Originally posted by Jon`C:
If individualism is a factor, it's nevertheless insignificant compared to the well understood efforts of car, oil, tire companies, and housing developers, to make modern American society as car centric (and therefore profitable) as possible.
I don't think profits have anything to do with it. The US got pretty well committed to roads when we built the interstate highway system back in the 1950's when no one was really thinking about the issues with oil. The interstate made it possible to commute further to work, allowing greater numbers of the newly exploding middle class to purchase homes in suburbs rather than rent small apartments in cities. By the time the oil crisis hit in the 1970s, we'd invested a generation of massive economic growth into infrastructure that wasn't easily adaptable to any other form of transportation. Mass automobile traffic massively constricts the potential growth of our largest cities, but at this point, we'd pretty much have to rebuild everything from the ground up to change it. We're too spread out for commuter trains to work, and getting right of way to build them at this point is a nightmare. Most of our cities aren't designed to be walk-able, and you can't fix that either, because housing, places of work and stores are usually highly homogeneous and highly separated. Often, even if a place is within walking distance, it's just about impossible to get across the roads in order to get there.