I think a lot people in the U.S. see our car-oriented culture as clearly just the natural way of doing things, and see places like Amsterdam as more 'unnatural'. I don't think most people realize what a historical accident it is, stemming from a confluence of factors:
- Cars becoming affordable right about the same time as the U.S. was experiencing the postwar boom. If they had stayed too expensive cities might have expanded rail and other transport methods more in the postwar boom years.
- New construction methods allowing the building of certain styles of single family houses cheaply arose around the same time
- Several Supreme Court decisions like the banning of red-lining and the banning of public school segregation causes a lot of white people to move to more-expensive car-dependent suburbs as a way of preserving their ability to live in a segregated neighborhood. The GI bill was also structured in a way to exclude most African Americans from being able to buy homes. The resulting flight of wealthier white folks causes urban decay which causes more white flight to car-dependent suburbs.
- After initial suburbs were built out, the FHA set up regulations that made it more difficult to build suburbs that weren't car-dependent.
- Planners like Robert Moses hadn't been able to see the space inefficiency of when you have a huge network of suburbs trying to commute into cities via cars. Additionally, induced demand meant that highways into dense cities quickly fill up to capacity compared to more efficient methods of transport like trains or buses.
- The federal government went along with the car-dependent vision promoted by planners, partially because it hadn't been demonstrated yet. The costs of building car infrastructure and suburbs were heavily subsidized by the federal government. Maintenance costs are mostly localized, but not expansion, which encouraged more expansion of the suburbs to get more tax revenue from property taxes until maintenance bills come due and the cycle begins again (see strongtowns.org to read more about this phenomenon).
- As white people moved to the suburbs and drove personal cars, public transport became seen as something only poor-black people would do
- Alternatives like biking became dangerous because of all the fast-moving cars and not as practical in spread-out suburbs
- Status quo bias sets in, so we keep doubling down on existing patterns of development
I'm sure there are a lot of other factors that I am forgetting, but the US wasn't built for cars just because there was a lot of 'empty space' or whatever people like to say.
- Cars becoming affordable right about the same time as the U.S. was experiencing the postwar boom. If they had stayed too expensive cities might have expanded rail and other transport methods more in the postwar boom years.
- New construction methods allowing the building of certain styles of single family houses cheaply arose around the same time
- Several Supreme Court decisions like the banning of red-lining and the banning of public school segregation causes a lot of white people to move to more-expensive car-dependent suburbs as a way of preserving their ability to live in a segregated neighborhood. The GI bill was also structured in a way to exclude most African Americans from being able to buy homes. The resulting flight of wealthier white folks causes urban decay which causes more white flight to car-dependent suburbs.
- After initial suburbs were built out, the FHA set up regulations that made it more difficult to build suburbs that weren't car-dependent.
- Planners like Robert Moses hadn't been able to see the space inefficiency of when you have a huge network of suburbs trying to commute into cities via cars. Additionally, induced demand meant that highways into dense cities quickly fill up to capacity compared to more efficient methods of transport like trains or buses.
- The federal government went along with the car-dependent vision promoted by planners, partially because it hadn't been demonstrated yet. The costs of building car infrastructure and suburbs were heavily subsidized by the federal government. Maintenance costs are mostly localized, but not expansion, which encouraged more expansion of the suburbs to get more tax revenue from property taxes until maintenance bills come due and the cycle begins again (see strongtowns.org to read more about this phenomenon).
- As white people moved to the suburbs and drove personal cars, public transport became seen as something only poor-black people would do
- Alternatives like biking became dangerous because of all the fast-moving cars and not as practical in spread-out suburbs
- Status quo bias sets in, so we keep doubling down on existing patterns of development
I'm sure there are a lot of other factors that I am forgetting, but the US wasn't built for cars just because there was a lot of 'empty space' or whatever people like to say.