Cities in those countries, for the most part, were built around public transit. As a result, navigating by car is difficult and sometimes costly.
Retrofitting public transit into a city designed for cars at that same scale is unbelievably expensive before the costs of changing public opinion are factored in.
I say this as someone who dislikes what suburbs have become and would _love_ to see public transit proliferate throughout the US.
Where I live I’m Columbus I can still see the trolly tracks lining my streets. Buildings were torn down to pave over for parking lots. There is not this extensive retrofit that needs to occur for many American cities, it just needs to be funded.
In my home state of Ohio and in my home town we are spending a billion dollars to build a new ramp and make some other changes to a highway that was built well after the city was founded to make it “easier” for car traffic. We have the money. We are just choosing to spend it only on car infrastructure.
I do agree about public opinion though. But fortunately attitudes amongst millennials and Gen Z seem to be strongly in favor of better transit and more dense development patterns.
The city named after me was also founded (1836) purposefully on undeveloped land and planned from the beginning to become an urban center and territory capital.
Within 3 decades of when Columbus got going, so I would have to say they both have a downtown layout that was originally designed for horses and horse-powered vehicles to begin with. And to accommodate a lot more horses in the future than there were in the area at the time.
Plus think of the gig workers. I can only imagine one of the blocks where people are waiting for an Uber today, is where early residents were once waiting for a Wells-Fargo coach. Once the Wells-Fargo startup was able to leverage being online 24/7, at your local telegraph office ;)
Streetcars came in the late 1800's and I would expect tracks were laid on what could be considered thoroughfares.
There was probably quite a bit of urban character by then and a good chance it was the rapid transit offered by the march of technology, rather than the mass transit aspect that was most appreciated by the riders. Houston already had horse-powered "buses" before this.
Next thing you know, a few decades later there's Model T's and you can really save tonnes of animal feed while helping the environment (at the time) at the same time. They all shared the roads even if it was not all horses and pedestrians as intended any more.
After years of mass-production, it would be like cars are reproducing faster than horses and taking over the place, car owners would have growing influence. Plus if for some reason older mass-transit hardware were deteriorating at a faster rate than the payer could justify reversing, there would be increasing incentive to eventually throw in the towel and let people drive themselves around.
It could happen ;)
Technology marches on but the mainstream beats the most heavily-trodden path.
Thankfully technology continues to march on, and the march of progress will continue to free us from being required to buy cars instead of starting new companies.
Retrofitting public transit into a city designed for cars at that same scale is unbelievably expensive before the costs of changing public opinion are factored in.
I say this as someone who dislikes what suburbs have become and would _love_ to see public transit proliferate throughout the US.