There was a time when we had all of those things that you mention. But cars quite clearly won; the others lost.
Towns and cities then continued to grow. They did this in car-centric ways because that fit the transportation style of the time.
And now, it is stuck this way.
Unless this is sarcasm, isn't it kind of strange to decide that history just happened to end in this moment?
We tore out the light passenger rail lines that once quite commonly connected cities and towns together, and to points within those places. These cities once grew around (and because of) these features, but now it is like like they never even existed.
We can't just put them back where they used to be. The landscape has changed.
In order to do something different, we'd need to have new routes that are built through cities that have been designed for cars for a very long time. That's a quagmire of nightmarish proportions.
Every now and then, someone makes some noise about changing it somewhere -- and almost every single time, it goes nowhere. Where new light rail does get built in a place that had none, the ridership tends to be limited because...sheesh: Folks with jobs and places to go already have cars to use, so they keep using them.
So we have cars, because we need cars. And since we need cars, we might as well use them -- which reinforces the issues. Call it what you will (I'm a fan of "self-perpetuating fallacy"), but that's what we've got.
And yes: It is stuck this way. It'd be fantastic if it weren't this way, but we don't have an undo button.
At this point, we're ~4 score and 7 years too late to preserve what we once had.
A lot of old train right of ways still pretty much exist. For many areas it often isn't too outlandish for those lines to be brought back, if there was a will to do so.
I don't feel like pinning down my location in public, but it is sufficient to say that I'm very familiar with a place in Ohio that was once a booming with every kind of rail.
I can walk around and see where things used to be, and sometimes it's very clear.
But mostly, it seems like it has been transformed. Whereas people used to build around the paths of the rails, they've now built atop of where they used to be. It was once a straight shot with an occasional (and very deliberate) bend, but now there's a house and a factory and a substation in the path.
Or, Columbus Ohio again. :) That place used to have a very diverse passenger rail network, with a somewhat grand Union Station right in the middle where it counts. Rail was such a thriving and important thing that at one point they raised the level of the main drag, High Street, to help reduce conflicts between trains, pedestrians, and the various horsemobiles. For some of the old buildings that still remain, what was once the first floor is now the basement.
And in what seems like something that real libertarians would dream about, these railways were built privately and were self-sustaining.
Things changed.
In ~1979, they finally tore down the old Union Station just weeks before it was likely to be ruled a protected historic site and then put a very immobile convention center in its place instead.
Columbus has been expanding pretty rapidly (by Ohio norms) for a couple of decades now. The old rail paths are hard to find at all while walking around or in aerial shots, never existed in newer neighborhoods, and whatever was there has been further decimated by the batshit highway network that is in a continuous process of changing.
It's possible that it could all come back again, but the cost would be intense beyond imagination.
And even if it did come back again, who would ride the things, anyway? They've already got busses that they hate. Folks would still have cars, and they'd still drive them. I guess people might eventually be able to adjust to using trains to get places, if that became practical for them, but I'd also guess that this transition would take multiple generations to really take effect.
Also, just because things are one way today, doesn’t mean they can’t be a different way tomorrow. It’s all a what we we make of it and decide to fight for
Cars won _and_ and it wasn't a fair fight.
This was almost certainly not an isolated incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...