What would an alternate timeline where the US favored building vertically instead of horizontally look like? Where they built trans, trains, subways and bike paths/lanes?
>Where they built trans, trains, subways and bike paths/lanes?
They would just be elevators silly.
>>1029304
Westward expansion would have been much, MUCH slower and lots of western America might not actually be, well, America.
>>1029222
You don't have to work very hard to imagine this, just look at pictures of American cities from the turn of the last century and imagine the buildings with more modern facades and taller average heights (especially in the urban core). Chicago, New York, San Fransisco, Philadelphia, Detroit, etc. were all big, bustling places well before the advent of sprawl.
>>1029754
And today it would look more like this - pretty much like any other modern city around the world (excluding European/Asian cities that still have road networks and landmarks that date from ancient times).
>>1029749
>Westward expansion would have been much, MUCH slower and lots of western America might not actually be, well, America.
This is a retarded answer, and it displays a complete lack of even basic knowledge of history.
The bulk of westward expansion occurred in the mid 1800s, while the technological advances that allowed for tall buildings to exist didn't exist until the late 1800s.
>California Gold Rush: 1848-1855
>First "Tall" (7-story) office building with an elevator: 1870
>First self-supporting steel-framed tower: 10 stories, 1890
At this point, 44 of the 48 CONUS states had been admitted to the Union. Utah, Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico were all admitted well before the start of WWI.
Cities as we know them now simply did not exist before the 1900s. The big vertical-construction boom in the US largely occurred between the end of WWI and the start of WWII, whereas the suburban sprawl, highway construction, and elevation of the automobile over streetcars and inter-urban rail are almost exclusively post-WWII phenomenon. Similarly, most of the European and Asian cities that /n/iggers sperg over have been largely built post-WWII. If you want to take OP's suggestion seriously, the timeline split would be sometime ~1938-1945.
>>1029222
Manhattan?