According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, approximately one-third of the nation’s residents don’t have driver’s licenses. In her 2024 book “When Driving is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency,” disability advocate Anna Zivarts argues that not only is America’s car-centric infrastructure harmful to the climate, it also fails to meet the everyday needs of many Americans.
because we hate poor people
And car makers sucessfully managed to lobby for it in the last 100 years.
Even the Netherlands was turned into a car centric country after WW2, it’s just that people fought back against car centric design starting in the 1970s because they realised how bad it is for everyone.
The USA helped rebuild a lot of countries after WWII through the Marshall Plan, which is probably partly why so many ended up with car-centric infrastructure.