> But then in the 1950s, Americans collectively decided that public transport was useless and they bulldozed through their city centres, ripped up the trams and railways, and splatted veritable plates of highway spaghetti right through the middle of their cities
The causality for this was mostly the other way around. There was a lot of empty land around the cities -- unlike most of Europe or Asia -- so once cars became available people started moving there because they could get more space for less money and still commute into the city by car for work.
The real problem is that the people who did this didn't want the city encroaching on their suburban space, but that space was directly next to the city. So they zoned it for single-family homes only and then the only way to add new housing is for the city to expand horizontally. Which needs more roads and parking and reduces use of mass transit which in turn gets discontinued.
What you need isn't mass transit, it's to allow condos and mixed-use zoning in what is currently the suburbs, to reconstitute enough density that mass transit can actually work.
Houston is actually a good example of this: the city has no zoning laws and so the workplaces are relatively evenly distributed across the metropolitan area. It may not be ideal, but you don’t really appreciate this aspect of the city as a visitor.
The causality for this was mostly the other way around. There was a lot of empty land around the cities -- unlike most of Europe or Asia -- so once cars became available people started moving there because they could get more space for less money and still commute into the city by car for work.
The real problem is that the people who did this didn't want the city encroaching on their suburban space, but that space was directly next to the city. So they zoned it for single-family homes only and then the only way to add new housing is for the city to expand horizontally. Which needs more roads and parking and reduces use of mass transit which in turn gets discontinued.
What you need isn't mass transit, it's to allow condos and mixed-use zoning in what is currently the suburbs, to reconstitute enough density that mass transit can actually work.