Well Germany had the unfortunate advantage of having many of their cities complete destroyed. I live in Hamburg, which was flattened by bombs. After the war the cities were rebuild - for cars..

> now cannot be significantly altered

And why should we? (as in: I consider car-friendly cities a bug, not a feature)

Sure, no one's suggesting they _should_ be altered, but evidence from the entire world suggests that most people (partly in a political context) are too dumb to understand the concept of the damage done by a car-friendly/human-unfriendly city design. So external barriers like the one described here tend to be the only defense.