this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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No offense to the citizens, but USA is a failed Capitalist experiment. Nothing really works optimally, or even close to it. Everything is backwards, wasteful, unjust, non-free, anti-democratic, and in general several hundred years behind more mature nations..
Europe had an advantage on designing walkable cities by building them when there wasn't another option.
Much of the US was settled by cars and air conditioning.
To quote Not Just Bikes: “the USA wasn’t built for cars, it was destroyed for cars”
Most cities in the US were walkable and public transport oriented, but in the fifties all livable neighborhoods and city centers were bulldozed to make place for parking lots and arterial roads.
Yes and no. Lots of the smaller towns were already fairly spread out because they were agriculturally-based towns, so the property sizes were huge. But many of the big, old cities still have excellent public transit.
About 20 years ars ago I flew to New England on a trip and was able to get between and around everywhere I needed within Baltimore, DC, and Pittsburg using trains and public transit, very very easily.
In Texas that simply isn't possible because most of the cities here are so spread out. The Texas Triangle is an urban population center with the population of New York City, but spread over 60,000 square miles instead of 300.