As someone not from the US, the idea of non-walkable cities is so alien to me.
Before learning to speak English and reading about the US, I wouldn’t even imagine it’s a thing.
Yeah basically the country was blowing up in birth rates and suburban expansion post WW2 at the same time the car was becoming a big thing and people were able to afford them. So auto companies lobbied and campaigned heavily to make everything very car-centric in the US and now this is the result. It really fucking sucks.
Also doesn’t help that the country is so damn big, but that’s a poor excuse for the lack of proper transit at the metro area level.
I’d say it’s more the influence of the industrialist class and the oil barons tbh.
Like for example, modern medicine is also extremely based on petroleum and it’s extremely dependent on the oil industry. This is a manufactured end caused by the oil barons (you can google “How Big Oil Conquered The World James Corbett” for more details).
But for transport, the early automobile corporations literally bought the streetcars in all the major cities and just dismantled them. They lobbied to stop existing subway projects, and all future projects that came to be for rail etc. For a modern example see Elon Musk and his Hyperloop almost killing California’s high-speed rail project.
All in all, the US has been controlled by old-money, big industrialists and Wall Street since forever. If you want to know why something happens, just follow the money. Everything has happened according to their interests.
It’s frustrating because so many of the older city and town centers actually have decent walkability, even if growth made things a little more complicated. It’s mostly the later development surrounding the cities where the only thought during planning was how the cars get from point A to point B and then park, and now the barriers to fix that situation are enormous. Some of them will update their ordinances to require sidewalk construction during new development, but it’s not all that helpful when you end up with sidewalk stubs connected to nothing. It also doesn’t fix the existing arrangement of buildings and drives that makes everything so hostile to pedestrians.
