4 ms·

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

• 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.