Reply #29: In short: [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. Deliberate destruction by the auto companies. The Twin Cities used to have a superb street car system that went everywhere, even quite far into the suburbs. That was all gone after 1954.

2. The Interstate Highway System, which was originally designed to be for intercity travel only, was incorporated into urban traffic plans, leading to the latticework of freeways that exists in most American cities.

3. Real estate agents consciously used racism ("The blacks are coming!") to get white people to sell their urban houses and move into new suburbs.

4. Snobbery. The bus is "the loser cruiser," and in most cities, transit is grudgingly supported as being necessary for all those poor people to get to their minimum wage jobs.

5. Ignorance. Most Americans have never lived in or even seen a place with good public transit, except for possibly TV dramas about murders in the NY subway.

Some people may indeed "love" their cars, in the sense that they get almost orgasmic about a new Lexus or something. However, an awful lot see their cars only as necessary evils and are just as happy to get rid of them.

In Portland, where the public transit is really good by U.S. standards (mediocre by world standards), the number of people who have given up their cars is much higher than the national average. I was one of them for ten years, and I was surprised at how many other people I met who had made the same decision.

Here in Minneapolis, however, #3 and #4 prevail, and even I, who managed to live car-free for a decade, am forced to drive about half the time.

It's the greatest disadvantage of the Twin Cities.