> US cities were not destroyed, and this is just misinformation, or hyperbole at best.
The damage US policies did to US cities is worse then what allied bombers ever did to Europe.
> In fact virtually all cities benefited from car infrastructure, since it brings people and things to the city
First of all, car infrastructure is literally the single most inefficient way to get people to a city.
In order to do it you need to basically destroy half of the city and give gigantic amount of space to roads and parking. To the point where in the US, much of the things people used to go to the city for is just gone.
And the few people that do get to the city, is LITERALLY the expense of the people who actually live there. But fuck them I guess. All the people who were Red Lined, unable to invest and impoverished, and then when their houses lost value, getting paid nothing and torn down.
And those places now had a horrible highway threw the city, making the land on both sides be worth even less.
But at least the subburban white people can still drive to the office tower.
> It helps the economic value of a city
US cities were much more valuable before the drive to build highways. And in Europe, cities that didn't build massive highways tend to be much more valuable. And many of the worst example of urban decay are those cities with the most complete highway programs.
Your assertion simply not backup by any data, there is tons of research on this. Gigantic amount of property value was lost. Countless beautiful old building that could still produce economic value to this day (and for the next 100 years) were ripped down to build parking lots.
And the worst part is, despite the dilapidated state of the cities, the cities were still producing more taxes, subsidizing the suburbs.
Literally destroying cities, pulling all the wealth out of it, to subsidize the subburban infrastructure.
> If this wasn't true, there would have been a response with a broad political base.
Please do yourself a favor and actually read up on the history of how these things happened.
> At best, a tiny minority of residents gets upset about roads and organizes into activist groups that make such claims. But the majority of the public enjoys and utilizes driving infrastructure.
People back then didn't all understand the long term effect of these policies. And hidden subsidizes were used to hide the actual cost.
You act like the US in the 50/60 was some perfectly democratic society where if its impossible to even imagine that one group of people would support policy to exploit another group of people that was much less able to fight back politically. Must be nice to live in a imaginary world all the time.
If you didn't get it in school, if it doesn't fit the narrative it didn't exist.
> But the majority of the public enjoys and utilizes driving infrastructure.
People for the most part don't enjoy it. 'Road rage' is literally an incredibly common thing. People are sad by the terrible state of roads. The Netherlands and other European countries consistently outrank the US in driver satisfaction index. And that is only looking at drivers.
And many people have had people die, many people had accidents, many people had cars drive into their homes. Many people have lung issues. The list goes on an on and on.
The reality is people don't have another option, and most people today in the US have never even thought about or considered any other kind of system.
You can't say 'see after we invested countless billions in System A and gave it every advantage over decades and decades and abused System B for just as long', people use System A more. That's prove that system A is better.
Its an idiotic line of argument and its truly sad to see that even on HN people make those kind of basic mistakes.
In the Netherlands people actually have options, trains, trams, bikes, cars. And turns out, yes some people like driving. And driver satisfaction is much higher there then it is in the US. But many people clearly use bikes and trains. And just FYI, the investment that was put into bike infrastructure in the last 40 years is a absolute drop in the bucket compared to 100+ years of road investment.
If you actually gave all the modes the same amount of city space, and the same amount of investment, and actually prioritized by both energy efficiency and and people threwput, things would be far more tilted then it even is in the Netherlands.