Reddit reviews The Way Things Never Were: The Truth About the "Good Old Days"

I'll give some historical context.

After WWII all our factories were still at full capacity and switched back to making personal cars, and all these returning vets on the GI bill want to college or back to good factory jobs and started buying homes and settling down.


Now the popular notion at the time was that city life was dying. Why get at best a row house or apartment in New york or philadelphia when you can build or buy a crafstmen house for the same price out in the suburbs. Also as civil rights was coming about it was convenient to cede the inner city to African Americans and poor and use things like loan restrictions to zone and price them out of the nice crime free suburbs.


So given the popular notion that the city and urban life was dying. Most city planning resources when into road construction so everyone could live out in the surburbs and take the new highways to their jobs. Entire cities were built up around this concept. In order to pay for this essentially halted Urban public works like subways and light rail. Why would you want to go on a stuffy subway with negroes when you can commute in your cadillac with radio and select-a-matic transmission?


So the results are profound and easy to verify. Any city that become major and modern after world war II has terrible public transportation: Examples include LA, Houston, Denver, Portland. Any city that was major before WWII tends to have still strong public transportation like Chicago, New york, Boston, D.C.


We basically decided as a nation that surburban life was awesome and gave up on public transportation. We even went steps further in places like LA where they actively bought out trolley lines just to close them down and pave over the tracks. Also the very way we designed our suburbs actively discourage pedestrainism and many live in places that "have no where to walk to". I'm ashamed to say that even my hometown Ann Arbor fell into that spiral and built many planned developments that have no feasible options of walking or biking to get to any retail area.


TLDR: city planners after WWII decided everyone (who was white) should live in suburbs and stopped funding public transportation.

Edit: for those who don't believe me this was covered by sociologists in the way things never were http://www.amazon.com/The-Way-Things-Never-Were/dp/0595348084

and lies my teacher told me http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457056096&sr=1-1&keywords=lies+my+teacher+told+me both fascinating reads

The Way Things Never Were: The Truth About the "Good Old Days" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0595348084/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_emfPAbX7ZSNV9