>>2030130If car culture is mostly sustainable as it is in the US due to having enough space and resources then it's not going away. Public transit is something that results mostly from necessity.
In Europe, since many cities have existed since ancient times they were already somewhat dense and huddled together, which then favoured public transit, and they continued to develop like that around transit. There was mostly not enough space or resources for car-oriented development. You got some of it mostly in France and Germany during the 2nd half of the 20th century, because they were booming economies, but even then it wasn't to the level of the US.
Japan OTOH is the perfect example of simply not having much space due to the geographic constraints. Car-oriented development would be completely unsustainable over there.
The US has both the space AND the economy for car-oriented development, with few exceptions like NYC.
American cities before the advent of transit or cars were mostly very small, since they hadn't had much time to grow. Even during the brief era of transit before mass-motorization there was lots of low-density development like streetcar suburbs.
I think it would be possible to have more transit-oriented development in the US, but it seems that there's just not much demand for it. Too few people really value access to proper public transit enough to give up cheap and roomy suburban living, even with its many drawbacks. And even if, then many people and places would still be badly connected to the public transit network, so they'd still depend on cars a lot.
tl;dr it's never going to change because there's not nearly enough factors that would push for that change.
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