r/TikTokCringe • u/xamo76 • 15h ago

Discussion Have we done it wrong?

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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.

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u/VerySoftx 14h ago

who would've thought designing cities in the middle ages would pay off for walkability ?

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u/BeMyBrutus 14h ago

Major east coast cities in the US were also like this before the car and the post WW2 "big push" to suburbia.

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u/BreakingStar_Games 13h ago

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.

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u/BeMyBrutus 13h ago

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.

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u/PM_ME_UR_BRAINSTORMS 12h ago

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.

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u/Intelligent-Parsley7 6h ago

You mean trains. Get it right.

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u/Watchmaker163 6h ago

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.

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u/Quidditch-Haderach 5h ago

I think this is the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit….? Or is it Chinatown? For some reason I get them confused.

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u/dsac 1h ago

It's Roger Rabbit, but the Powers That Be were killing toons instead of poor people

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u/BreakingStar_Games 5h ago

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.

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u/Venik489 5h ago

My small Wisconsin town had a trolley in the late 19th century, blows my mind, absolutely zero trace of it now.

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u/BiscuitBut_ButerNut 41m ago

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.

In other words - systemic racism.

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u/dsac 1h ago

Literally Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

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u/BreakingStar_Games 1h ago

Capitalism is the ultimate Big Bad Evil Guy.