1979 advertisement for London transit showing how the city would look if built by American planners.

30 comments
  1. since this keeps being reposted, then I will repost this excellent doco on why this is the case, and excellent transport systems wound up in junk pile set on fire.

    [Taken For A ride](https://youtu.be/p-I8GDklsN4)

    side note.. I amsure the auto industry in Austrlia is part of the reason we ahve virtualyl no decent naiton ral/frieght systems and rely on tucks so heavily. Well that suck when a china-manufactured fluid is withheld!!!

    light rail and national rail networks is what we need. Our cityscapes are the consequence of corporate greed and political corruption

  2. And they are not really off with this. A lot of nice American city centres were dozered and overbuilt for cars.

  3. I commuted on the A13 into the city most days back in 2012. Doesn’t look much different to this photo.

  4. With Ubers discount last year it was cheaper for me to use uber to get to central than it was public transport.

  5. I live in a modest city (Denver). And even with only about 3 million people in the whole metro area (10 counties, including some far flung ones), we have a section of highway called “the Mousetrap” because of how ridiculous it is.

    We also have decent regional rail at least.

  6. Fun fact: Los Angeles is actually building a ton of rail including a subway. It has been slow going and very expensive because they waited so long but progress is being made. It’s also been quite neat for paleontologists because they keep finding large fossils.

  7. One thing that struck me in the US was the lack of footpaths. In the city I lived, you couldn’t walk from one side to the other on footpaths. Just highways.

  8. Yep. And yet it costs £4500+/year to get into London from Kent, depending on where you are.

    If I want to go to, say, Exeter from Kent, it’s £252 for two adults. I can take a bus that’s only £77 for two and takes virtually the same amount of time. I used to be able to fly from London City but since FlyBe went bust…

    UK rail sucks.

  9. That’s how Paris was supposed to look by the end of the 70s.
    Luckily, the next government put an end to that and also worked on transit instead. Not all cities were so lucky.

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