I do remember the song (by ... C+C Music Factory?) -- but fear that is (yet more) evidence that I'm not a young'un anymore.
I thiiiiiiiinnnnnk it worked this way. Hall had that as one of his comic bits and it became so popular that a group made a song based on it. And then that song was briefly popular as well.
Development of suburbia in the US is much more extensive than that and cannot be explained by "white fly" only. As a matter of fact, everyone lives in suburbia nowadays in the US. When visiting Atlanta, Martin Luther King's old neighbourhood consisting in apartment buildings was essentially a ghost town.
Above-ground light rail - sometimes called "streetcars" here - has only recently been looked at again as a valuable, or even viable, form of transportation. Before WWII, they were the way everybody got around every US city. Even cities we associate with cars today, like Los Angeles. There's a scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? where Bob Hoskins hops onto a passing streetcar and says something like, "Why would anybody need to own a car? The trolley takes you anywhere you want to go!" I remember my grandmother telling me about taking the streetcar all over the place when she was a girl, and she lived in one of New England's small cities, not Boston. On weekends in the Summer, she routinely took it ~15 miles to one of the area's seaside resort towns (which were hopping, in the days before air travel, with amusement parks and boardwalks and long beaches). By the time I was a little kid, the notion that small cities had streetcars, and that you could take them all over the place, sounded like a story from another planet to me. We had the subway in the city, but where my cousins lived in the suburbs, you couldn't do a thing without a car. They even drove to get to the park to walk their dog.
That's awesome.)
The thing is that Europe preserved a lot better its rail industry than the US did. In Europe we have Alstom, Siemens and tons of subcontractors building high-speed trains, metros and light rail. So there is a whole economical ecosystem to feed in investing in such projects to fill up those companies backlogs. In the US, the rail industry basically vanished. There is still Bombardier but it's Canadian (and Canada builds more rail than the US). As a result, in France, there are something like 30 cities with a modern light rail network built during the 21st century and 6 which have a metro network. And France is nothing more than California in population and GDP. So it's as if you had a metro in Fresno or light rail in Santa Rosa.
LA does have a downtown, it's only that the downtown is not what the city is famous for. Its specificity is that it is most famous for what could be considered as suburbs: Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica. Anaheim. Hip hop fans will know Compton, Long Beach, Inglewood. And even the most famous avenues (Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard) are actually suburban avenues! Therefore when tourists visit LA, they rush to those places and hardly see LA's downtown (that's actually what I did when visiting as a teenager). And indeed we end up considering there's no downtown there, but there's actually one!
It's not just the rail system; all of our public infrastructure is a disaster (literally, in some cases).
US cities undoubtedly developed later in general. However those population from 1900 you mention were largely rural (at least in Germany and France, maybe less so in Britain). In France, rural flight happened very late, from the 1950's, so cities have grown a lot then, and that was about the same time as when any French people could buy a car. So cities did sprawl then, but not as much as in the US. Paris is twice bigger now than it was in 1960 (it went from 6 million to 12 million inhabitants). When the oil crisis hit in the 1970's, this has triggered massive public transportation projects in the city which contributed to make it growing denser rather than sprawling.Thinking more about rail-v-auto transportation, I'm wondering how much population density and concentration might have or had to have played a part. Picking an arbitrary date, I see that in 1900, the US population was ~76 million, the UK and France had ~40 million people, and Germany had ~50 million. So just those 3 Western European countries had close to double our population, and of course practically every city & town in Europe is older than our oldest. Prior to the late 19th Century, most people would have had to walk across any city or town. In 1840, for the people who lived in one neighborhood of New York City or London or Paris, whole other neighborhoods of the same city might as well have been on the Moon. Glancing at a list of London's association football clubs, many of the dates of their founding seem to correspond with what I imagine was the first few decades of public transportation, 1880-1920. (There used to be a club called Casuals FC.
All countries have their strengths and weaknesses. On TV they were saying that 6 of the 12 most influential AI engineers were French mathematicians, they all work for US companies in Silicon Valley, earning millions they wouldn't even dream of in France. The future is being built in the US (and China) but no longer in Europe.
No. The suburbia that happened in the US after WW2 did so for a combination of reasons: because the baby boomers were being born; the US had (and still has) lots of empty land near urban areas; war production introduced ways to mass produce houses; an economic boom; government projects to increase and improve the US road network; and an unfilled need for housing that was not built during the depression. "Get off my lawn" doesn't show up until the 1980s (David Letterman) and doesn't gain momentum for a decade or more.
