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).)
> 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.