It really fucking sucks that the auto industry lobbied the US government so goddamn hard in the 30’s - 70’s and got so much of this country built on car centric infrastructure while also systemically dismantling countless forms of public transit nationwide too. Most major cities and metropolitan areas used to have a pretty comprehensive streetcar system, yet where are they now? That’s right, manufacturers like GM bought majority stakes in those companies and then had their infrastructure dismantled all in the name of “progress.”
As far as I’m aware, the only city in the western world that truly kept its pre-automobile streetcar network was Melbourne, Australia. A result is it today has the largest tram network of any city in the world.
It hurts my soul to imagine how basically every city in North America had similar networks, but they were almost completely annihilated, save for small fragments in a small handful of cities.
Technically Australia is east of the international date line so it’s not even really the western world.
Most of the people there are white so it counts as Western
Yes, but context matters. Nobody is taking a train up the street to get groceries. And using a car (or a huge ass truck) for that is often overkill.
Bikes FTW!
![[image] Cars are an incredibly inefficient way to move people](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a55ce0e0-9740-4207-9d5f-64bc68231a3d.jpeg){kind=link}