Very well said, with one minor (but significant) nitpick. The US was not built for cars. It was bulldozed for them. There are a lot of good stories about this, but The Power Broker is a great one, or any of myriad YouTube videos about Robert Moses (many of which draw directly on The Power Broker).
So was much of Europe. WWII leveled a lot of cities and many of them thought it was going to be a great opportunity to build more auto infrastructure and be more like the US as they rebuilt. The same midcentury madness happened to them as happened across the Atlantic. The same mistakes were made. But like basically all of the world outside of the Americas, they quickly saw what a catastrophe it was and slowed or even reversed course the insanity.
Very well said, with one minor (but significant) nitpick. The US was not built for cars. It was bulldozed for them. There are a lot of good stories about this, but The Power Broker is a great one, or any of myriad YouTube videos about Robert Moses (many of which draw directly on The Power Broker).
So was much of Europe. WWII leveled a lot of cities and many of them thought it was going to be a great opportunity to build more auto infrastructure and be more like the US as they rebuilt. The same midcentury madness happened to them as happened across the Atlantic. The same mistakes were made. But like basically all of the world outside of the Americas, they quickly saw what a catastrophe it was and slowed or even reversed course the insanity.