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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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North american street and road design are not great at preventing automobile accidents due to their wide designs, high speed limits, and poor road hierarchy uses. The roads are especially unsafe for anyone outside of a car like pedestrians and cyclists. If this was truly done for safety there would be more traffic calming, safer pedestrian crossing and protected bike lanes. Cars are the most subsidized method of transit in North America and the roads/streets are designed to move as many cars as fast as possible.
Lawmakers also sat idly by while big auto corporations bought street car companies, ripped out the street cars, replaced them with buses, and eventually cancelled the bus services as they were now stuck in the traffic created by destroying the street cars and promoting more people to drive. Lawmakers also decided that dense downtown areas should be destroying their buildings to meet parking minimums that were based on very little real data. Sure lawmakers didn't force you to buy a car, but they certainly contributed to the erosion of walkability and transit as well as promoted car centric design (suburbs, strip malls, parking minimums).
Not disagreeing with the person above me here in the reply chain but wanted to tack onto the conversation that all of the following is historically true:
A) the lack of separation of means of travel has caused traffic issues for everyone involved as long as there have been more than one mode of travel (and those modes of travel weren't separated)
B) most people (but especially urban Americans) were opposed to cars and saw them as a blight on their city. The city was for the people, the road was for the people. This mentality is reflected in many many news articles which interviewed everyone from the average worker, to cops, to mayors.
C) that the car industry learned how to lobby against the American political system to take advantage of zoning laws and implement stricter guidelines for car centric designs such are minimum parking requirements.
Each of these things played a part in what American car infrastructure looks like today. People hated being afraid of cars, so local government was trying to separate cars from people. The car industry wanted the automobile to be the only form of transportation so it pressured the federal and state governments into passing laws which would result in this happening.
Wanted to highlight this because I feel like a lot of people think it was caused by one thing (namely GM), but life and history aren't that simple. It was a multitude of factors all overlapping with one another that were amplified by the lobbyists actions.
I think big oil and gas pulled a few strings as well. Making people rely on cars also meant making them rely on gas.
Unfortnately cities were in a sense sold out to these companies with promises of prosperity brought by the automobile but instead recieved crippling debt trying to support the automobiles and their roadways.