It's mostly self-fulfilling too: "No one wants to walk to these stores anyway, so when we didn't build sidewalks"...

Europe has a population density twice that of the 48 lower US states. In addition, roughly a third of all people in the US live in a mere 500 cities (if you account for metro areas, that number increases). Even if those cities had great public transit, it would leave the remaining areas far less populated in reality. Less than 30 people per square mile is very common outside cities with a lot of midwest states having something like 5-7 people per square mile (or less).

It may be hard for people in many places to grasp, but even in eastern states there are many, many areas where you could pick a direction and walk many miles without seeing anyone.

Below a certain population density (likely in the hundreds to low thousands per square mile), public transportation simply is not feasible.

I don't think it's so much about density as it is about planning. Even in a massive area, the correct way to distrubute people in it is so that they can access what they need with ease. Let people live next to the store, their office, the bus stop and so on. How far apart clusters of people are will determine the overall density. Density doesn't say much about whether people are clustered or more evenly spread out however.

It should be noted that this was not an accident, but the result of a concerted effort by corporate interests with major influence in state and federal gov't via professional connections and their control of the labor market. This not only involved the dismantling of existing, car-agnostic infrastructure - clearly, as most major American cities existed and were designed to provide for the needs of its residents before the existence of the automobile - but also represented yet another chapter in the history of collusion between private and gov't entities in the interest of maintaining America's toxic race and class order.

>most major American cities existed and were designed to provide for the needs of its residents before the existence of the automobile

Most major American cities that existed before the car still have public transportation. NYC is a prime example of somewhere you can live without a car. Most other cities still have functioning bus systems, though not great.

It's the suburbs where you really need a car, and the development of suburbs was spurred in large part by the car. So you have your historical order wrong.

Suburbs aren't cities, though it's true that the modern suburb owes its existence to "urban renewal" initiatives which dovetailed with auto infrastructure development (hence the freeway which cuts through the historically black quarter of so many cities, which it connects to said suburbs). Additionally, many of the older small towns had public transit into cities via rail/streetcar.

I would be interested in reading more about this topic if you have any recommended references?

I'm not the GP, but I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am... might be a good fit if you're interested in this arena.

The history and politics of this shift were discussed quite thoroughly in Happy City by Charles Montgomery: https://thehappycity.com/the-book/

Check out "The War on Cars", it's a fantastic podcast: https://thewaroncars.org/

Maybe that explains cities that were dense and got less dense.

But mostly it’s the suburbs and small towns where cars are totally necessary. Those areas were settled less densely because everyone already had a car. They never had subways and bus routes.

Are there any first world cities that substantially grew in area since 1920 that aren’t primary automotive cities?