> Basically how things were built pre-WW2?

The majority of America was not some idyllic "streetcar suburb" even pre WWII. Majority of it was either grid based urban development or rural residential / agriculture in large plots (often 20, 40, 80, 160, 320, 640 acre plots).

https://web.archive.org/web/20131108174122/http://www.thegre...

As agriculture got more efficient, and raising food for ones self became less common, and as cars became more prevalent these large rural plots often got sold to developers who would be tasked with breaking up the land into parcels and installing new roads and infrastructure.

Even in 1906 in San Francisco, you can see that cars are beginning to overtake the cable car and horse carriage as the central form of transport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHkc83XA2dY

So it's natural that majority of American land was developed around the automobile.

I grew up in a house built in the 1890s (with residual pipes for gas lighting because electricity hadn't been "invented" yet). It was designed to be with-in walking distance of retail and streetcars/trams/trolleys, because the car had not been invented yet. Grid layout pre-dates the automobile:

* http://oldtorontomaps.blogspot.com/p/index-of-maps.html

There's nothing "natural" about car-centric design and giving priority to cars:

* https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/

It's a policy choice, one which (e.g.) the Dutch started moving away from in the late 1970s:

* https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...

* https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in...

Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...

The book Crabgrass Frontier was published in 1985:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crabgrass_Frontier

The Geography of Nowhere was published in 1993:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Nowhere

We've know for decades about the consequences of sprawl.

Not to mention that many places in US actively oppose or outright ban mixed use developments. (commercial lower levels, with residential on top)

Well I've been in many pre 1890s buildings and houses that were never anywhere near a streetcar or even railroad, because they were not located anywhere near a dense urban area. The United States is a vast swath of highly arable land. Far more of it is amenable in terms of climate than Canada. And huge swaths of this country were sparsely inhabitated, broken up into these large rural parcels as I described. People moved to the United States throughout the 1800s specifically to obtain land.

> There's nothing "natural" about car-centric design and giving priority to cars

Look at the video footage of San Fran in 1906 I posted. It is just about as perfect of a model as you could find. It was a premier city at the time. It had cable car infrastructure across the city that survives to this day. However, even in this footage people are foregoing the cable car for the automobile. More people are jetting around in their car, far before any real infrastructure even existed specifically for the car. It was a consumer choice.

People like to think it was some kind of conspiracy that streetcars and railroads fell out of favor for cars.

No, cars replaced horses and horse carriages, which were flexible in path movement, did not depend on central operators, asynchronous in that they could be deployed any time, and also like horses, cars were owned.

Independence, ownership, empowerment, etc. Huge American cultural values in part shaped by the sheer geography of the U.S.

For the United States, based on its geography and culture, absolutely inevitable that independent and self owned forms of transportation would dominate.

Sprawl, in a sprawling country, is inevitable.

> Sprawl, in a sprawling country, is inevitable.

The communities listed in this page were suburbs, just not car-centric suburbs:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

Development could have continued to be denser communities around either tram lines, rail stations, or existing towns. LA's 'sprawl' started around the trolley system:

* https://la.curbed.com/2017/9/20/16340038/los-angeles-streetc...

* https://www.jstor.org/stable/26412661

Some of the original bedroom communities were based around rail stations. But those communities still had 'urban-ish' communities that one walked around, and long distance travel was rail, or horse, later car.

And I know well communities not around any dense urban area, as I visited my grandparents' farm in Communist Europe numerous times when I was young: my aunts/uncles had cars back in the Old Country, but my grand parents still used horses for a lot of work and even going into town.

A random farm, in a rural area, in a sprawling country is not the same planned development on a parcel of land, which required government approval and permits. Low-density development, cul-de-sacs, restrictive zoning where residential is not with-in waling distance of commercial/industrial were all policy choices. There was nothing inevitable about it. Certainly in the 1940s and 50s maybe folks didn't know any better, but that's harder to say by the 1970s and 80s.

(Parenthetically, originally people used to live in towns and commute to their farms: living right on the farm was a later development (relatively speaking).)

"Basically how things were built pre-WW2?"

Or, like many places still build them today?