A common serious mistake is to associate the origin of suburbia with the private car. The tram (streetcar) created suburbia.
By the outbreak of the First World War, electric power had replaced the horse for haulage, eliminating (local) pollution and increasing both speed and capacity. One could live ten miles out of the big ugly city, yet keep your commute reliably under thirty minutes.
A second mistake is condemn suburbia out of hand. Whether we like it or not, people value privacy, and there’s little of that within a densely populated town or city.
Another problem of urban life, which political correctness denies recognition of nowadays, is crime and antisocial behaviour. The Victorians always feared the underclasses and counted them carefully. They believed around 15% of the population were irrevocably irresponsible (e.g. regularly getting drunk), and about 5% were outright criminal. Who can blame decent folk for choosing to live elsewhere?
Finally, there is access to open countryside, and perhaps a private garden – of particular value when raising children.
Suburbia does not equal sprawl.
Sprawl is characterized by 1) a continuum of housing, unpunctuated by any focus, and 2) access predicated on the private car, with the result that no shared amenity (of any significance) is viable, including high-capacity shared transport, and congestion is inevitable.
A light-rail (transit) station is a focus, and affords an opportunity to get to know your neighbours. Development is then limited by the need to walk (or cycle) there in reasonable time, retaining a boundary around each community. Rail companies were known to invest in new build themselves, which required pleasant and effective transport to see a return.
The arrival of the car threatened the viability of rail transport (see my page “road versus rail”) but it required both conspiracy and incompetence to destroy it. While we have plenty of both this side of the ‘pond’, US big business tends to put us in the shade for sheer audacity.
The Pacific Electric Company essentially built Los Angeles, before it was busted by General Motors, which in 1932 formed United Cities Mobile Transit to take over ‘streetcar’ lines and convert them to bus companies. (It owned Atlantic Greyhound Lines, and made buses.) In 1936, GM joined with Firestone Tire and Rubber and Standard Oil to form National City Lines, spinning off Pacific City Lines (1938) and American City Lines (1943) to buy up and dismantle electric streetcar systems in more than twenty cities, including Los Angeles. By 1950, more than a hundred lines had been converted to bus.
As they well knew, buses are not popular – when a rail service closed in Britain in the 1960s, the replacement bus was used by only around one in five of those who formerly used the line. (See my page on the bus for further comment.) With the railway gone, all those who could find the money bought a car.
What has changed since then is primarily congestion, the price of fuel (see my earlier post), and both concern and regulation with regard to the environment, both local and global.
Electric propulsion is far more appealing when you can connect the vehicle to a stationary power supply than it is when you have to carry that supply with you (in a battery or fuel cell). It’s much cheaper, and you can travel as far as you like (the full breadth of France, for example).
Britain and America are waking up to the fact that they are thirty years behind continental western Europe, not just with main line heavy rail, but with light rail too. The French, who co-led the high-speed rail revolution with their Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV), have shown us how to deliver power to a tram without an ugly overhead cable or a live exposed third rail.
We have come full circle. The tram (streetcar) is on the way back.