What does “true and progressive” mean? The freeway expansions of the mid 20th century cutting through city centers were disastrous all over the USA, right from the start. Horrible for urban society, economy, equity, ...
Thankfully San Francisco was never turned into https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2...
Great for the automobile, tire, and petroleum industries though.
Also from the article: "A widespread misconception exists that well-functioning streetcar systems were intentionally put out of business by a conspiratorial alliance of tire and auto manufacturers in the 1940s and 1950s…In reality, many streetcar companies were never reliably profitable, and they suffered from overcapitalization, inadequate maintenance, and poor service". In comparison to that, all these cheap and reliable "rubber tires" vehicles probably seemed pretty progressive.
Of course, knowing what we know now, it's easy to see how incredibly short sighted this was. I sure wish we hadn't ripped out all those rail lines.
The entertainment industry would be far different if not for automobiles. Look at woodstock. Such iconic american activities and mass gatherings would not have been possible without widespread cheap personal transportation.
In a lot of urban areas now the population/demand is such that people have expanded well pass the initial sets of suburbs and now those suburbs are in dire need of urbanization. That’s due to general growth over time. While it looks terrible now, that’s more because people are greatly resisting converting suburban areas to urban, and doesn’t invalidate the initial decisions to create suburban areas.
An alternate reality would have seen the US purchase rights of way between traditional urban cores and new suburb centers, then run rail (and upzone density around that rail) once that suburb attained sufficient population to merit. Then build sufficient park-and-ride capacity to handle the suburb's population's last mile needs.
So basically, what China does. Except with less upfront heavy construction (because the US doesn't need to drive a demand-based economy) and more emphasis on right of way purchase (because the US has stronger property rights).
Instead, we largely grew the first generation of suburbs and then... just didn't invest or plan non-road transit. And so began growing suburbs outside of suburbs, and none of them connected with a high-throughput transit network.
Sprawl particularly exasperated inequality by basically requiring everyone who wanted to succeed to own a very expensive (both upfront and overtime) thing.
I'm definately not one for more highways, but this map doesn't look _that_ different from SF today?
"For whom" may be the more pertinent question. It's impossible to untangle mass the politics of transit in that era from the politics of segregation. Hence the famous bus incident.