"Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway" -Warren Buffet
One thing that the US is lagging behind the rest of the world in is the realm of public transportation. Both at a city and regional level, most of the US requires a car to navigate. As a huge fan of public transportation, I love that I live in a city where I don't need a car but so much of the country doesn't have this luxury.
My theory behind this phenomenon is that US is more spread out than many other countries. The US being a relatively young country did not have the space constraints that many other countries did. Take for example the city of Paris. There have been inhabits for many years in the same location so the city was forced to build up eventually as opposed to being able to continually build out, as there were more cities that had already been erected on the outskirts of the city. Since the cities start to build up, you gain more of a critical mass to the point where public transportation begins to be more convenient or at least as convenient as driving a car. In addition, many of these cities were established well before the invention of cars. Without cars, greater distances were much more difficult to travel which lead city planners to focus on keeping the city denser. While some US cities like Chicago, Boston, and New York experience this phenomenon, many other US cities do not. The combination of plenty of space and growing during the age of the automobile created a more spread out city plan
Take for example Los Angeles. The city was built from nothing with very little around it, which gave it plenty of space to expand outward. Given the city's relatively short history, most of the development of the city happened after the invention of the car meaning that covering bigger distances. As the city expanded, the lack of density made a public transportation system less viable. Not that there are no buses in LA, but the majority of the population does not use it because it is so much less convenient to use that driving. With less people using the system, it makes less sense to expand the system to further places or add extra stops.
Public transportation systems are the classic situation of the chicken and the egg. You need the customers to justify expanding the system, but customers won't ride if there aren't stops that are convenient to them. Eventually some US cities will grow dense enough to warrant large public transportation systems, but until then I'm going to just keep making Hannah drive me around.
