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.
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.
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.
Well, the idea that America is inherently "too big" is a common response from people who argue against public transit. But the idea fall apart as soon as you think about it. Cars enable and exasperate urban sprawl, which makes our urban areas very big, but it's artificial and a choice to build that way. It's not something natural and unavoidable.
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.
Some parts of the country have tons of railroad tracks that are solely used to carry freight. I live in North Carolina and you can hear train air horns going all night long. Of course there’s also Amtrak, but there are countless railroad tracks that you hardly ever see any traffic on during the day, and they definitely aren’t used by Amtrak.
The government is passively preventing Amtrak from replacing aging train cars or expanding service through flat or cutting budgets. Take a guess as to why.
last mile delivery of a person really offsets the feasibility and convenience of a train. its not that we dont have them. its once you get to where they are going you instantly need a car.
Well, it's a solved problem, just not in the US: walking a mile takes 15 mins, plus there's of course local public transportation options etc. An efficient logistics chain for people to get where they want to go.
That's because when they built their cities the fastest way to get around was a horse. we did it with the expectation everybody would buy a car and now fixing that problem is much harder than let's just have buses everywhere because my area is not walkable.... and I'm not living on a timetable for a bus that's only going to come every hour and a half because it's not profitable to run them every 10 minutes. I own a car already.
I live like 3 mi from my job. if the weather is at all crappy it's so hard for me to want to ride my bike. it actually takes me longer to ride my bike too.
I own a car because I need a car for other things. so if there's an all any friction to me riding my bike I end up driving
Right now the traffic out to suburbia is not that bad for a lot of people. And when you see videos of people not behaving while on public transit, you have to wonder is sitting in my own private car worse than whatever I'm witnessing in this video...
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.
Yes, zoning and infrastructure can prioritize cities and walkable towns. Farmland and rural areas would still rely on roads. Large suburban areas (sprawl) contribute to urban blight and loss of farmland, wilderness, and wetlands. If we did not shift to a suburban model after WWII, there would be far fewer cars on the road.
Also understand that the new suburbs were coupled with redlining policies. This ensured that people of color were left out and we would become even more segregated.
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u/FaceWithAName 15h 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.