>Perhaps what you are referring to is actually ancient history, when automobile transportation was not generally considered reliable or economical enough for day to day commuting. In those days, developers did briefly subsidize rail commuter services of all sorts (chartered the trains) to stimulate sales. But that did not result in sprawl. Development was clustered near stations, creating small towns, with plenty of open space in between, just like in Europe still.

From the 1890s through about 1920s developers would buy large tracts of land and build rail lines therein so it would be convenient for people to buy land for homes and be able to commute downtown to their jobs. The idea was to makle money from land sales, not the transit. In it's day this was sprawl and actually referred to a such, although perhaps not with that exact word.

All the LA freeways, particularly the early ones of the 1940s and 1950s, more or less follow the lines of the LA Railway and PE. In Oakland and adjoining cities in the East Bay, until about 1960 virtually all the 4 and 6 lane streets at one time or another had electric rail transportation of one kind or another thereon (SP, Key Route, etc.).

Automobiles didn't really become cheap and, more importantly, reliable until after WWII, in itself a development of the War.

The only differences between today's sprawl and that of the 1910s/1920s are the extent and distance from the city core.

The main reasons such things didn't happen in Europe are population density and that European attitudes toward the ownership of private property (land for homes) and automobiles were different from the US. In Europe, an automtobile has always been a luxury, and they are taxed by total engine displacement. The larger the displacement, the higher the tax (here these engines are hyped as "-a so many- litres"). Similarly, when we were paying $1.50/ gallon for gas in the late 1970s, over there they were paying something on the order of $4.00/gal.

On the East Coast, where population density has been greater than out here since before WWII, rail transportation never really went away and freeway development lagged far behind that out here in the west.

Public transit, whether rail, elevated/subway, "light rail", or bus, has always been a money loser because of the morning and evening rush hours. Any transit system which has steady patronage throughout the day is a money maker, and I know of no such system here in the US.