Here’s a complex and fun chart that shows the historical evolution of global cities according to mobility type. If you go back far enough, all cities were “walking cities”, and then they started to evolve along a transit v. private mobility spectrum.
This chart from the Reinventing Transport blog plots those out:
As you can imagine, Minneapolis-Saint Paul falls well into the “Car Cities” category, closer to Los Angeles than the Montreal/New York City box.
Check out the whole blogpost on the charts here, which has some old-school urban geography diagrams.
A glaring omission in the article: Draft animals were a key transport option for both people and goods in the old days. Who would walk across town to buy some horehound candy and a sarsaparilla if they had a horse?
You’re darn tootin’!