It is interesting, as a thought experiment, to consider what the United States might have looked like if we had followed a different course of development, one in which the cities are cities and the countryside is countryside and there isn’t very much sprawl between them – something like what might have happened if we had, among other things, continued to rely largely on our perfectly serviceable railroad network rather than building a subsidized competitor to it in the form of the interstate-highway system. Not that that was ever going to happen: You tell a car where to go, but a train tells you where you are going. That’s why progressives love trains — they fit perfectly into the progressive conception of the world as a vast Erector Set to be tinkered with by social engineers until utopia has been built. Americans are culturally (if not always politically) far too libertarian for that to have been the way things shook out in the 1950s and thereafter.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
