[zachkatz]

For cars, it’s actually even more cartoonish than that. Read The Power Broker; auto-centric urban planning is basically entirely the result of Robert Moses’ insane power and influence (in the same way that the reason everyone has smartphones is basically solely because of Steve Jobs).

[pfannkuchen]

This is exactly what I’m talking about. That is too cartoonish to be real. I’m not denying that whichever person lobbied or propagandized in whatever way, but it is extremely unlikely to have been the main cause.

A more plausible explanation is that there is an emergent phenomenon where the use of cars drastically reduced the degree of coordination required to develop usable residential property. People are generally lazy when they can be, and so future developers took the easy route of developing land without much regard for things like walkability, because they no longer strictly had to. Prior to cars, if a developer did this, they would not have sold the property. Cars dissolved a natural constraint on property development.

[zachkatz]

I know it seems too cartoonish to be real, but if you read about Robert Moses, you’ll see that it is shockingly true. He didn’t just lobby and propogandize; he had absolute power over all public works projects in NYC. That’s not a typo or an exaggeration—absolute power, outside of the established system of checks and balances. And he genuinely loved cars, and hated public transit, so his projects were all designed as such. Since his reign, no one has had nearly as much power (some say he was as powerful as Gengis Khan), so it’s been very difficult to reverse the impact of his decisions.

Robert Moses was so influential in reshaping the urban fabric of the US to prioritize cars that everything else is basically a footnote.