It's pretty much impossible to leave this relationship unless you live in one of the larger US cities. If you live in a suburb, rural area, or city that's not in the top 10-15 in terms of size there's literally no other option that exists or that could easily exist.
And for a few things it IS better. But there are a whole lotta costs, too, with the top 3 being being actual financial cost, grinding on the faces of the poor, and making us fat.
If U.S. launched its missiles while all these people just came home from jobs say at 11pm ET/8pm PT, and people in the Soviet Union were on the way or at their factory jobs during Moscow morning on Siberia mid-day, it would be a slaughter for the Soviet Union and an easy win for the U.S.
Sounds like a completely made-up justification after the fact.
Surely someone would have raised the point that the soviet union could just launch it's missiles in the middle of the work day.
Also, Moscow is tremendously sprawled out.
It also explains the "white flight" of the time. What we now call the "inner city" was allowed to remain black and brown with the expectation that the country would be alright if they were incinerated while the more -valuable- people had been relocated to the suburbs.
The Soviets would be able to get their retaliatory body count while eliminating people that the US didn't really value in the first place.
Given that sprawl is not a new phenomenon but obesity is I don't see how you can claim this is responsible for making us fat.
Remember, we're talking about relative density within a metro area, not how close each metro area is to the others. If you look at cities that were more or less fully developed prior to WW2, like Boston, you find that they're more compact, as opposed to, say, LA or Phoenix.
That said, I don't think it's the only thing making us fat. But I do think it's one contributing factor.
Cars are more useful when people need to go to random places at indeterminate times.
The difference is networks of buses and trains that the countries and cities invested in over decades.
America went in another direction, and looks no closer to changing it's mind.
Suburbs now spread for miles around towns and even former villages, for ten or twenty miles around major cities.
And small towns and villages lost their railways and stations 40 to 80 years ago.
New developments havebeen getting more sprawl in China though, as cars have become more popular.
New York, sure. Everyone's heard of their subway.
The first time I'd ever heard of BART was when I visited briefly, and in doing so I learnt 2 things:
1) BART is pretty bad: noisy and a small network 2) Talking to people during my short stay made it pretty clear San-Fran and the bay area was considered 99% car territory, and traffic/congestion/commuting around SF was a significant problem commensurate with that fact.
Edit: understand this is a genuine question asked as a foreigner who has only formed an impression from short visits.
I couldn't see myself ever wanting to take that mode of transportation.
