alt Hacker NewsIts laughable to think the cities of America in 2025 still look the same and function the same as the cities of America in 1925. "Cities" weren't nearly as sparsely populated and highly zoned as many suburbs are these days. You didn't have neighborhoods with seemingly fractal patterns of roads ending in cul-de-sacs the size of several city blocks with only a couple entrances and exits like what seems to be common these days. The average American urban household in 1920 didn't live on a quarter acre lot multiple miles away from the nearest food source. So yeah, there were streetcar suburbs as well as the denser city apartments and rowhouses, they were largely grid patterns with a major boulevard. They didn't sprawl anywhere near as far. They weren't nearly as insulated.
> Every city, including tiny ones, had public transport
I can point to dozens of cities around me that never had actual public transportation throughout their entire history, and that's just a small part that I happen to know off-hand. Few places actually had any kind of real public transit.
Rural communities often still had an expectation of some amount of private transportation accessible. What, are you really tiling the soil by hand? No, you've got horses.
Look, I'm not saying public transportation can't happen in the US today. Obviously it can. There are lots of places where it does today. There are even more places that could have it tomorrow if the voters decided to do so. There are also lots of places that require quite a bit of urban redesign to actually make transit make sense for those communities.
I'll give you an example. I used to know someone who worked in Dallas, around I-635 and US-75[0]. They lived someplace like this. [1] How does public transit serve this person effectively? How would you have a bus service with both decent ridership and good service times in a town like Forney here, while not just having the bus snake through the mazes of neighborhoods? How do you convince someone to ride the bus to work when its probably going to have poor service intervals, require multiple changes, and ultimately likely to take considerably more time than the average day in the car?
Then copy and paste that same issue hundreds of times over. How does transit make sense in Seis Lagos or the rest of Lucas for that matter? [2] These people likely work in West Plano or Dallas. How do you convince them to take the bus?
[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/ETD6a9XgTFoZCYR78