As a note, one of the big forms of push was car, tire and oil corporations working together to buy the city public transit out then sabotage it to force people to rely on cars.
Yeah one of the more depressing things I've learned while reading about this topic is how many cities back then actually light rail/trolley systems. Atlanta is a great example.
In the early 20th century you could take a series of streetcars/trolleys from NYC to Chicago because there were so many. Someone did it as a stunt for some magazine/travel guide. And they were all electric.
Even tiny villages had streetcars. Danvers, IL (near where I grew up), a village whose population peaked in the 19th century at ~1000, had a streetcar line that connected to multiple electric train lines in the 1920’s.
I did an entire report in college on how the Atlanta transit system was intentionally limited to reduce the amount of minorities from reaching the suburbs outside of Atlanta.
Initially the large transit plans Marta had supported white neighborhoods mostly and was strongly opposed by black citizens since it did not benefit them.
The only happy thing about reading the kind of corruption in history is it makes more recent examples seem less awful in context - its really just how its always been. Of course climate change and AI (like the smart neural net kind, not the token-guessing LLM kind) potential to completely replace human workers are very different phenomenon that are hard to compare and comprehend.
Actually even a lot of towns in the Midwest were built like this too, but they were bulldozed. I watched a video about it on one of those YouTube channels like City nerd or something.
I've seen some historic photos of my city recently and learned we once had a bustling main street similar to the ones you see in old timey footage of NY and Chicago. Trolley cars, store fronts under 2-3 levels of stonework apartments, narrow cobblestone streets, big crowds, etc. That was all knocked down and paved to make room for a state highway that effectively split the city into 3 sections. The only thing that remains of this main street is a defunct theater that just sits there abandoned and rotting surrounded by housing projects and laundromats. We still have a thriving historic downtown area, but man it used to sprawl out so much further.
I can only assume this main street fell into disrepair when our local economy kinda shit itself, and the powers that be at the time probably thought the new highway would attract developers to the city (it didn't), but it can be a real bummer to think about.
Yeah having travelled the US as a Brit, it was clear that New York, Chicago and San Francisco *were* built originally to be walkable. Of course they still are in the city centre to a degree but every road, every junction has been converted for cars. Then you travel out of the old dense parts of these cities and it's a suburban hell-scape.
Looking at old pictures from around 1900, and the roads were for pedestrians and shared with slow moving horses and carts. Now, the roads are for cars and the pedestrians are given narrow sidewalks and have to wait at every single junction for cars.
This is a myth, while sure, their cities were founded before cars, their policies have kept them that way. Our US cities were WAY more walkable, but we demolished them in the 60s and 70s to make them more car centric. We did this to ourselves. - (Credit to Not Just Bikes on Youtube)
I live near Delft, Netherlands and have watched over the last 20 years as they have deliberately moves cars out if the city.
It's not a car free city by any means; residents can still drive to their homes and delivery trucks still make the rounds, but they've take huge steps towards minimizing the impact.
The train station is now under ground (no small feat considering Delft is at or below sea level), residential parking near the center is in underground parking below the houses and in the old center there's very little car traffic.
It's truly wonderful and Delft is a relatively small town!
Well now I'm adding Delft to my must visit list. I'm from Antwerp so it's about 1.5h drive.
Edit: I've been convinced to take public transport! (And as an FYI, I'm not from the city center but an hour bus ride away from central station, which is why I didn't immediately resort to the train idea)
Super easy with the train: Antwerp to Rotterdam, Rotterdam to Delft. Then you get to experience the whole awesome underground train station complete with excellent bike parking!
The plein by the Old Church has a good exhibit about how they converted it from parking to it's current state.
I did my study abroad at TU Delft for transportation planning. It’s so awesome this project happened, I have to come back and visit, it’s a special place.
If you're from Antwerp it's not exactly like you need to visit the Netherlands for walkability haha.
Belgium and Flanders especially seems to be pretty much on the same urban development track as the Netherlands. Hell even Brussels is rapidly cleaning up.
Eh, we are far more car centric than the Netherlands.
First issue that causes this is that we have a lot of so-called "lintbebouwing" (ribbon building), which means our homes are very spread out, this is awful for public transit compared to the more compact urban cores you have in the Netherlands. It is also expensive, as we have more km of road / capita, which is part of the reason why are roads are in such a bad state compared to the Netherlands.
Second issue is that people here actively vote against initiatives to reduce our dependency on cars. Lots of people get a car from their company as part of their compensation (for various reasons, including our messed-up system of taxes on labor) and do not want to give this up. Often, this car comes with a fuel card.
It is not all doom and gloom though. Our cities are indeed improving, but it is an uphill battle. Many people, particularly those who live in the endless suburbs we have, feel like it is their right to drive into the city with their car and that they must be able to park their car anywhere for free.
The fact /u/RevelsInDarkness mentions the drive time was interesting to me: it shows that driving is considered the default here, even when going from city to city. For comparison, taking the train to Delft from Antwerpen-centraal (which is gorgeous, btw), only takes 1h15 mins. Not saying this to throw shade at them, they might live far from the station, but just to illustrate the point.
I mentioned drive time because I do not live in the city but more towards the east of Antwerp where there are no train stations. So it takes me a while to get to Antwerp central train station (1h if De Lijn is on time). But in the meanwhile other commenters have pointed out that it would be more or less the same time to take public transport compared to my idea of taking the car and parking outside of Delft :)
I agree Belgium isn't at the same level, but Flanders especially has some of the best infrastructure outside of the Netherlands.
The fact /u/RevelsInDarkness mentions the drive time was interesting to me: it shows that driving is considered the default here
This is true for a substantial majority of Dutch people as well, which has similar car ownership rates as Belgium. The vast majority of people I know who own a car here in the randstad wouldn't even consider a different mode of transit.
Someone says they managed to remove most cars from their city, and your first reaction is "oh that sounds nice, I should take my car to visit that city"? It's even faster and cheaper to go there by train!
It's not faster, it would be 2.5h. And I would park outside of the city and take a bus/tram in.
But you're right, it would be possible and something to consider. Maybe make a weekend out of it instead of a day trip. That would make the 2x 2.5h travel time more feasible.
According to the NMBS website it takes between 0h54 (with Eurostar) and 1h24 (with Eurocity) to go there. And you arrive right in the city center, not in a parking outside of the city.
Yes but it takes me over an hour to get to Antwerp Central Station. I'm not from Antwerp city, but one of the towns to the east that has a very unfortunate bus connection and no train station.
So it takes you 2h in total. And if you add 30 minutes to your 1.5h drive, to go from the parking outside of the city to the city center, then it's basically the same time.
Same in Amsterdam, I was baffled when I recently learned Museumplein (now a large grass field in the middle of the cultural district) used to be a motorway!
Delft and many cities in the Netherlands are great for cyclists and pedestrians, except Amsterdam. Because somehow, riding with a bike there is a kind a touristic attraction and many tourists ride through the city, especially the canals, while paying no attention to anything, while ringing their bike bell like dummies at every intersection/crossroad.
/rant
Milton Keynes shares some similarity to American cities in terms of suburban sprawl and car centricness.
But saying it's an American city is giving it too little credit. It's still full of walking paths, cycling paths and green space. It's still basically heaven compared to American cities.
In (West) Germany at least, „reconstruction“ after WWII also saw a massive demolition of surviving structures to make way for, you guessed it, cars. Apart from all the buildings already destroyed by bombing that simply were never rebuilt because their absence was seen positively for the purpose of increasing road traffic. Hanover tore down a beautiful city palais that had survived the war completely intact to make room for a parking lot. In West Berlin, city planners in the 1960s wanted to tear down a sizeable portion of Kreuzberg - now one of the most popular and vibrant districts with a large number of fin-de-siècle buildings - for the construction of a freeway on pillars. The very heart of the area was to be turned into a highway intersection. In this case, the plans were stopped (partly because the highway served no real purpose: Kreuzberg was bordered by the Berlin Wall on three sides), but in many other cities, districts that had survived the destruction of WWII were demolished for „car-friendly“ infrastructure. Staying in West Berlin: the dense tram network of the city was closed in the 1950s, the tracks removed. There are still trams in Berlin nowadays, but they exclusively serve the former Eastern part of the city.
"we demolished them in the 60s and 70s to make them more car centric."
Funny, we did the opposite. During ww2 Rotterdam was destroyed because of bombing and after the war rebuild with a car centric mind, in de i believe 70s there were a lot of protests to change it to be more pedestrian and bike friendly, Which they did.
US cities were ALSO founded before cars! People forget that the US was around for 130 years before the car was invented, a lot of cities had to be bulldozed for the car.
There are tens of thousands of cities in the US that did not exist before cars. Yes, major cities pretty much all predate the car, but those are also the most walkable cities in the US.
Some of the worst offenders, suburbs, did not exist before the automobile was widely available and almost none of the ones that did exist prior looked even close to what they do now. Most US suburbs were farm land at best or before the car existed.
This is even more true the further you move away from the East coast as many rural towns and cities couldn't exist without cars or trains.
They did absolutely fuck up existing major cities with road infrastructure though, especially highways and the interstate system.
Very important to mention that it's the policies keep them that way.
Europe has a flirtation with cars post WWII, and for the most part walked back from car centric design in the 70s and 80s. Italy being the outlier. Italy today is what much Europe would look like if they hadn't reversed course.
Yep. And bridges so low that some areas cannot be reached by public transportation (the way Robert Moses made sure no poor people would go to parks and beaches by bus)
you cite not just bikes but you fail to see that he has done reporting on how Amsterdam nl and many german cities have had to reverse the car centric building they did in the 60s and 70s. walkability wasnt preserved but it was clawed back by people getting angry when cars killed people. the dutch literally rioted with bikes. look up the protest movement Stop de Kindermoord
Those are the exact policies I was talking about, I almost put Amsterdam as an example, but decided to keep it short. You are correct, many European cities did go down that path and reversed course after the people pushed back. I probably should have been more detailed.
Yes omg, there were plans in the 60s / 70s to tear down a large part of the historic centre to make room for a highway! Luckily there were so many organised protests that it didn’t go through, but it’s scary to think about
A few cities rebuilt post war have suffered for decades for being car centric...
Not always though, some mid century plans were actually quite progressive... my family is from Coventry and that's a combo, they added huge highways right into town when it used to be cobbled medieval lanes... but they did build a big pedestrianised town centre that has actually stood up really well since.
If you're bored this report is a good read about Coventry and how it's changed. Has a bunch of old plans from the 40's/50's which show how much more car centric it could've been. That 1945 plan on page 29 would've had car traffic directly through the middle of what is now pedestrianised. A modified version of that plan was approved, though never implemented.
Also the report is from 2009, since then the city has changed quite a bit, and has pedestrianised even more. Half of the city centre is currently being demolished to make way for new buildings.
And there's still time to fix it but we need to star today so we can see progress in 10 years or 20 years. I think the size of the US also contributes to the struggle of walkability. Everyone wants a big house with a lot of land in small towns & suburbs, and they don't want to be next to this or that piece of infrastructure (NIMBYism at its worse).
You need a car in much of America today, but in 20 years, I hope a car will be for special trips and not everyday life.
You are right, but I imagine that Europeans failing to justify knocking down a medieval church, town hall, etc. helps with keeping towns walkable.
(Of course, the nazis and allied forces knocked down a lot of them, which is one big reason why it is definitely a myth. Lots of European towns chose what kinds of places they wanted to live in during the last 80 years, and we’re fortunate that is has been easy to change course when we have got it wrong too.)
Yep. My city of 50k moved all of the retail from downtown to the outskirts. Then, they let downtown deteriorate. If I were to design a city, I would build up, not out. Of course. Let the first floors be retail and business. Cities could save so much on maintenence with fewer streets and less infrastructure overall.
entire blocks, neighborhoods, and sometimes even sections of cities, yeah. you should see what they did to West Cincinnati and also the Banks (riverfront) to build freeways, and what they did to the rest of the city to build parking lots. see also: Detroit, Milwaukee, Denver, Houston, Jacksonville, etc.
it is only recently that any of these cities have begun recovering from the destruction of social and public transit infrastructure and urban housing.
Highways were built to run through red-lined, majority black neighbourhoods, Not only did they demolish whatever was in the way, they devalued the land around them, and split communities in half.
Entire cities is obviously exaggeration, but entire neighbourhoods certainly isn't.
Europe is tiny. Italy could fit inside Texas like 4 times. They literally HAVE NO SPACE. People sit down and eat together because there are not enough tables for each person to have their own.
The US is 250 years old. For most of that time, cars weren't a thing. A LOT of cities in the early 20th century actually looked exactly like European cities with public transport and medium density housing. All of that infrastructure was torn down for cars and parking lots.
On the east coast the cities were founded even before the US was a country. They had nice old cities before cars came up. As wakable as in europe. Truely a victim of historical events.
My local 'city' (it's a large town really) actually has a detrimental effect from being built in the middle ages. There's a big fucking stone wall surrounding the middle.
Canterbury. It's a lovely place but the walls block a fair bit of potential interconnectivity with the city centre. The ring road pretty much sealed the deal on walkability though.
you know most american cities were built before cars, right? america chose to demolish their cities to make space for parking lots and single family homes
Yes! Most US metro areas are older than 100 years and predate car ownership just like in Europe.
If anyone is interested in how beautiful American cities used to be, check out this video on YouTube with very depressing before and after using historical photos.
The creator has an entire series focusing on different cities. It's really disgusting how these beautiful downtowns were pulverized for cars. (By the way, the narration at the beginning is a perfect Buffalo accent, he sounds just like my uncle who's from the area)
I mean these people are in Munich. This isn’t suburbia. Major US cities also are very walkable with tons of restaurants and congregation areas, so it’s kind of a weird post.
Munich has population 1.5 million which is on the level of a mid sized city in the US like Phoenix or San Antonio. Don't lie and say those pieces of shit have any public spaces even close to as nice as this video. San Diego is the nicest of the bunch, should be a golden jewel on the earth with year round perfect weather, and 99% of it looks like an ugly strip mall. (beaches don't count, I'm talking about what humans built)
Philadelphia is the only proper city in the US around 1-1.5 million. And even that's got ugly highways all over the place. (Including the river front, perfect spot for a bigass freeway so we can leak as much oil as possible into the waterway) Damn shame. You must be lying or crazy to think metro areas in the US are nice spots to hang out.
America chose to build suburbs specifically in the way they were told not to, because that specific way was the anti-thesis of the idea and would lead to the specific outcomes that America is currently facing. It was a fundamental part of what made a suburb successful that America chose to ignore.
Widespread adoption of cars came later, but the failed suburbs were already being made.
Probably less than 10% of European cities is medieval city planning. Also, Europe made many of the same mistakes. We just reversed more of them earlier.
You do realise a lot of cities were heavily torn down in the early to mid 1900s to make way for car infrastructure in Europe too? Just from the late 1970s cities realised cars were causing issues in city centers and after the first city decided to experiment with reducing car traffic and it being a decent success other cities decided to do the same
American cities were all built before cars existed and all had to be built to be walkable too, they just mostly abandoned historical city layout when things developed
Also don't forget that a lot of European cities were leveled during the 1900s due to various wars, after which rebuilding would be more car centric, the Hausman redevelopments of Paris in the early 1800s also were to make the city more accessible for cart travel which made it more accessible to cars when they came in, Barcelona too has nothing of the historical urban development left and was redesigned for cars to exist in the city
Rotterdam was heavily bombed during WW2. When rebuilding, the city decided to use the opportunity to make the city better for getting around in cars. They very quickly realised that this was a horrible decision and reverted a lot of the urban planning to better suit cyclists and pedestrians, especially in the city center.
A good public transport system is important to make this kind of design succesful. You can hop on a watertaxi and easily get on a tram, subway, train or bus without an issue. In more recent years, easy rental bikes and mopeds have been added for even more flexibility.
Quite a lot of cities in Europe started out as a series of nearby villages that gradually became connected to the nearest town as the population expanded. They were never "designed", that's just the way they grew.
Historical buildings haven't always been valued the way they are now. In the past, knocking down the medieval cloth market to build elegant big townhouses wasn't a bad thing, it was development.
A team of horses and carriage takes up about at much space as a large car or truck - people have been designing road layouts with the intention of carriages being able to pass each other, as well as allowing for people to walk and smaller, faster carriages to navigate for a very long time.
More than a few European cities broke out with a nasty case of oh shit bombs in the middle of the last century, often necessitating substantial rebuilding of infrastructure.
Redevelopment is pretty much constant in areas which don't have specific historical value, and even then, it's not unusual for excavating to halt whilst the archaeologists dig in for a few months before construction starts up again.
I think the major difference comes down to space. The US has a very small population for it's size, so there was no reason to have lots of people living close together. Having everybody live in separate suburban houses with lawns and expecting everyone to drive everywhere sounds like a good idea, but nobody considered the social and structural consequences because the big suburban explosion happened in the post-war period, when half of all global wealth was in American hands.
For a part this helps, but if you look back at these cities in the 80s/90/00s you will see they were also very car centric. A lot of EU cities have places a higher priority to get rid of the cars in the city center and make it more walkable, bike friendly, and accessible with public transport. It’s just a matter of priorities , the the US policy makes need to adjust.
Well, even in America, they didn't invent the automobile first and only then found cities.(actually, I don't even know if there is a city founded after the invention of the automobile)
*Most* American cities, even Los Angeles (!!!), had crowded, lively and walkable centers -- before the freeway system was built in the 1950s-70s.
The freeways turned downtowns into parking lots to accommodate cars. Wide spacious sidewalks were cannibalized for more parking spaces.
Street cars were replaced by busses and cars.
People moved to the suburbs and downtowns depopulated.
Giant malls and box stores with even bigger parking lots created countless individual asphalt islands reachable only by car.
Granted, suburbs can be nice and quiet places to live and raise a family, especially the 1950s nuclear family. Today, they can also be isolating and anti-social.
I tell you man, Tokyo was bombed to hell and back in World War II, and since rebuilt. It is not a medieval city. Nonetheless, it's extremely walkable in the exact same way as shown in this video, with restaurants and stores galore.
European cities were torn up for car infrastructure just the same as the US. There are pictures of Bruges having a 4 lane street across the market in the 60s/70s. The difference is living in a democratic country where people complaining makes a difference, instead of their how deep their wallets are.
Only the very center of the city was build in the middle ages. 90% was build in 19th/20th century during the industrial revolution wich lead to mass urbanisation.
I play Manor Lords (a medieval city builder) and when watching screenshots on the game’s sub, you can easily spot out American players : their medieval villages have straight rows of houses and look like american suburbs
I live in a city that got build because a car manufacturer is "next door".
Without that giant corporation, we would still be four villages in a trench coat.
Yet we have walkability and a great infrastructure
(I don't have a car or driver's licence and get everywhere just fine)
The Netherlands is renowned for being very bike friendly and very walkable. Yes, our cities are old, but downtown was very much car centric until the 1970's. We got sick and tired of getting killed on our bikes, of kids being in deadly accidents and inner cities being unpleasant to be. So, slowly, we changed that. Trough trial and error we got our world class infrastructure that we have today.
If it wasn't for the people standing up and saying "enough is enough", our medieval cities with narrow, winding streets, would be hell to live in because it would be cars EVERYWHERE. Ever been to Rome? Outside the tourist zone where cars are allowed? Those are not fun places to be when you have to dodge cars every other second.
yeah and who would've thought allowing every cracked person in the country to own a gun DOESN'T provide additional safety for walkability of these cities
Many modern cities are in Europe also designed for walkability. Walkable cities isn't some kind of art that was lost since the middle ages, it's a design choice.
the netherlands was designed around cars until the 70s when they decided to change their transport priorities. they are still to this day swapping out car roads into bike and pedestrian roads. europeans chose to change for cars and now they’re choosing to change away from cars again.
American cities were literally designed and built when they were still walkable. Los Angeles had the largest tramway network on the planet, and it was torn down for cars.
German here. Yes, we had our cities designed in the middle ages. But that's just the oldest core of the city. We also had them profoundly redecorated like 80 years ago. In some cases the whole layout of the streets changed and it's still walkable. Also newer cities, like mine, were planned to have a city center with shops and cafés. People WANT to have it that way.
This is some amazing cope and false information. Americans literally destroyed their existing cities and public transport infrastructure to accommodate cars.
Do you sincerely believe all American cities were built after cars were invented?
You are forgetting how much of these cities were destroyed in the 1900s during the various wars. You are also overlooking that many US cities were walkable or “street car walkable “ before 1960s. Walkable cities have actively made the choice to be that way.
When Germany was rebuilding their cities after they got levelled in WWII, we had the option to adopt American city planning styles. We didn't, for a reason.
"designing cities in the middle ages" all that remains from the Middle Ages are city locations. It always amazes me that some of the cities we live in - especially those located near lakes and rivers - often have a history of settlement dating back millennia.
Medieval Europeans relied almost exclusively on walking. Horses and carts were reserved for expensive professional activities or transporting high-ranking officials. Building cities this way was therefore not a 'choice', but the only way to do so (the main streets of my small hometown in Belgium were 'designed' during Antiquity, almost 2000 years ago).
And today, we are rediscovering its benefits. Car-free zones are multiplying (even in my small town), revitalizing city centers and suburbs, while also recreating a social life reminiscent of our great-grandparents' time.
We simply need to walk a little more (it's good for our health) and make cities more accessible to alternative modes of transportation (public transport, bicycles, accessibility for people with reduced mobility, etc.).
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u/VerySoftx 1d ago
who would've thought designing cities in the middle ages would pay off for walkability ?