You have to understand that after the 1950s in the United States, everyone thought cars were awesome. They allowed you to go farther than anywhere else before and they allowed a greater mobility in general than ever before. Combined with the dream of having a house and a yard, this allowed for sprawl.
So cities were planned around this. San Francisco itself even had a boom where it tried to utilize cars as much as possible. There were either freeways or plan to build more freeways cutting through the city to get to places. There was going to be a 2nd Bay Bridge to San Leandro, why? Because they wanted more traffic to get into the city and they didn't trust his new fangled thing called BART (the train system for those of you who don't know it).
I don't know what the situation was in England or other European countries when cars started taking off but I imagine there had to be something similar, maybe just not with the same momentum as the United States.
There certainly were some attempts to introduce more cars to the city centers in Europe, tram lines used to be closed etc. but thankfully a lot of streets were too narrow to handle an ever-increasing traffic so they just had to give up. Not to mention that a good network of public transport has already been there, so people have always been accustomed to it. Nowadays most of my friends here don't use their cars in the cities, because it's way faster to get everywhere by bus/subway/tram or even bike.
So cities were planned around this. San Francisco itself even had a boom where it tried to utilize cars as much as possible. There were either freeways or plan to build more freeways cutting through the city to get to places. There was going to be a 2nd Bay Bridge to San Leandro, why? Because they wanted more traffic to get into the city and they didn't trust his new fangled thing called BART (the train system for those of you who don't know it).
I don't know what the situation was in England or other European countries when cars started taking off but I imagine there had to be something similar, maybe just not with the same momentum as the United States.