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My only observation is that I have been told many times by smug Europeans and Australians, on this forum and many others, that they have found a way to "true multiculturalism" and "peaceful cohabitation" that continues to elude American society, with our polite segregation and constant miasma of racial tension. To which I have always pointed out that the only reason they are able to believe this nonsense is that their societies are still less diverse than ours, with national populations that are still, for the moment, supermajority white. They will learn better, one way or another.
The future of European cities won't be pretty if what happened to the U.S. in the 1960s is any indication.
Lately, I've developed a grim fascination with the 1950/2024 comparison shots of various American cities, both large and small. In 1950 they were bustling centers of activity, with well-dressed, thin, professional people scurrying to and fro. In 2024, they are just like an intersection with giant parking lots and maybe a payday loans store.
Ignorant Redditors like to blame car culture for the collapse of American cities, but cars merely enabled people to escape the crime and urban decay. The process of ceding productive areas to the least productive citizens is now beginning in earnest in Europe as well, although in this case the cities are rotting from the edges inwards.
Like a receding glacier, the genteel areas of a city like Paris get smaller and smaller. Soon, the scowling male faces of the banlieue will reach the heart of the city and the City of Love will become the city of trying not to get sexually assaulted as you wander down the once-thriving boulevards.
American cities were bulldozed for cars in the 50s. American cities looked like European cities: https://i.redd.it/mn45jsmhowna1.jpg https://www.vox.com/2015/5/14/8605917/highways-interstate-cities-history
Never forget what they took from you.
Yes. Perhaps my comment implied that whites were chased out of cities starting only in the 1960s. In reality, the process started much earlier.
Between 1950 and 1960, the black population of Detroit increased by nearly 60% while the white population fell by nearly 25%. But as early as 1920, mass immigration from the south was changing the character of the city.
The race riots of the 1960s are crystalized in our memory, but Detroit and other northern cities were already experiencing population replacement decades before, long before the first interstate was built.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of car culture, but it wasn't the cause of the decline in American cities. It was black crime.
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I still don't understand why having highways that go to the places worth going to is bad. I guess some people hate driving, but once we get self-driving cars this will be seen as obviously correct right?
IMO, the money spent on highways and other car-related infrastructure since 1920 should have been spent on maintaining and increasing urban public transit and passenger rail service (anyone remember interurbans? Like streetcars, but they traveled between towns rather than within a city).
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Highways are cool! But they demolished beautiful buildings downtown instead of building highways in less dense areas.
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Anti-car activists have a mental model of an ideal world with a level of density they believe is incompatible with typical roads, and often think even moderately car-traversable areas are Literally Causes Of Death.
I'm... not a fan, and to be blunt their underlying claims range from merely misleading to outright malicious lies, but they're a pretty common viewpoint.
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A large part of why ‘the places worth going to’ are worth going to is that there isn’t a highway going through them!
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