No "America" didn't decide that. The geography of America dictated how America evolved to become a car preferring nation of sprawling cities.
The car is the perfect combination of flexibility, scale, speed, utility and so on.
Sprawls are a byproduct of what the car made possible, they where not created to promote the car they where created because the car made it possible and gave a number of benefits for the individual families.
Yes, and we turned around and codified all of that so we can't easily do anything different. For example, as noted in the article, developers are REQUIRED to supply parking in most locations. Looking out my office window, there's a sea of surface parking. If that was legally mandated, the developer could in-fill with mixed-use and some of us could live literally right next door. Instead, the closest I can get to work is a bit over a mile down the road.
They are required BECAUSE cars are base for the sprawl.
Again even in Denmark and other places that are extremely pro-public-transportation and anti-car, cars are still used by the majority of people because its the base means of transportation which provides the most benefits when you boil it down.
Forcing people to live in big cities with public transportation makes no sense on a continent like America.
Public transportation is only good for very dense areas and becomes extremely expensive once you need to cover less dense areas. This is true even in countries like Denmark which are geographically pretty small.
Denser cities mean more expensive real-estate which means less money for yourself and your family.
The sprawls and laws came after the cars, not the other way around.
Sure, the space is there, but there are real costs to using it the way we do. It is a choice we have made as a society. But, there's no natural law that required us to choose cars or stopping us from reconsidering.
As I see it:
- cars and the sprawl they allowed made sense at the time
- entrenched interested worked to codify the car-based lifestyle
- it is likely time to reconsider the path we took, given what we now know about pollution, the time wasted in traffic, and other factors.
- those entrenched interests have done such a good job of selling the car as a fundamental (and "free") part of the American Dream that many people are unwilling to consider anything else (see sibling comments about freedom and flexibility).
The discussion is what allowed cars to take over i.e. in the past not what might happen in the future.
Urbanization is a reality ex. because of the way the job market evolves, but the claim that there was some big conspiracy to make the cars take over is simply unfounded and based on very sloppy thinking.
Cars took over because they allowed us to live further away from the big cities which was cheaper and gave us more room and allowed us to build sprawl because the land was plentiful.
It's a combination of things not just some single reason that obviously isn't true which you will see the second you look at other countries who also need cars but doesn't have a legal system that helps.
Urbanization is taking over because of the benefits it offers today. Just because cars might not make sense in the future it doesn't mean that it didn't make sense in the past.
And no matter what, it's not something anyone of us decide to do just because it'something that we do once it makes sense and the benefits outweigh the negatives.
The car is the perfect combination of flexibility, scale, speed, utility and so on.
Sprawls are a byproduct of what the car made possible, they where not created to promote the car they where created because the car made it possible and gave a number of benefits for the individual families.