Ever since ditching car culture and joining the urbanist cause (on the internet at least but that has to change), I’ve noticed that some countries always top the list when it comes to good urbanism. The first and most oblivious one tends to be The Netherlands but Germany and Japan also come pretty close. But that’s strange considering that both countries have huge car industries. Germany is (arguably) the birthplace of the car (Benz Patent-Motorwagen) and is home to Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Japan is home to Toyota, Honda, Nissan and among others. How is it that these countries have been able to keep the auto lobby at bay and continue investing in their infrastructure?
So you’re focused on withstanding road brain.
After WW2 everyone was broke. In Germany there was no money to build new massive freeway projects. No one had money to buy cars anyway. You can watch the movie “Judgment at Nuremberg”, it’s fiction but one thing that stuck out to me was people riding bicycles. They also had a lot of things to focus on. It took a long time to get things back on track.
Japan also had no money, though they did try the car thing for a while afaik. There were many problems. First was there was not much room for the cars and car parks. Land is tight there. Second was there was no massive domestic gasoline production. I think they finally realized that if everyone drove like Americans, that they would be sending a ton of money outside the country for oil.
As for how Japan became home to massive car companies. First the lack of resources led to the Japanese car companies making a new production technique called Just It Time manufacturing. Instead of lots of inventory of parts to assemble, they timed everything to arrive just in time. Sometimes called lean manufacturing. It may not sound like much but it leads to much cheaper production. And they committed to high quality with “Andon” which was a pull cord workers could pull to stop the line and call management over to quality or production issues. They really got the manufacturing process down because of necessity. Finally they really needed things to export, cars were one of them. Cars are high value and relatively easy to export.
The German domestic market was still big enough on its own to keep their companies aloft. I’m not sure how those expanded.
I don’t think this is the cause of it though: No money for buying cars. My guess is, it’s because there were more alternatives such as trains and public trams and cities are more densely build out of history.
Despite the US, Germany(& Europe) and Japan had a huge railway network spanning all cities and even smaller cities. The area I lived in Germany had the first railway 1840. Japan 1872. US 1827. However, if you look into the network expansion the US never reached the density and complexity of both others due to it’s sheer size.
With the advent of trains all bigger European and Japanese cities began to build public tram systems. To such an extent that it spans most of the citied nowadays. This is still not the state in US. One can literally see the difference when visiting US, German, and Japanese cities todays.
Moreover, US hadn’t cities that grow organically throughout the centuries. And there is much space available. No dense historic city centers, no growing city rings. E.g. you can easily cross an one million city such as Cologne by bike in 1-1,5 hour. (And adding traffic jams and parking lot search time, bike is more efficient and easy)
Interactive map railway network Germany: https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/bahn-schienennetz-deutschland-1835-bis-heute/
Video railway network Japan https://jref.com/threads/video-150-years-of-japan-railway-network.504981/
Video railway network US https://youtu.be/a8lX5A2q-Eo?si=-zjdLE1Wz8TlyCbt. Wiki https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transportation_in_the_United_States
Public tram systems in US https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streetcar_systems_in_the_United_States
Which is the cause and which is the effect?
If people have no money for cars, they will demand transit. If the government has no tax money for massive infrastructure projects, but people are still demanding something, they will give buses which are cheap. Then the demand and mentality is to upgrade those to trains.
As the engine car was invented in 1886, I would say trains and trams were already there. Way before the car entered the scene. Just later at 1908 with Ford T cars became affordable for the non-rich.
People at that time hadn’t a huge radius of movement. There wasn’t simply not much need.