Originally Posted by
dynodonn
It's more difficult to be car free in the US today than in years past, whereas in the past, most businesses and schools were located close to residential areas. Today, many more residential areas are now located in the outskirts of a city, making a large number of the population opt in driving a motor vehicle, especially when mass transit service is either limited in scope or non existent all together.The more automobiles that are on the road, the more difficult it is to walk or ride a bicycle, and with more automobiles, with roadways get more prioritized for motorized traffic, and less for non motorized traffic.
And all of these cars spur on building more parking and more lanes, making things too far away to bike or walk to and taking away bike lanes and sidewalks, which discourages bikijg, which encourages driving. And, hey, if you drive everywhere anyway, then why not live an extra 7 miles away. Well, no reason to patronize the bus networks, but we could use more free parking downtown now, which requires razing a four-story apartment building, which encourages those people to move to townhouses in the new development on the edge of town, which has no bus service. Any rent savings now go to car loan payments, and now they demand more parking downtown. And to top it all off, you now have 10x the infrastructure per capita (road maintenance, water, sewage, elecrrical lines) on a smaller tax base (parking lots do not generate much revenue per acre).
I sincerely wonder how stupid and/or evil the government, construction companies, and auto companies were in America in the 1950s to not see or care about this inevitable result.