[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by electricron

When passenger railroads and interurbans were the fastest way to travel from point A to point B in a city, they could compete with everything else. But as streets and highways were paved, and as automobiles and buses got more powerful and faster, the railroads, interurbans, and streetcars could no longer compete.
Sure, paving streets and highways was a government subsidy in favor of automobiles and buses, but do you really believe cities and states were never going to pave them? How many bike and jogging pathways in cities today remain dirt and gravel paths vs paved?
And while cities were paving the streets, they were also burying other utilities at the same time under or upright alongside them. So more was being done for the betterment of society besides just paving the streets.

I'm not referring to street and highways being paved. Are you actually being serious here?That was largely done prior to the era of post-war mass sub-urbanization. I'm referring to the extreme capacity expansion and speed increases afforded by things like the mass construction of multi-lane limited-access expressways and significantly wider multi-lane surface thoroughfares.