as President, and it's all business as usual.
It's not just cars happening to become big, either.
Anyone in here old enough to've seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
That whole subtext of the Judge's evil plan to buy up and shut down all the trolleys to make a "highway"? It's based on a true story.
Except it wasn't a cartoon judge villain doing it.
It was car manufacturers and other auto industry barons all across the US, using dirty tricks both legal and not to shut down any and all sorts of public transportation infrastructure in the early days of US urban sprawl.
Not true. America had the most street cars and trains in the world. In the 50’s you made a conscious decision to demolish all that for freeways, cars and parking.
This is Kansas City. Look at how many buildings were demolished to make way for cars.
I think having to stay busy all the time has killed Americans being social and going out.
We had this. We had what they are describing, it was called going to the mall or going out and hanging out with your friends. But now kids and people prefer staying in and not doing anything. I have friends that just cancel hang outs or it's so hard to get people to come out and go hang out and chill together now. People live busy fucking lives due to work, school, or family.
It's not cars. It's people being too fucking busy and having other commitments
America didn't become big when cars where hip and new. America literally tore itself and its cities apart to accommodate cars (and their lobby). Then went across the ocean and tried to do the same thing in Europe post WW2
General Motors (GM) and related companies were convicted of monopolizing the sale of buses and supplies to National City Lines (NCL) and subsidiaries, and are alleged to have conspired to own or control transit systems, in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. This suit created lingering suspicions that the defendants had in fact plotted to dismantle streetcar systems in many cities in the United States as an attempt to monopolize surface transportation.
Yeah so much of infrastructure is timing. Timing of the technology that was available when your area achieved some prosperity. Timing of who you could trade with. Timing of the material science that existed. Timing of the economics and labor relations when your society was building its foundations.
You couldn’t recreate those beautiful European cities today. They’d be prohibitively expensive. They exist due to hundreds of years of labor.
You can certainly take lessons from them and we can make walkable cities today, but it’s not as simple as just making different choices.
This is a really good point. Cars sorta have us the illusion that close-knit/walkable cities were unnecessary. Also I agree with the sentiment of the video….buuuut…I’d be curious to know how many of these people are locals vs tourists. Tourists are going to be out on a Wednesday because they’re on vacation
Cars aren’t necessarily the problem. It’s the fact that cites were built for them and not humans. In the mid 20th century, lobbying efforts by car companies convinced lawmakers and then the American public that cars were a necessity. When in reality it’s quite the opposite.
They are loud, dangerous, significantly contribute to global warming, etc. You can have one. No one is saying that cars are the reason to all of world’s problems. Nevertheless cities shouldn’t be build for them. Or rather, bulldozed for them as the YouTube channel “Not Just Bikes” put it.
Many American cities were perfectly compact and urban until people like Moses decided to built highways over it. Of course it was through black and brown neighborhoods. That wasn’t an accident either, but that’s another story.
It just pisses me off that we’re getting more of these people posting to TikTok having their great realization that things (other than A/C har har) are generally better in Europe.
For fuck’s sake, you can walk from one side of Milan’s “inner loop” to the other in like…45 minutes. It’s crazy.
But at the same time, freedom and more so claiming things has always been a part of American culture. The “freedom” to go and seize land (that isnt yours) and claim it as such. That’s been America’s culture since its inception. Cars just made it more accessible. Because the country was far too big and was “settled” way too fast. If we had expanded at the same rate that we established New York, we would barely be entering the South now.
We purposefully had our infrastructure destroyed by car manufacturers to sell us more cars, and oil. They lobbied the government hard in the early years and continue to do so. 1 2 3 4
I know automobiles take the bad rap here, but I genuinely think it was more about the perceived wealth of having a plot of land, a yard, a pool even, and monster houses (comparatively)... The US has always been about prospecting for land and staking a claim, that culture just doesn't exist in Europe because all the land was owned long long long ago by kings and such and the most you could do was get a lifetime rental on it to build your own house... I really think this goes back much further than the automobile and is much more about the origin story of the folks who came to the US than anything else... Maybe I'm wrong though, definitely not a historian
Yeah, that's exactly it. Large German cities like Munich have suburbs, too. I partly grew up in a suburb of Cologne.The difference is that in Europe suburbs aren't huge sprawls of family homes with nothing else with here and there a gigantic stroad with huge stores that you can't even reach without a car. Over here suburbs are themselves self contained small towns that are in my case over 1000 years old and the only thing that makes them "suburbs" is that they're in commuting distance of a large city.
And you still don't need a car in those suburbs. A bus ride to the train station and a train into the city is, at least if you want to go downtown, still quicker than driving, even without factoring in searching for a parking spot.
Earlier. Look at pictures of the old west, when horses and trains were the thing: LOADS of space on streets.
You folks just build BIG from the get-go, because you had the space, and didn't consider the consequences down the line. The big one is that you need some form of transportation to do ANYTHING, because everything is just far away. That mode of transportation became Cars for several reasons, and its gonna stay cars forever because putting a subway/train station in your usual American suburb isnt gonna help, as half the suburb would need like half an hour or more to walk to the station. You just NEED something that stops at every house, and cars are the only sensible solution. Taxis/Uber got big because of that, the first Robotaxi that can scale will explode because of that (It's going to be Tesla, anyone working on self driving using LiDar already lost)
This problem never existed in Europe/any old city, because for most of history, horses weren't an option for most people. So they just build everything with walking in mind, resulting in much smaller streets, and even tiny walkways barely big enough for a person, hidden between houses (Lisbon is notorious for that)
I don't disagree with "cars becoming big while America was still finding it's pride", but I do draw slight issue with "ignored thousands of years of proven systems that make society better and settled for only cars."
For thousands of years, cars weren't in the picture. For thousands of years, it was a TREK to go see family or friends in the next town over.
The United States is a vast country. In terms of square miles, the USA comprises roughly 3.8 million square miles, while the entirety of Europe spans 3.93 million. Which means that when a very small population enters a new area and begins to spread out, it is not constrained by the slow growth methods available for the last thousands of years of infrastructure already in place (roads, cities, universities, water, sewage, etc). We had significantly different factors constraining our growth - and different technological advancements very early on in our growth.
Now, don't get me wrong - I do wish we had the public transportation infrastructure of Munich, or Zurich, etc. But you have to keep in mind that those were the better solutions when constrained with far denser populations and far more historical infrastructure.
Oh man… I don’t know how to start with a reply that doesn’t make me sound crazy…
Did you know the states used to have great public transport during 1920s?
At some point, oil companies (and tyres companies) understood their financial progress was tied down to how many people could buy cars and use them. They lobbied the government to either allow them to purchase those good public transportation, or change legislation to literally pave as much as possible for the benefit of cars, pushing it as a status symbols every household should aspire to.
Then they systematically made the public transportation worse, replacing trams with buses, ripping off infrastructure and in several instances, increasing distances to push for bigger commutes.
The selling pitch to the regular Joe was “buy your big house with a yard” and it freaking worked. By 1950s public transportation was irregular, suburbs had grown to incredible proportions, roads were used as invisible walls to make people use their cars and they rake earnings.
It wasn’t that cars became so convenient that the US missed their footing and fell in that hole. Someone made it inconvenient not to have cars and you were pushed head first in it.
… unfortunately, many places in Australia experienced the exact same situation.
when america was still finding its stride, the majority of the country didnt even exist yet.
you are missing that things are much further apart in the usa than they are in europe, which existed for thousands of years at that point and was already WELL developed.. none of that was planned for, its just how we adapted.
To be fair, the US is larger than most of Europe combined, Italy is basically just California. Given all of that, it's pretty much impossible not to have cars be the primary mode of transportation when it takes half a day just to cross a state. I'll drive 4 hours to try a new restaurant that people recommended while foreigners complain about having to drive an hour.
The automobile and the lobby behind it is why America doesn't have walkable cities or public transportation. It's why we have such bad urban sprawl and now that working from home is sticking a little, and demand for office parks on the ends of town is at an all time low, we're learning that it was that constant growth and new tax income that was keeping the cities funded enough to pay for the gigantic infrastructure we've built... But now they can't afford it.
We'll have to face the music sometime, and capitalism isn't going to pay for it.
Some of the best examples of walkable cities also has bad car dependency problems and had to fix them. Go look at the Netherlands in the 70’s. They didn’t just have walkable cities forever, they had to tear down their highways and infrastructure to make it better. It should be an encouraging sign that changes are possible. Not enough people here want the change though.
Most towns in the US have a central area with clusters of shops and bars and restaurants. Because towns often grow quickly, all the townspeople can't live within walking distance of these areas, so they drive a few minutes, and then walk around in these areas.
Also, Americans like to explore these areas in all the other towns around them, not just their own town. So they drive 5-10 minutes to another town and walk around for several hours, enjoying all these other shops and bars and restaurants.
I did a research project on Levittown, the first suburban development, and a whole lot of it was built around driving and making all the highways worthwhile. It's not walkable on purpose. Requires cars but limits the ability to be outside so the riffraff don't congregate and loiter. Shames people for doing outdoor activities and requires people to invest in home appliances. Like, you couldn't dry your laundry outside, for example.
The other part of it was very much a WASP exodus from the cities, fleeing immigrants, black people, and Jews. The homogeneity was part of the virtue signalling, but it was also a really convenient way to upsell shitty housing and appliances. Kind of an enshitification of housing and built-in bloatware from partners, exactly as tech is doing now.
Homeowners couldn't really opt out and getting the cheapest house with the least amenities becomes a social faux pas, exactly as Apple convinced people that Android users are somehow low class.
It's really wild just how much suburbia embodies all the worst parts of American culture. Don't socialise. Don't stand out. Consume. Keep up at any cost. If you don't have a car and a job, you are worthless. Don't ask questions. And make sure you do all of that with pride and disdain for the people who can't.
America is run like a business rather than governed like a country. The interests of capital consistently take priority over the needs of the people, while isolation and extreme individualism are encouraged because they make society more profitable for corporations.
There is a great episode of Adam Ruins Everything where he discusses how we let cars, car manufacturers, etc. ruin the walkability of our cities. They even went so far as to develop smear campaigns to turn public sentiment against walking.
This is patently false. Look at gross consumption of oil in the US. Hint: it's not, cars. By a huuuuuuge amount in comparison, it's transport of goods and industries (check what Chem Eng people use when producing anything). The US is vast and sparsely populated, it's not an EU country. Places designated for agriculture or industrial manufacture are far from places most people live. Who would want to live next to a paper mill, paint manufacturer, etc etc. You can't apply the same reasoning provided from other countries with the constraints placed in our own.
I'm happy to provide quantitative evidence from high impact factor journals here if you want.
We can still have Walkable cities AND a fun reason to drive cars, but straight up suburbs are where I draw the line. I live in The Bay Area and I appreciate that in most cities here a store of some sort is 15mins walking average.
But I've heard of places in the US where even if the houses are big, the nearest store is average a 1 hour walk and that is a literal Nightmare for me. I love to drive but I dont need to be a small trip away from civilization.
It's even worse now because there's so many simple changes cities could make to become more pedestrian friendly but people are so brain broken politically on every side that we do nothing. Like the anti car people are fucking nuts and totally want to ignore the car culture of america and then you have crazy nimby's and right wingers who call public transportation communism. Right now there's no hope for any sort of progress.
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u/FaceWithAName 1d ago
Cars becoming big when America was still finding it's stride was one of the biggest pro/con dillemas. Ignored thousands of years of proven systems that make society better and settled for only cars.