While I believe the logic in the article is sound, I think it missed the mark on what actually transforms cities in such a way. It's not the cars - they're jus

While I believe the logic in the article is sound, I think it missed the mark on what actually transforms cities in such a way. It's not the cars - they're just tools. It's the insatiable appetite for living space. There's a trend in the city I grew up in(Warsaw, Poland) that started over 20 years ago and continues to this day - people grew tired of living in crammed, Plattenbau apartments, so they moved to smaller towns(in part inspired by their notion of how Americans live) adjacent to big cities where all the jobs were. Additionally at that time interest rates were so high that this was an option for those who couldn't get a mortgage for an apartment. Cars followed, but not everywhere. Places close to railways were an exception, but only up to a point, because over time commuters exhausted any spare capacity there was, so the remainder had to drive and bear the not insignificant costs of that. In the meantime a highway was built, but that didn't help for long. Was Warsaw hollowed-out by this? Hardly. What happened instead is that it started cannibalizing smaller (but still relatively large) cities.