So this is not as black and white as it seems. There are three major pushes that end up pushing people out of the cities.

* the aforementioned highway boom, but this is not enough to actually kickstart the whole thing; most European nations also had a highway boom around this time with much less sprawl

* lending standards. Prior to the Great Depression, banks are wholly in control of mortgage lending. The collapse of the economy also collapses the banking system and the housing market; banks have to foreclose on properties that are no longer worth anything. As part of the bank stabilization efforts, the FHA creates national standards for loans that it will insure. These standards are restricted to single family homes, and to properties without commercial (small businesses have a really high rate of failure). This has the effect of encouraging banks and developers to stampede into single family suburban development; the cost of financing is a lot cheaper because of the Uncle Sam guarantee, and it's a lot more profitable as a result. No other type of property is given this kind of preferential treatment to this extent, and this still more or less persists today.

* desegregation. This is the big one; prior to the civil rights era, suburbs are expanding rapidly, but cities are still growing. The moment Brown vs Board of Ed passes in 1954 all hell breaks loose. The real estate practice of blockbusting gets into full gear, where real estate agents spook the white people out of a neighborhood by having one black family move in; they proceed to buy the houses on the cheap from white people fire selling as fast as possible, and then take advantage of black and minority sellers. Whites move into suburbs in droves, because it's "where the good schools are" without the minorities they used to be legally separated from. And this is a national phenomenon. Even today, we see whites flee school districts with increasing minority populations; they do so even in districts where the minority groups are affluent and educational metrics remain positive, like Cupertino, CA or Johns Creek, GA: https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessin...

Exactly. I said “don’t like” to avoid making this explicitly about racism but it’s true. And those planners that made these cities people currently complain about had droves of people who “didn’t want to be near other Americans of another color or class” and loved car filled suburbs and strip mall towns.

You know I used to believe that for many years and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is just a “bike-city” circle jerk scapegoating Robert Moses in order to ignore our deeper problem: Americans don’t like each-other.

We would have built better cities if we wanted carless communities. But we didn’t and still don’t.

We want this. This is what we like. We are a sick people. And it isn’t Robert Moses and GMs fault, they are a product of us. We weren’t brainwashed we weren’t forced into this. There is no cabal that made it this way. We choose it. The sooner we accept that the sooner we can evaluate real options for change.

This just historically inaccurate.

Older US cities have many of the same characteristics as cities in other parts of the world. Those characteristics can vary, from small single-family homes tightly packed into a walkable neighborhood to large scale apartment dwelling with city squares and boulevards nearby.

Americans used to build cities this way. Whether it was Moses or the emergence of a general dislike of each other, or a multitude of other possible reasons, we generally no longer do.

Moreover, many of those older city neighborhoods are considered extremely desirable to live in, even today, so much so that they have become very exclusive areas available only to those with plenty of income or wealth. That doesn't imply that most Americans would necessarily make that choice even if they could, but the continued elevation of housing costs in the best of these "old world" neighborhoods suggests to me that your thesis is at best incomplete and at worst just incorrect.

^ this is very accurate.

There are multiple studies and historical accounts documenting exactly this TsunamiFury. Car lobbies are actually clearly tied to many city planning decisions, combined with white flight and corresponding government loans to create suburban communities that essentially cut others out.

Additionally interstate commerce in a comparatively intensely large land mass like the US did create a need for additional transportation, but the sprawl has indeed been very much tied to the factors PaulDavisThe1st and others have pointed out. Its not 'not liking' each other. Its money + racism + poor representation of the populous. Like a lot of things.

Sure. I’ve studied that for years and I’ve come to the conclusion that is not the root cause. At the end of the day it’s a boogie man people trot out to excuse the fact that they did that and continue to do it together. They let it happen because they wanted it.

Hm... fair enough. I have studied this for years and come to the opposite conclusion. Specifically in Geography and Urban and city planning courses.

What studies or books lead you to your conclusion?

That people ultimately do what they want. They aren’t brainwashed. Car companies or lobbies don’t build our cities. We build them they way we want them. If we wanted them some other way we would. And most people live in suburban sprawl where they distance themselves from their fellow American — who they don’t particularly like very much.

Womp.

I don’t understand what you are refuting.

But I live in Pacific Heights, one of the most desirable old world communities in America, and it’s mostly empty and full of ghost capital homes.

People like it for a while but they leave for the suburbs pretty fast and go looking for elbow room away from others. And it’s mostly because the energy under the surface of the beautiful homes is rude, selfish and inconsiderate. From the owners to the workers that come to service the homes. Regardless of class we are really angry people.

Pacific Heights is indeed one of the most desirable neighboors, and is very much non-surburban in its nature.

but ...

The current situation in uber-expensive real-estate markets when it comes to high-end housing should not be over-interpreted as having more to say about what most Americans want from the places where they live.

Pacific Heights current situation is also very similar to wealthy old neighborhoods in cities across Europe. London at the very least is full of such examples.

also ...

> I don’t understand what you are refuting.

>> We would have built better cities if we wanted carless communities. But we didn’t and still don’t.

I wouldn't say it's an emergence of a general dislike of each other. It was desegregation; the dislike always existed, but before Brown vs Board of Ed and other decisions in the same cities different racial groups lived in different worlds.

Blockbusting was a real phenomenon in which real estate agents would move a black family into the neighborhood to get white families to fire sell their homes, and it worked because they could no longer legally isolate minorities from their children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting

We know that this happens today, even with minority groups that are affluent and do well in education metrics. https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/07/silicon-valley-whit... (And before anyone accuses me of "wokism", the original story was broken by the Wall Street Journal, which is decidedly not a "woke" publication.)

Rather than they “used to build cities this way”, perhaps it just takes centuries for cities to evolve to a good form.

I’m very unconvinced but this. New Yorkers famously all hate each other yet if you can afford to live in relatively central parts of New York, you don’t need a car. Though New York is still somewhat car-focused. Internationally, London has similar but a slightly milder case of car-dependent sprawl to New York (but people still famously don’t like each other). Swedes are also known for their desire for space and privacy yet they somehow manage to live in cities that don’t follow the North American model. And many Dutch cities used to be going in the direction of the American model (held back by the lower wealth after the war preventing mass car ownership) and only changed direction in the 70s after won’t-somebody-think-of-the-children political campaigning and some very slim majorities in votes on the topic. And the transition was a slow one too.

> Americans don’t like each-other.

Specifically white Americans want to avoid living with brown Americans. Once segregation was no longer law, it launched a wave of destruction for public infrastructure: pools, schools, transit, even things like sidewalks all became things to oppose if they had to be shared.

It's more than that. Jews, Asians (individually, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc), Italians, Polish, Irish, Arabic ... all segregated into their own neighborhoods. The "melting pot" was never really real. We are a nation of immigrants that never really got along with one another except when common interests were threatened.

I don't know that it's uniquely American thing either, I think this happens anywhere that different cultures come together. Humans are deeply tribal.

I think the intensity matters: my Irish ancestors weren’t considered white when they got here but there wasn’t a mass exodus from cities rather than sharing infrastructure, and they were allowed into whiteness over time (especially when large numbers of cops were needed to police black populations). The ones who served in the military weren’t restricted to certain units and duties, etc. When white people moved to the suburbs, the neighborhoods which were razed to make highways had a very uneven distribution.

That’s definitely not perfect (and it’s like, say, Chinatowns weren’t raided or sacked) but that option of coexistence wasn’t on offer in much of the country.

> all segregated into their own neighborhoods.

Check out Shellings model of segregation [0]. Global seggregation doesn't necessarily mean that local decisions have strong preference for their race.

e.g. for two types it's enough to have preference "I want at least 33% of my neighbours to be same type as me" to reach segregated global result.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schelling%27s_model_of_segrega...

This is inaccurate.

The GM conspiracy bought streetcar companies to replace them with buses, not to eliminate public transportation.

The reality is that streetcar companies were already unprofitable, killed by infrastructure cars and poor urban planning. So it was already easy for GM to buy these companies.

> The reality is that streetcar companies were already unprofitable

What seems to me to be a good takedown of “public transit must be profitable or be dismantled”, or “the US post office must be profitable or be dismantled” is: How profitable is the US military?

Everybody has a budget. Going red is just very bad. Sustainability is the keyword here.

A streetcar enhance economic activity and transportation, especially when built with proper urban planning, and may even make a profit.

With the profit, the public transit agency can use the fund to improve infrastructure with hopefully less political influence in order to further it missions.

You could of course make a trade off and not mandate the agency to be profitable and subsidize it, but it's a political tradeoff.

Just because a business turns a loss doesn't mean it isn't sustainable.

Public transport is unprofitable pretty much everywhere, because the explicit transactions don't offset costs of operation. However, the cost of not operating public transit is that you end up with awful car centric cities, more respiratory disease from increased traffic, lost efficiency from congestion, higher real estate prices in walkable areas, etc.

Additionally, there's a ton of positive externalities that are not factored in when judging profitability. Effective public transport increases foot traffic, which increases economic activity.

Even if public transit was 100% free, it would still be worth running. The market is awful at evaluating long-term large scale effects, and just disregards them as "externalities". You can't blindly trust markets to build your cities.

An even better one that's directly relevant is: How profitable are roads? Public roads are exclusively unprofitable and yet they get fully subsidised.