zlacker

>>amathe+(OP)
The issue of quiting cars is nowadays far from just a matter of values as the article seems to be implying.

Cars are by now a hard to reverse environmental and urban planning disaster across the world. We are stuck with them. As a mode of transport it has grown uncontrollably at the expense of all others (except the airplane) and practically everything has been shaped to accomodate it.

Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and arteries transplant on a living person. Even if there was a will (which there is not) it is not clear if there is a way.

In the best scenario it will be an excruciatingly long transformation (~50 yr) as car oriented cities (or city sections) get slowly deprecated and the car-free or car-lite segments become more desirable, more livable.

>>nologi+Mz1
What I don't understand is that you can keep the car-centric cities we have and still improve some zones. You could create pedestrian streets, for example. And you could allow shops and commerces to open fronts on more than just a few blocks in a commercial street. Yet US cities refuse to do both. Here in SF we got slow streets, which nobody asked, and basically did not change anything about the topology of the streets. Not a single pedestrian street was created during covid, and restaurants had to fight to turn parking space in parklet. Parklets are being removed everywhere now.