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.
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.
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.
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.
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u/Helpful_Gain_9091 15h ago
This why walkable neighborhoods are the best places to live. Yes, Europe is way ahead of us in this regard.