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. 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.