The car industry influence played a role but is always overplayed in these kinds of discussions, and ignore equally if not more important factors.

-On macro scale, the US is bigger, more spread out, with tons of land, and there's something in the American psyche that pushes Americans to expand, settle, and use all of it.

-On a micro scale, and as a consequence of the first point, Americans are accustomed to homes that are much bigger, have yards, and are more adverse to sharing a wall with a neighbor. Sure there have been exceptions like tenements in NYC, but even in those cases those residents could wait to get their own Levittown cape cod in a residential subdivision.

-Finally, a ton of this growth happened at right after cars became mainstream and affordable, but before the long terms downsides of car based societies were well understood. Therefore, a huge majority of infrastructure investments were made on what people wanted (cars and space), and not public transit.

-Now, while many of the problems of car based societies are better understood, that doesn't nullify the often ignored benefits of car based societies. Also, for public transit to work at a massive scale, people would have increasingly do two things that Americans intrinsically hate: Move closer together and pay more taxes. There may be a growing population that finds that appealing, but the silent majority in this case is an enormous and entrenched one.

There's an old conspiracy, although its accuracy is debatable, google the "General Motors streetcar conspiracy." Another potential possibility is many cities scrapped their streetcars for spare metal during WWII. Along with that, market forces and lobbying and policy by people like Robert Moses, the current form of America was created.

These things all happened. But a huge part is simply that people live in suburbs built at a time when people could afford cars. So they did. Just as their grandparents moved out to districts served by streetcars as soon as they could, for the same reasons -- affordable floor area, cleaner air, less noise.

The central part of most EU cities is pre-1914, when cars were a curiosity. And for decades after that, cars were nowhere near as affordable to citizens as they were in the US, because the US was just much richer in (say) 1960.

They lost court cases over it, I don't think it is fair to call its accuracy debatable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

The debatable aspect is how much of an impact it had. Many other cities without a similar conspiracy also got rid of their streetcars.

The veracity of the story notwithstanding, the core of the conspiracy, though, was to push buses over streetcars, not cars.

...Because (per the conspiracy) the manufacturers of cars knew that busses were unpleasant to ride in (compared to trolley cars) and that most people would prefer to own a car over riding in one.

The market forces element is the one that people tend to ignore in these types of conversations. Americans couldn't wait to move out to the suburbs.