American Transportation

The 250th anniversary celebration of the US seems like as good a time as any to think about how the US stacks up globally in terms of this blog's focus of urbanism and transportation.To be clear, by "globally" I mean here against other Westernized, industrialized countries. If we want to claim to be the wealthiest, best, most shining-city-on-a-hill country in the world, we should be comparing ourselves to people who are in similar circumstances and do urbanism in a model that's based on similar wealth and a similarish social organization. I am not here to debate the value of a traditional Micronesian village as an urbanist space or to try to distinguish between the various ways that societies have organized themselves and their spaces across time and space and declare one or the other superior. Rather, I'm suggesting that there are certain standards that we look for in Western societies, of which the US is one, in their social, geopolitical, and spatial organization, and then looking…