Quite literally all cities before the 1950s.
Los Angeles, now a car-dependent hellscape, once had a robust and far-reaching street car network.
Post-WW2 we went full car-dependent suburbs. Why? Racism has a lot to do with it.
Los Angeles, now a car-dependent hellscape, once had a robust and far-reaching street car network.
Post-WW2 we went full car-dependent suburbs. Why? Racism has a lot to do with it.
I'm trying to find photos or accounts, but most of them seem to be people talking about or showing off how happy they are about having their own cars.
Los Angeles has busses that go absolutely everywhere, and even has a subway system, and yet people happily pay tens of thousands of dollars to own their own car so that they can go wherever they want.
I've never heard of somebody intentionally selling their car to take public transportation instead, certainly not in an American city. People take public transportation because they can't afford a car.
As it exists now, however: public transportation is terrible, and having a personal vehicle to take you where you want safely is universally preferable.
In the meantime: google image search photos of some of the Indian commuter trains I’ve ridden on and ask yourself why everybody with even a tiny bit of money hired a private driver.
Your comment about “broader perspective” is insulting, and I guarantee you that my perspective is quite a bit broader than “traveled to some glorified Disney land parks in Western Europe.”
Actually some of the nicest walkable neighborhoods that I’ve visited since moving here, I was the only tourist that I saw.
If you’re genuinely curious, I’d love to give you more information about my city (as an American that moved to Europe). Let me know.
But I have 5 grocery stores within a quarter mile of my home, I take public transit and bike for all of my daily errands, and haven’t driven a car once since moving here. I see my friends whenever I want, often by either walking or taking transit depending on distance.
Just last weekend, I took a train to another city to buy a new racing bike, and took the train most of the way home before riding it the last mile or two. It was easy, and I went all the way to a neighboring town to shop for it (since they had a model that I wanted to try).
You can minimize it by calling it a glorified Disneyland park, but then you’re basically just skipping over the hundreds of millions of people who work non-tourism jobs (engineering, law, business, farming, medicine) and live within these generally well designed places.
You're right, of course, that unpleasant public transportation is very common worldwide. But it's not universal, which, to me, suggests that it's possible to learn from those success stories.
And your own transportation system is vastly inefficient in the task of getting you and thousands of other people where they need to go. In a world where people's destinations are wildly divergent and travellers are few, cars make more sense. But when you see a clogged interstate filled with cars all mostly going to the same or similar destinations, whose occupants could easily fit into a couple of buses, you start to see the logic behind public transportation.