Reddit reviews Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Inside Technology)

I will recommend my favorite nonfiction book, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter Norton. It documents the period between WWI and the Great Depression when streets were converted from public spaces to car exclusive spaces from the perspectives of justice, order, and efficiency. It’s a fascinating history of how cities largely surrendered their greatest asset to the automotive lobby.

The political and marketing influence of the car industry played a huge part, but it's as much a cultural and urban planning thing as it is industry driven. Entire cities are built around catering to people in cars... there are vast swathes of strip malls and supercenters where there aren't even sidewalks but there are huge multi-story parking garages. Cities are zoned to have most of the population separated from areas where they participate in commerce... our entire life has become decentralized and auto-focused. Public railways serve a very small niche when both endpoints are, by design, far-removed from anything you'd want to explore. By contrast, in places in Europe and Asia, you get off the train and onto the bus or subway, and the bus stop or subway station is smack dab in the middle of shopping and business, and business is much more local.

A couple interesting books on this topic are Fighting Traffic (Peter Norton), Geography of Nowhere (James Kunstler) and Asphalt Nation (Jane Holtz Kay), worth a read if you're really interested in the topic.