Richard A Fay
2009-06-13 09:10:16
A key question is : When was the city built ?
Eastern cities, and especially northeastern cities, were first laid out in the 18th and 19th centuries, before the deelopment of the automobile, and it shows. Major population and commercial areas were built close together, because they had to be. This is why many people in NYC, for example, don’t drive – they don’t need to, unless they’re leaving the city.
Western cities were founded in earlier centuries but developed mostly in the 20th; some of them weren’t much more than small towns until after WWII. Their developers assumed that people would have and use automobiles to get around, and they factored that assumption into city planning.
