- parking mandates that push everything very far apart because parking takes up a lot of space
- zoning restrictions that necessitate distant travel because your home is in a different sector of the city as your place of work, the grocery store, and places of leisure
- the disassembly of public transport systems after the war
- street design that makes it simply dangerous to travel on foot or on a bicycle, and extremely slow, because cars receive priority at all junctions
No parking mandates here. It's rural. Zoning restrictions are everywhere (except Huston where you have oil refineries next to housing), it's almost all residential. No real public transportation to speak of around that time frame. In-town speed limit is 25Mph and there is about 90-95% coverage for sidewalks. I walk daily anywhere from 3 - 5 miles around this town, I don't feel unsafe.
etc. etc.
You and others in this thread are arguing about _where I live_. Don't you find that a tad silly? I haven't even named the town, you have no ability to research it, and the historical docs are all located at the local library and history museum.
This is a great place to be a ped and driving is a requirement. Maybe this is the golden holy land of mixed-use roads, or something.
Feel free to keep arguing how things radically changed just for cars. But they didn't.