West Coast baby
Sure. And now we clearly know that it would’ve been better to develop things that way in the first place; instead of rapid relatively unplanned sprawling residential. At the time these developments were being mostly planned, zoned, and legislated, that was seen as the right strategy.
That’s literally my point. We don’t know everything, don’t expect magic fixes. This will be better, it will need improvements.
I mean without researching I know that Tolkien was pro-car and then flipped to really anti car early on (I think either 10s or 20s). There was no doubt others that saw that car infrastructure was bad for society. I think you can probly blame a really strong car lobby for how bad we ended up.
Its’s also not that crazy to undo, look at the Netherlands. There is at least one example where they got rid of canals for motorways, realised it was terrible and put the canals back. Amsterdam also was a mess of roads and it only took 20 years to get to what it is today.
Hindsight is 20/20 yadda yadda. It’s very easy to look back and see what the correct solution might’ve been (well, until you dig into it, normally, then it becomes much harder). It’s so so so much harder to have a solution in front of you and be justifiably confident you were on the right side of every issue for the rest of time, especially when it comes to engineering.
We all wish we could wave a magic wand and fix every problem with all of our various solutions, but it’s simply unknowable and unfeasible.
That point about the car lobby is one I see a lot. It’s of course true… But probably not in a way that makes it a boogeyman in the same way we’re aware of lobbying now. Let me put it this way, did automakers lobby hard for car centric transportation, downplaying downsides? Almost definitely. Did people generally feel cars may lead to greater social and economic prosperity than the alternatives? Yeah, probably so. There was push back, for sure, but there was pushback on the existence of electricity too. And what’s more, did we even have the modeling and research to be able to definitely say cars wouldn’t be worth their cost then? No we didn’t. We don’t even now, but on balance we have enough that people are generally favoring different urban panning priorities in certain spheres. We don’t even know that the science and engineering that went into vehicles wasn’t worth it. It’s unknowable.
This is a long winded rant to say, we know better now, shame on us for not improving now, though we are. We will know even better in 20 years, 40 years, 100, shame on us then if we don’t improve then. But there are no magic bullets in life. We see one solution, but even what that solution looks like in the details can make or break it, and those details will need to be different for every community, both spatially and temporally. What we build now, even if it is a super perfect solution to everyone it effects, may not be right for people 50 years from now. Life is fundamentally chaotic and we can only ever hope to do the best we can with what we’ve got. And to that point, people are people, we will never be perfect, never be able to achieve even that temporarily perfect solution. There will be good and bad implementations, things won’t be implemented to anyone’s ideal, there will have to be compromises and time and knowledge constraints.
No magic solutions.
Hindsight is 20/20 does not make a good argument here. Cars are bad for people, we have the studies and the research.
- they kill a higher number of people than other modes of transport.
- on average car drivers are more unhealthy and die earlier than people who self propel/use public transport
- fumes and particles from cars lower the air quality in cities and are responsible for more deaths than just collisions
- even if you go full electric particles from the tyres released at speed are terrible for people
- car parking is a massive waste of land in city centres
- commerce benefits more from cycle infrastructure than car infrastructure because more people are likely to get off their bike to go in to a shop they didn’t intend to go to than car drivers who have to find a parking space
There are definitely more examples of why cars are bad in urban settings. Banning cars in city centres is the very easy solution that would make everyone’s lives in the cities better today. It’s also not a super crazy solution, cars didn’t always occupy space in cities.
Also car drivers are not the majority in cities or even some contries but somehow the whole population is beholden to them.
