Imagine, if you will, a whole town built around a highway off-ramp gas station. Now imagine a whole country built of those same sad towns.
Charleston is pretty at least. Also very walkable.
Asheville (NC) is an example of what a highways popup town should look like (at least the downtown, there was a bit of sprawl like this that happened leading to the suburbs, but the city itself is still intact)
Charleston is dope; what stuck out most to me as a visitor was that many roads didn't have shoulders, i was told it was for wetland preservation but seeing school kids walking these roads made me real nervous
Yeah, it's a beautiful city, but nothing can fix the blight of the personal motor vehicle except it's complete abolition and replacement with mass public transport.
"The American highway is now like television, violent and tawdry. The landscape it runs through is littered with cartoon buildings and commercial messages. We whiz by them at 55 miles per hour and forget them, because one convenience store looks like the next. They do not celebrate anything beyond their mechanistic ability to sell merchandise. We don't want to remember them. We did not savor the approach and we were not rewarded upon reaching the destination, and it will be the same next time, and every time. There is little sense of having arrived anywhere, because every place looks like no place in particular."
- James Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere