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.