America the Beautiful
This is a picture that I snapped a while back outside of a store that I was visiting to document what a dump most American cities actually are. Don't believe the images published to hype tourism, this is what daily life actually looks like much of the time. The whole country is absolutely covered in cars and infrastructure for cars, like a true shithole.
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Cold climates in the USA are all car-centric except the small downtown areas of the super major cities with a Metro (Philly, Boston, NYC, Chicago, etc). You’ll notice right away that Americans that choose to live outside of those metro bubbles are mostly extremely introverted, lack socialization, and want to be “left alone”. There are of course many people living to be near family that make it feel more varied than that super myopic view. Myself, I moved from a rural area to an urban environment as an adult; I can say that people who live out in these areas just don’t want to come together and make community.
If you look into the history of the USA, it was a bunch of religious fanatics that moved here centuries ago, who eventually spread out when they started disagreeing with the main religious leaders. Regular people didn’t generally move “out west” to build “better” community; they moved to get farther away from their neighbors, the law, elites, minorities, etc. A lot of the reason why you see these communities in the middle of the country is because hubs popped up around manufacturing/railroads/shipping ports. Many, many, of these communities are defunct and dying because the underlying reason for those communities to exist has vanished, sometimes generations ago in the past.
Political leaders in the USA are also simply anti-mass transit because the car lobiests incentivized politicians to be that way. If you complained to your political rep in middle-of-nowhere-town-inserted-here, they’d tell you to move to a place that already has transit.
Related to the above, American cities (read: not metroplexes) simply do not fund public works projects anymore. The funding isn’t there, nor the willpower. If you look at architecture around the USA you’ll find a lot of municipal buildings built to last out of marble/stone/brick popping up until the mid 20th century. I cannot recall a time that I saw better than cheap plywood structures going up anywhere near me. You simply do not see third spaces like parks/playgrounds being built and maintained either. The USA in its current form has essentially stopped growing, and is absolutely at an inflection point.
Tl;dr
Americans are anti-collectivist and do not want to live close to other people. The average American response to “let’s improve our city” is: “move away to [insert major city] that has what you want”.
Where is this taken? What's the weird low brownish structure in the bg?
Without having seen the extent of it for myself, I can only say that such places exist in all the countries I lived in.
So let's hope this comm will give me more material to form an opinion.
But I can say with confidence that carbrained infrastructure must be really really bad in the USA. A lack of sidewalks, bicycle paths, public transport...
And I've seen pics where overhead electricity was used in urban areas, which struck me as extremely outdated.
Not OP but that brownish structure looks like a highway barrier/ramp. I can hear this picture, that's how common this type of parking lot is in US
This is parking lot of a shopping plaza at the junction of US highways 12/18 and 151, and that structure is a highway overpass approach. Highway 12/18 was routed to a bypass, called the Beltline, and punched through the southern extent of the city in the 1950's. It cut a residential street in half at about this location. (The obscured building behind it is located on that street.) In the 2010's the state Department of Transportation grade-separated the junction, hence the sloped approach.
The contemporary ads from the '50s tried to make this place look modern and glamorous, and maybe it was. We used to love coming here as kids, because it hosted a Toys R Us store. Now, the big store is a Home Depot, and the place looks even more sad and run down.
Through the magic of induced demand, the highway expansion predictably led to worse traffic congestion. There's no room to expand it more, so WisDOT plans to destroy another strip mall across 151 (out of frame to the right, no great loss), and also half a dozen more small businesses, maybe 20-30 houses, and a city park to build a free-flowing interchange. What's left of the neighborhood will be next to a freeway sound barrier, instead of a quiet, tree-lined street. (A bit to the west, some friends of mine used to have a view of the sunset from their back yard; now they have a concrete wall.) The Wisconsin legislature outlawed using eminent domain to acquire land for bicycle and pedestrian facilities, but by god, we're still happy to throw people out of their homes for cars. Freedom!
In many respects, too, we're lucky. The planners had the foresight to route the highways around the edge of the city, instead of punching right through its heart, as they did in so many other cities. (They did seize and bulldoze the Italian/Black neighborhood by other means, so don't fret. Racism finds a way.) On the back side of this shopping plaza was an Illinois Central rail line that went right downtown. There was a proposal to replace it with another highway, to provide a high-speed connection into the heart of the city for drivers. It's now a fairly nice bike path, actually.
Further, the city does have some genuinely nice spots, mostly in the old, pre-auto core, around the university campus. Which is weird, because we have examples of what's beautiful (for the wealthy people who can afford to live there), and then choose to build this kind of dreck just about everywhere else.
Thanks for the breakdown! Took me a bit of sleuthing, but route 151 crossing route 12 is unambiguous: you live in Madison, WI, and the picture was likely taken around one of the Verona-something roads.
Wait, is the latter something that is still done? As in, newly planned highway right through the city? Or no, you're talking about the 50s.
It's between two lakes, that can't be too bad. I also live in a village between two lakes - nothing all that exceptional in Southern Finland.