Those are suburbs of Top 20 metros. Arlington has commuter rail to DC, I've ridden it before. San Bruno is on the BART subway.
You are living in a fictional world.
I... am focused on the dynamics of the bottom 80 cities of the top American 100.
A lot of American metros are north of a million people, and if they were built like European cities most of them would have subway systems with that level of population (Like Hamburg in Germany). But because of the sprawl, those bottom 80 for the most part can't even manage street level light rail, because there are simply no viable routes. They're not dense enough.
This is a valid criticism of American city design that they are being built in such a way that makes it difficult for them to naturally grow the core, because there was no provision for the areas AROUND the core to increase in traffic density. You CANNOT infinitely widen interstates. It doesn't work.
You literally said that inner suburbs die out and it is impossible to build transit there.
YOU HAVE THE CAUSATION ORDER REVERSED.
WHERE IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO BUILD TRANSIT... the inner suburbs will die.
In cities that are ABLE to build the transit by force of will and ruthless use of eminent domain, the suburbs will densify, consistent with the European/Asian city style.
Well, the most perfect example is Kansas City. But basically all the cities from Minnesota to Texas show degrees of it.
Here's the deal:
Immediately post war, there were only a handful of metropoli in the US. San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. That was it, all the rest of the metros started about on an even footing of less than 100k people.
Why did Denver and Atlanta become top 20's? There's no particularly obvious geographic reason why those two cities would experience the explosive post war growth they did.
The reason is simple: for their own reasons, they resisted the attempts to kill their mass transit systems In Denver, the Denver Tramway Company didn't die. In Atlanta, the tramways WERE killed but the city realized how badly it fucked up and restored commuter rail in 1975, early enough to avoid entrenching the damage in the 80's suburb wave (the 70's were generally a low point in housing building across the country for obvious economic reasons).
Cities that went into the 80's wave of suburbs without commuter rail were committed to the path of roads and highways only. When you get into the 80's the damage started to manifest. The Quad Cities, St Louis, Dallas, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, all ran into problems with their "big highway" strategies. They couldn't grow upwards so they grew outwards, and stagnated as they had to sink more and more money into widening existing roads.
America became a tale of two city archetypes. The big cities that suffered in the 80's because they had bad crime, and the rest of the cities that suffered because their CBDs died as the greatest generation retired, industries offshored, and interstate widening projects drained money that otherwise might have been spent to make those cities more appealing to the boomer generation that congregated in the top 20's.
Now... I'll give you a prediction:
I believe, with 100% conviction, that not a single new subway will be built in America for a century. Existing systems will expand, but no city that doesn't have one today will succeed in building one in the 21st century. The population density simply isn't there and the costs are too great.
We will have metros of five million plus people, with no subways. Because they're too damn spread out.
Those are suburbs of Top 20 metros. Arlington has commuter rail to DC, I've ridden it before. San Bruno is on the BART subway.
I... am focused on the dynamics of the bottom 80 cities of the top American 100.
A lot of American metros are north of a million people, and if they were built like European cities most of them would have subway systems with that level of population (Like Hamburg in Germany). But because of the sprawl, those bottom 80 for the most part can't even manage street level light rail, because there are simply no viable routes. They're not dense enough.
This is a valid criticism of American city design that they are being built in such a way that makes it difficult for them to naturally grow the core, because there was no provision for the areas AROUND the core to increase in traffic density. You CANNOT infinitely widen interstates. It doesn't work.
YOU HAVE THE CAUSATION ORDER REVERSED.
WHERE IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO BUILD TRANSIT... the inner suburbs will die.
In cities that are ABLE to build the transit by force of will and ruthless use of eminent domain, the suburbs will densify, consistent with the European/Asian city style.
Stagnated.
Well, the most perfect example is Kansas City. But basically all the cities from Minnesota to Texas show degrees of it.
Here's the deal:
Immediately post war, there were only a handful of metropoli in the US. San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. That was it, all the rest of the metros started about on an even footing of less than 100k people.
Why did Denver and Atlanta become top 20's? There's no particularly obvious geographic reason why those two cities would experience the explosive post war growth they did.
The reason is simple: for their own reasons, they resisted the attempts to kill their mass transit systems In Denver, the Denver Tramway Company didn't die. In Atlanta, the tramways WERE killed but the city realized how badly it fucked up and restored commuter rail in 1975, early enough to avoid entrenching the damage in the 80's suburb wave (the 70's were generally a low point in housing building across the country for obvious economic reasons).
Cities that went into the 80's wave of suburbs without commuter rail were committed to the path of roads and highways only. When you get into the 80's the damage started to manifest. The Quad Cities, St Louis, Dallas, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, all ran into problems with their "big highway" strategies. They couldn't grow upwards so they grew outwards, and stagnated as they had to sink more and more money into widening existing roads.
America became a tale of two city archetypes. The big cities that suffered in the 80's because they had bad crime, and the rest of the cities that suffered because their CBDs died as the greatest generation retired, industries offshored, and interstate widening projects drained money that otherwise might have been spent to make those cities more appealing to the boomer generation that congregated in the top 20's.
Now... I'll give you a prediction:
I believe, with 100% conviction, that not a single new subway will be built in America for a century. Existing systems will expand, but no city that doesn't have one today will succeed in building one in the 21st century. The population density simply isn't there and the costs are too great.
We will have metros of five million plus people, with no subways. Because they're too damn spread out.