I hate the suburbs so much it’s unreal bro
I’m on mobile but I’ll try to explain because all of this was new to me when I moved here.
Kids who don’t have a license are usually driven around by family members or friends with licenses. A lot of kid activities are also done at school like sports or some after school club (chess, speech club, dnd) so the kids usually just need to be picked up from the activity not dropped off. Usually a parent will do that and drive more than just one of the kids home.
The public transport thing is a mix of car lobbies/industry and America just being big. Point A and point B are just further apart than in smaller countries. Plus less people live there so having a big transport system is probably not economically viable in a lot of places. Though it could be made so and it’s complicated. If you want to know more about transport in America I suggest following @amtrak-official (obv not the real Amtrak).
A lot of regulations are written in blood. We have asbestos and black mold regulations because lots of people died from having black mold and asbestos in their homes.
There are apartment blocks and split houses do exist. Lots of people live in them. It’s just hard to put on tv because you then have all these neighbors you have to make characters for. So it’s easier to just make it single family homes.
The home / shops split can be answered by something called zoning. Zoning is stupidly complicated but one thing zoning is is when a town decide what buildings can go where. They say from Point C to point D has to be all homes and from Point E to Point F is all businesses and shops. There is a bunch of reasons for this. Noise/light pollution is a big one. You don’t want the all night chicken buffet at Strip and Tip to keep the kids awake. Some of it is kid safety, less kids playing in the streets where there are a lot of cars from adults going shopping. Some of it is about racism and segregation. You’ll often hear USians complain about zoning because they can’t build/demolish something on their property. Again it’s more complicated than that but that’s the general idea.
Vegetable gardening takes a lot of time, work, money, and know-how and a lot of people don’t have that and it’s more economically viable to just go buy those veggies at a supermarket. The grass obsession is something I don’t really get either but this episode of the Anthropocene Reviewed gave me some insight.
I would also recommend the podcast 99% Invisible which talks a lot about why things are designed the way they are.
Hope this helped!
You’re right on the money for most of this except for one thing, the US once had a vibrant public transit and rail network and every city in the country had a street car up to the 1940s, but then the Automotive lobby fucking murdered them to increase its profits. Also the size argument kinda sucks but the rest is true.
