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A friend I knew as a child was killed last year on her bike as she commuted to work. She lived in a western US city and after her death I learned that this cit

A friend I knew as a child was killed last year on her bike as she commuted to work. She lived in a western US city and after her death I learned that this city has the same number of total bike deaths per year as New York City! We can argue about the statistics used by this article and the math here but it doesn’t really matter. The fact is US cities are not built for anything besides cars (with the exception of NY and maybe a few tiny downtown areas where hardly anyone lives). Urban planning on the US is a disaster and the decisions made 50 years ago amount to large, sprawling suburban areas we pretend are cities.

ryukafalz 4y ago
> The fact is US cities are not built for anything besides cars (with the exception of NY and maybe a few tiny downtown areas where hardly anyone lives). They were though, and it's a big shame that changed. I seem to recall Los Angeles had the largest streetcar system in the country.
- vel0city 4y ago
  Most cities in the US were practically small towns in comparison to the populations of today. The vast majority of most of our cities were built post 1930, with a few exceptions like NYC. In 1920 the population of LA County was about 900k. In 1950 it was 4 million. In 2020 its now 10 million. For comparison, the population of Amsterdam went from 650k in 1920 to 835k in 1950 to 872k in 2020.
  - pgodzin 4y ago
    Part of the problem is that increase in population happened in outward sprawl. There isn't anything particularly incompatible with a modernized version of that transit system at that density.
    - vel0city 4y ago
      The sprawl makes up massive chunks, if not the majority, of US cities these days, and has been so in most of what is now our cities since those areas existed. So suggesting our cities were designed for dense urban cores and it was the automobile that somehow destroyed it is revisionist IMO. Our cities experienced the vast majority of their growth when automobiles and fuel were relatively cheap, when most people weren't aware of greenhouse gasses or didn't necessarily care about the environmental impacts. So we built our cities reflecting what a lot of the population wanted at the time: automobile access. Its not like LA was a city of 10 million people in a dense urban downtown with cable cars, then GM came in and spread them all out. The city with cable cars is absolutely nothing compared to the city which exists today. However, comparing a place like Amsterdam, it hasn't experienced anywhere near the same level of growth during that time period. Most of what is the city today was the city in the 1930s as well, before automobiles were popular. And on top of that, automobiles were never as popular in Europe for several other factors other than just pure city design. Tons of dense European cities were dense cities well before automobiles were a thing. Pointing to Amsterdam, it only added 20k people in that time period, during which LA added >6,000k. Meanwhile, most US cities have experienced these kinds of massive growth during periods when automobile access was relatively cheap and affordable for most households.

ryukafalz 4y ago

> The fact is US cities are not built for anything besides cars (with the exception of NY and maybe a few tiny downtown areas where hardly anyone lives). They were though, and it's a big shame that changed. I seem to recall Los Angeles had the largest streetcar system in the country.

vel0city 4y ago
Most cities in the US were practically small towns in comparison to the populations of today. The vast majority of most of our cities were built post 1930, with a few exceptions like NYC. In 1920 the population of LA County was about 900k. In 1950 it was 4 million. In 2020 its now 10 million. For comparison, the population of Amsterdam went from 650k in 1920 to 835k in 1950 to 872k in 2020.
- pgodzin 4y ago
  Part of the problem is that increase in population happened in outward sprawl. There isn't anything particularly incompatible with a modernized version of that transit system at that density.
  - vel0city 4y ago
    The sprawl makes up massive chunks, if not the majority, of US cities these days, and has been so in most of what is now our cities since those areas existed. So suggesting our cities were designed for dense urban cores and it was the automobile that somehow destroyed it is revisionist IMO. Our cities experienced the vast majority of their growth when automobiles and fuel were relatively cheap, when most people weren't aware of greenhouse gasses or didn't necessarily care about the environmental impacts. So we built our cities reflecting what a lot of the population wanted at the time: automobile access. Its not like LA was a city of 10 million people in a dense urban downtown with cable cars, then GM came in and spread them all out. The city with cable cars is absolutely nothing compared to the city which exists today. However, comparing a place like Amsterdam, it hasn't experienced anywhere near the same level of growth during that time period. Most of what is the city today was the city in the 1930s as well, before automobiles were popular. And on top of that, automobiles were never as popular in Europe for several other factors other than just pure city design. Tons of dense European cities were dense cities well before automobiles were a thing. Pointing to Amsterdam, it only added 20k people in that time period, during which LA added >6,000k. Meanwhile, most US cities have experienced these kinds of massive growth during periods when automobile access was relatively cheap and affordable for most households.