You seem to be ignoring what actually happened. A huge number of the people in those cities wanted automobiles. That's why governments taxed people to pay for the roads for those cars.
I think I agree with the rest of your post.
The funny thing is, traffic in general and life for ardent motorists in particular would be better the better alternatives to driving are. Instead, they shoot themselves in the foot by shutting down anything other than adding more and more traffic, making things worse and worse for themselves.
Why did people want cars instead of transit, or bicycles, or walking? The alternatives work great... until it's a blizzard or 10 below. Then people don't actually want to wait at a trolley stop or ride a bike. (Yes, I know, you can dress for it. They still don't want to.)
So akkkkshully, people weren't the helpless sheep being run over by the invading automobiles that you claim they were. Autos are not an invasive species, overheated rhetoric notwithstanding. People brought those cars to the cities, and built the roads, and paid for them, and not just because the evil auto companies forced them to.
I'm from the South, so I've never had a car with a block heater, but I've driven in temps down to 0 F/-17 C without a problem. They had been that low persistently for about 4-5 days. Perhaps I did untold damage to the car by not having low-viscosity oil, but it worked well for the four years I drove it and the two after that when my sister did (until she wrecked it), and it was seven years old when it became mine. 13 years for a mid-eighties GM car was pretty good.
Given that the auto industry in the US and Canada was basically founded around the Great Lakes, I can't imagine that they wanted to sell things that wouldn't work in the cold weather of that region.
Actually, you've got the timeline wrong. It was the automobile becoming so common in cities that made the automobile industry powerful enough to later do those other things.
What got cars common in cities was that they were safer than horses and didn't shit and piss all over the streets.
When the government builds a ton of car roads, people want cars. When they build great rail, bike lanes and walkable streets, people want cars much less.
> When the government builds a ton of car roads, people want cars. When they build great rail, bike lanes and walkable streets, people want cars much less.
Is there evidence of that? I haven't seen an American city where bike lanes are utilized more than sparsely, even when an extensive network is built.
My many but anecdotal observations of bike lanes do not support it (I wish it did).
I'd like to be wrong: Where have you seen medium or high utilization of bike lanes, in the US?
despite all the improvements even cities like NYC still doesn't have this
imagine a city that's made up of a neighborhoods with high quality roads inside them but unconnected and separated by patches of sand dunes or dirt fields with between them
would you look at that and conclude "nobody drives here, these people must hate cars, we shouldn't invest in roads then, roads and cars are a useless technology, hiking on foot or riding a camel or donkey is superior!"
of course you wouldn't
but that's exactly what it's like being on a bike in ALL cities in the US - islands of a few (mostly unsafe) bikeways here and there, but not a complete, safe network to connect them in a meaningful way, so it's little wonder they're not as used as they could be (although despite that, esp in nyc, bikeways ARE heavily used)
if you wouldn't ride in them, they're not safe
if you wouldn't let your kids or nephew johnny ride in them, they're not safe
meanwhile in the Netherlands, Valencia, Seville, Barcelona, Paris and a bunch of other places in the world, they HAVE started to build meaningful, safe bikeway networks, and what do you know, then, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of people (including families and kids) end up using them daily
taking cars off the road and freeing up space for ardent motorists who always complain about traffic
it's a win win but most motorists are too blind to see it
Bike lanes in Vancouver and Montreal are pretty heavily utilized. But bikes are quiet and take up so little space compared to cars that it's easy to not notice.
> Cycling is increasingly popular in New York City; in 2018 there were approximately 510,000 daily bike trips, compared with 170,000 daily bike trips in 2005.[2][3]
Might also depend on what you consider and observe for 'bike lanes'. I've known very pleasant walk/bike paved paths that you wouldn't necessarily see from a car.
Have you ridden any of the bike lanes you've observed? My hunch is that they don't adequately serve the need due to a combo of dangerous intersections/car exposure and poor road conditions (potholes, construction, rails or grates sufficiently wide to trap a wheel).
EDIT: you might try looking for a counter example in Portland, OR? Purely anecdotal but my recollection is that I and many people I knew primarily biked around the city, probably had something to do with the infrastructure (roads felt safe, car exposure felt manageable, etc).
What is the basis of that? Perhaps, having the option of roads; and being led, to a degree by leaders' belief in roads, they wanted cars. Seeing public transit and seeing leaders' belief it it, they might have used that.
No. A huge number of people wanted an easy way to get from point A to B. Many people don't really care about cars, but when you design a city to accommodate only them with no viable alternatives, they will flock to the automobile. Case in point: Tokyo has a car ownership rate of 0.32 cars per household. Why? Because you can take the subway/bus/bike to anywhere in the city, it's clean, it's safe, it's invested in.
I mean, it does have a catchy title, but no, I'm not going to go order the book, and read all 170,000 words it boasts of, in order to try to figure out how you think that refutes my statement. If you've got an argument, make it.
It can be tiresome to have to repeat facts and opinions. It seems that grandparent has read a book, and found its contents convincing enough to share it here. A bit terse, but still relevant, no?
Seriously, how many people are going to go read it? Very few. How many are going to read it in time to say anything relevant to the discussion here? Zero.
So dropping a link to a book that size functions as an end-of-conversation move. It says "you can't argue with my unstated position until you've read this" (whether or not that was the post writer's intent). That doesn't make for a healthy conversation. For that reason, I call it out when I see it.
[Editing to add: It's even worse if you think in terms of time. How long would it take the poster to give a summary? Ten minutes? Well, how long would it take me to read the book? But it's worse, because more than one person read the post. How long would it take, total, for all of them to read the book? So it's really, really, really wasteful of peoples' time to just drop a link instead of writing the summary.]