The end of the Pacific Electric system was not a conspiracy theory by tire companies or anything like that; the price of the cars dropped and that's what consumers preferred, i.m.o.
Pretty much any major American city is less dense than it was 100 years ago. It was cheaper to build out than it was to build up.
All of that stuff you listed comes from tax dollars, and people ultimately care less about that than what's coming out of their pockets for a home purchase. Well, until it's unsustainable, anyways.
In this country we have this ideal of a rugged individualist whose out there living off the land and making his own way. Never will this rugged individualist acknowledge that he's dependent on 10x as many miles of roads as his urban counterpart. Never will this rugged individualist acknowledge that providing him with internet access on the state's dollar costs orders of magnitude more than someone living in a sustainable location. Same with delivery costs and literally every other thing this person consumes. They get to pretend to be a self-reliant individualist while leaching off of the tax dollars of urban residents who cost a fraction of the amount to support.
Thankfully we have Starlink to replace pork consumption with actual services.
It's a crying shame that they've stopped selling them in the US. Marketing (the real men need their Rams, thank you very much!) and the CAFE loophole seem to have won the day, though, and we're all worse off for it.
That means, all else being equal, a car company makes more profit selling a vehicle that has a higher profit margin. The $80k trucks my family members buy do not cost 3X as much to manufacture as say, a nice Camry, but the price you pay is about 3X. This means the dealer/manufacturer just outright make more money if a higher percentage of people buy trucks instead of small cars.
Consumers have "signaled" that they will be fine paying three times as much for the same exact feature set (no, they are not hauling anything, and there certainly isn't a massively higher percentage of Americans doing truck things than 50 years ago), even using longer term loans to make it happen.
When the car market has been basically saturated for decades, how else do you "make line go up" than selling the same product (transportation) for more money?
> ... even using longer term loans to make it happen.
I don't understand how so many people are driving these vehicles. Not only are they 2-3x as expensive to buy or lease but they're also 2-3x more expensive to fuel and maintain. (Probably to insure, too?) I don't have any data to back this up but my intuition tells me that these vehicles and their loans could be the cause of the next subprime mortgage-esque financial crisis.
You didn't expound upon your point about the unintended consequences of CAFE standards but they're very real. Instead of making smaller and more efficient sedans per the guidelines, car makers opted start making all of their vehicles "light trucks" -- 80%+ of new vehicles are SUVs or bubbly looking "crossovers" -- which are not subject to the same demanding standards. Small sedans also cost less and would require ongoing R&D to continue to meet the CAFE standards. The end result, as this thread is interested, is heavier vehicles with bigger tires and more plastic in the environment and our brains.