No, American cities are more spread out mainly because many Americans don't want to live in small apartments, and cars enabled that.
Public transit is much less convenient and desirable when the 1) distance between adjacent stops is too large, 2) there are too many stops between different destinations, and/or 3) the stops at a particular location are too infrequent. I think all of those undesirable factors increase as density decreases.
Using a personal car effectively reduces #1 to zero, #2 to zero, and increases #3 to infinity.
pjc50 and my post indicate the same happens in Europe, it isn't just the US. otherwise, agreed, I don't think anybody argued cities need more cars and less public transport.
It's a cycle. Build the city around cars? Then the city becomes spread out due to poor land usage and cars become a requirement. Since the city is more spread out, public transit is both more expensive (since you need to cover more distance) and less efficient (you service fewer people per mile).
Car ownership in US cities is high for a reason: lack of good public transport (compared to the European cities in the article) and the sprawl of cities in the US. Narrowing the streets would require a fundamental change in the rate of automobile ownership, which would not happen unless public transport is improved.
And on top of that, zoning in the US makes it basically impossible to reach densities where public transit works well. The last 50 years of construction were entire designed around everyone owning an automobile
There is a wide diversity of cities in the US. You can go to places like NYC, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, etc. and see examples of cities with decently dense cores and functional public transit. But then you can go to cities in the South, for example, where it's almost impossible to get around without a car.
I have lived in quite a few cities in the US, and people who live in the city are still driving a majority of the time. There are not that many US cities that have the appropriate biking and transit capabilities to match their size.
US public transportation isn't necessarily the problem, and neither is cars themselves; the root cause is US zoning/infrastructure.
When everything is built with cars in mind, nothing is walkable and everything is super far apart. (Because, after all, you're supposed to use your car to get there!) In a properly-designed area you don't even necessarily need public transit.
Interesting that the major cities with sizable public transport user populations are all in the northeast hub. Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, DC. Growing up and living here, cars aren't really necessary day to day in any of these cities. I'm shocked when I travel to basically any other major-ish US city, especially "newer" big cities like Denver, Phoenix, Miami, Tampa. The best way I can describe it is older cities are built at human-scale, newer cities are built at car-scale.
old cities: built dense for walking, because cars didn't exist.
new cities: built dense for walking and public transit because private car ownership isn't that common in China
20th century USA cities: built for cars. Sprawl makes public transit too expensive because it requires many lines with low ridership. Wide roads, long distances, and cars flying around everywhere makes walking scary. Driving becomes the only attractive mode of transportation.
The problem is deeply embedded in the urban layout and the culture. It will take decades of destruction & rebuilding, plus a huge cultural shift, before USA cities can be fixed.
Car culture is so big in the US that outside of the few cities with really bad traffic problems, nobody cares about sprawl.
The vast majority of everyone's experience of public transportation is shitty, slow busses and commuter trains with limited schedules and stops that you drive to. So cities that force you to use public transit sound really unappealing to people that haven't experienced something like Tokyo.
These two factors are why Americans don't have much concern about urban planning.
Primarily: the need to get around in whichever city/area you are in once you get there. In all but the most dense cities (NYC/SF/Chicago), you have to have a car to get around. If I had a high speed train to get between Kansas City and Houston it still wouldn't do any good because you need a car to get around when you arrive. This is true for nearly every area of the USA. We tend to build out, rather than up, making public transport impractical and expensive. Building out does have the advantage of keeping land/home prices relatively low, though.
Many Americans prefer the freedom of being able to go A to B at any time without needing to wait at a bus/subway stop or hoping the transportation system is still running for the day. The amount of money it would cost to get the entire country walk able or reachable by public transit would be astronomical.
That's because most of those cities were built up before cars existed, and even horse-drawn carriages were a luxury for the few.
Many American cities on the other hand have grown up with the car, with wide streets dividing neighborhoods, and essential facilities scattered far away from one another. Reducing car usage in a typical American city (not downtown Manhattan) is not just a matter of banning cars or replacing them with public transportation. The city itself needs to be redesigned in a more compact way. Property values will skyrocket in the CBD, and crash everywhere else.
Flawed analysis, smaller city's have less congestion and less demand for public transit. The real issue with cars is they don't scale as you increase population density.
I'm sure it can be attributed to a lot of factors.
Geographically, the USA has a lot of space, so it's relatively easy to sprawl. Some places have to be more space-efficient.
Ideologically, the USA has always been about individual rights, private property and self-reliance. Car ownership fits that model of thinking better.
Politically, private companies have always had a lot of influence over government. When the car became widespread, it was easy to influence governments to build highways, favour cars in roads, pass parking minimums, etc.
Historically, the USA has a history of segregation. Public transit mixes people from around the city, and I'm sure at a certain point in time there were people in power interested on reducing that as much as possible. I mean, there's that whole event with Rosa Parks as an example [1].
Moreover, a lot of the USA is "new". With a shorter tradition of city-building and more of a blank canvas to start, I'm not surprised what people expect and how they try to build their cities is different.
> Most US cities that could benefit from urban planning and redesign are that way because they're densely packed car-centric areas.
I mean, in Europe we've largely repurposed medieval towns to car usage, with much worse constraints in terms of preservation of historical buildings. US cities can be much more radical and much more easily, if they really want to.
Hence the "with office areas and places of interest being several miles apart each".
That's of course a design decision (urban planning). The average US city prioritized cars over efficiency, the environment and people actually having a chance to connect and build an urban culture (like NY or Chicago or SF has -- or had) outside of strip malls.
Right but in the US the vast majority of areas require cars. Things are just very spread out and so everything was designed for cars. It's not feasible to do public transportation like in Europe in most places because of the very low density and vast areas.
I guess it just comes down to the infrastructure, then.
In America, there isn't much "babysitting" of a vehicle - every place you want to go generally has decent parking near where you're going. Which ultimately is probably due to our mainly car-centric culture - our cities and "places of interest" are designed around the car, so you have plenty of parking and what-not geared toward cars. Also due to having a lot of land to "spread out" for car stuff...
Which then makes things terrible for public transportation! Everything spread out makes it difficult (and in some cases dangerous - if on foot or bike) to get around without a car, and public transportation has to conform to the cars (in some cases to absurd lengths - for instance, here in Phoenix, AZ we have a small light-rail system at ground level in the median of some streets. On these streets, the line has to respect traffic signals for cars, so in essence light rail becomes "large bus on rails". To me, this is stupid).
There's also the case here in America that using public transportation can be - interesting. In the times I have used it (even with the bad design of our light rail here, I still like taking it when I can), I have encountered crazy and hostile people who get violently aggressive at almost nothing. I've also encountered plain regular folk. It just all depends on the day, but the randomness can be off-putting to many. At times I mainly find it annoying, but many times I find it interesting.
Also could be US cities have no transit, requiring space-intensive auto infrastructure, so they're more spread out.
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