Did we make a cultural mistake popularizing the car?

[Ravenshire]

The automobile absolutely made getting places so much easier that it would be impossible for it not to be popular. The thing to remember is that some areas (in fact vast tracts of land) do not have any sort of infrastructure for personal transportation beyond having a car or truck and some federally provided road available.  You live in NY City, right? Cabs are common, and you have the subway. Contrast that with many places on the west coast, where MAYBE a bus or some such can get you where you want to go. When I was in the US Navy, I went home to get my car so that I could have a better ability to get around (shore duty). I left about 5 PM on Friday. I took buses and cabs and finally had a family member pick me up about 20 miles from home at 2 AM. I should have just asked that family member to drive to Long Beach and get me, and go back home. That would have taken 3 hours, tops. It was only 55 miles!

If you are addressing the vehicle "culture", well I'll bet you money that there is probably a newspaper report somewhere detailing how two young bravos were racing their parents' buckboards and had an accident.

Yeah but you're using problems that exist as a result of the popularization of car usage that wouldn't otherwise exist if, for the last 100+ years, we prioritized different, more accessible means of transportation.

This is really more of a theoretical question that we can't really do much about today. Hence the History section.

For roughly 2/3 (geographically) of the country, mass transit could not be made economically viable. For example, in Colorado, roughly one half of the population is concentrated in the Denver Metro area, 155 sq. miles. That leaves the other 2.8 million spread out over 104,030 sq. miles. When you consider Wyoming, it becomes even more striking. Denver (not the entire metro, just Denver proper) has more people than the whole state. The population densities outside of major metro areas simply won't support mass transit except for long distance trips. and the population densities drop drastically (with California being the obvious exception) as you move west from the Mississippi.The evolution of the car culture here in the sates was geographically driven. Of course, it didn't help that Henry Ford made the automobile affordable to the masses at the same time.