What really amazes me is the creation of new "Shopping Centres" - miles and miles of independent stores and nothing between them but parking lots. They took the mall and scaled it up so everyone gets a store, and now if I want to go to two places I have to actually drive from one to the other because it's nothing but parking lots and pedestrian hostile roads separating them - sometimes it's a two minute drive, but that's so much easier to do than try and navigate on foot it's ridiculous. You want to go to the next store over, but it's 3 lanes each way of homicidal traffic between you and it, or a 5 minute walk to get to the closest cross-walk.

This is precisely what shines so much in Pontevedra (the city featured in the article) and e.g. Oviedo (another Spanish city that aggressively adopted this policy in 1991). Local shopping benefited so much from banning cars downtown. Little specialty shops and cafes blossomed vs suburban malls.

Sadly, I think this is only easy to accomplish in mid-sized densely-populated cities (<= 250000 inhabitants), unless there's a lot of planning and investments done.

Paradoxically, shopping associations were initially strongly opposed to implementing car-less downtown plans. Only to reckon later how wrong they were.

If I recall correctly, car-less policies were imported from Aarhus and Aalborg, where majors were experimenting with turning some main streets into pedestrian only by the late 1980s.

It's also interesting to note that both Aalborg and Oviedo tend to rank very highly in a few quality of life EU metrics [1]. I know both, and they are pretty fantastic places to work and live in. Everything is within short walking distance.

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/sources/docgener/studies...

> Sadly, I think this is only easy to accomplish in mid-sized densely-populated cities (<= 250000 inhabitants), unless there's a lot of planning and investments done.

You are right about the "easy" part, but it can definitely be done. In fact that's what Tokyo feels like, and it's the largest city/metro area in the world, with 38 million residents.

Indeed. I've lived in downtown Tokyo for 8 years without even owning a driver's licence. Walking through the city is one of my favorite pastimes.

Take a bit of time to walk; Look, wonder, have a talk. There is no journey without the ´jour´; All should at least once be a flaneur.

An original poem? Lovely :)

Yea, its original. Thanks. Ive been a long time lurker here on HN, and thought i might contribute by putting my on topic thoughts into rhyme.

I moved here 2.5 months ago and I'm so glad I did. It's a huge metropolis where one can comfortably live without owning a car. On top of that, it has one of the lowest crime rates among the world's big cities:

https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_current.jsp

Sure, but the whole thing depends on there being world-class public transportation. Fortunately, Tokyo has that.

I second the fact that most towns in Denmark have superb pedestrian-friendly downtowns. Ghent is also really good in this regard. And of course some mid towns in Spain & France.

Many American and British cities fail in this regard due to excessively sparse housing. But, for example, I found downtown DC & Arlington very walkable and nice.

When I was in Denmark, many downtown roads were close to cars, making them pedestrian malls. Unfortunately, certain traffic was allowed, such as official vehicles. There was just enough of them to pretty much ruin things. You couldn't just amble down the street without having to constantly get out of the way of them.

It's like being in the airport concourse with those electric golf cars racing between the pedestrians with their interminable annoying beeping.

I'm not sure how or why, but you're dead. Your comments are only visible to people with `showdead` enabled.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

The comment was killed by HN's anti-troll software, which is tuned more aggressively for new accounts and unfortunately gets some cases wrong. Fortunately users tend to vouch for those, as happened here. That unkills them.

Me neither, but thanks for letting me know.

I wonder, when/if autonomous taxis come about will the whole attitude of catering to cars over than pedestrians will cease.

If people don't have cars, parking won't be a problem, and walking from one store to another rather than paying for a taxi would become preferable. Then more people would have the awful experience of walking half a mile through a giant paved parking lot which would motivate people to change it.

I'm worried that the opposite will become true. Autonomous taxis will drastically reduce the cost of taking a car ride. The benefit though might be that we get rid of the parking lots since a much higher percentage of total cars should be made up of vehicles that are shared and those shared vehicles should have much higher utilization than personal cars.

I feel like you'd end up with a micro-payment type system - it'd be $1 to cross a parking lot or two and you'd have fields of parking lots everywhere to house the cars that would serve the instant demand people would expect.

I don't think there would be so many parking lots needed. Cars today spend most of their time not in use, which is why we need such large amounts of area to store them.

Even Portland and Eugene love to boast how bicycle friendly they are, but neither are really commutable by anything besides a car for most people. Which is why most cyclists are so prolific -- it's hard to be a cyclist by circumstance. Riding your bike inherently comes with crossing a dozen intersections beaming with cars that treat you like you don't belong on the road.

A solution is to level the planes of separation between types of traffic in urban areas. With pedestrians closer to cars the cars have to go slower by nature. It's antithetical to the common logic and current policy of building walking paths completely separate from roads and all of the businesses attached to them.

> Even Portland and Eugene love to boast how bicycle friendly they are, but neither are really commutable by anything besides a car for most people. Which is why most cyclists are so prolific -- it's hard to be a cyclist by circumstance. Riding your bike inherently comes with crossing a dozen intersections beaming with cars that treat you like you don't belong on the road.

I commuted by bike for two years or so in Portland -- for work from North Portland to downtown across the Broadway bridge, and for fun when visiting friends all over south east -- and that wasn't my experience at all, Portland drivers were incredibly courteous to cyclists. You could take the lane when needed and no one batted an eye, people would correctly negotiate right of way with bikes at four way stops, etc.

Contrast that to Oakland where I live now where I receive death threats on a daily basis for riding in the bike lane. :)

Sometimes they're a bit overly quote courteous unquote -- stopping unexpectedly to let you cross, holding up traffic behind them, or waiting too long to turn onto the road you're on so that they end up behind you when they could have easily gone in front and been on their merry way, etc.

Not that I want to complain -- I'll take this any, any day over the drivers in certain other northern cities named after 70s rock bands. Just a bemused observation.

Peeve: these folks often don't realize there are other sides/lanes of traffic that they aren't able to stop. So the pedestrian still can't cross because of other lanes, but now the good Samaritan is just holding up traffic and slowing everyone down. Including the pedestrian who would normally wait for traffic to clear.

Paradoxically, in these encounters I prefer the "rude" drivers that get out of the way as quickly as possible.

I think this is a pretty interesting phenomenon and I often struggle with how to handle it. I have pretty severe defensive navigation requirements where I tend to require active perception of velocity change before I trust obstacles are going to behave in the manner I expect ... and I think that mentality often leads to these kinds of outcomes.

I was recently in Amsterdam where there are many many bikes and many variations on the scenarios that can cause this to occur. I felt like I started to observe communication on the faces and trajectories around me that tried to convey a message about a kind of conscious morality for influencing the outcomes that results in these scenarios. There seemed to be a kind of social encouragement toward modulating one’s trajectory when possible in advance of where uncertainties could cause delay in order to have the effect of minimizing the required velocity changes — an expression that seemed to say “if you put yourself into a situation where uncertainty about your trajectory is likely to cause a group velocity decrease, you haven’t found the ideal path. Keep an eye out for opportunities to improve the group outcome in the future and have a nice day.” (Edit: Culture in the Netherlands is rather amazing)

> Keep an eye out for opportunities to improve the group outcome in the future and have a nice day.

I think what you describe just minimizes fuel consumption though.

I had not really considered that people might view it differently but thinking back on my experience in Canada, I remember being surprised at how much people would accelerate when the light turned green and how hard they would have to brake just seconds later at the next red light.

I think what I was trying to describe does more than minimize fuel consumption — at least assuming as I sort of was trying to imply that changes in velocity are a message passing component that is part of a distributed “proof of consensus awareness” which is then employed to maximize the likelihood of involved parties converging on the same set of safe trajectories. If applied widely — I think the principle results in reducing the number of interactions where trajectories come too close for safety margins and cause involved parties to introduce extra delay due to uncertainty in the other agent’s behavior. If you modulate speeds in order to reduce the occurrence of delay-from-uncertainty, you can ensure that one party doesn’t experience any extra delay at all rather than both being likely to, which is a net win as well as win-win as the person who does stop or experience delay will wait less time in total for the obstacle to clear.

This is exactly how my first and only car accident happened. I was driving and the car in front on the next lane randomly stopped on the road. I couldn't see there was a cyclist on the other side of the car. The old lady went for it despite me not slowing down, so I hit the brakes and got smacked from behind by another car.

I would argue this is more to do with Portland culture of nice than anything.

I love riding, but I have been run over. No thank you. I will bike for transportation the day we implement Dutch style separated bike lanes (i.e. by an actual physical barrier, even if only a slightly raised bike lane)

Other than that, I drive my mountain bike to areas where there are no cars.

Edit: in the city I'm in now, we just 'created' a bunch of bike lanes. Which means putting paint on a continuous stretch of asphalt and expect vehicles moving at 10mph that weight 50 pounds to do just fine sharing the road with vehicles weighing 2000+ pounds and going 50+ mph. Ridiculous and a waste of my tax dollars.

> we just 'created' a bunch of bike lanes. Which means putting paint on a continuous stretch of asphalt

Yeah, this kind of thing is really disappointing, but unfortunately predictable. There's a real chicken/egg situation. Few people will bike until there's safe support for it; until lots of people are biking, all the infrastructure just takes space away from the people using cars.

I've been biking in Oakland for over 10 years and have never gotten a death threat.

I've had multiple people throw stuff at me from cars, I've had a teenager take a swing at me with a baseball bat from the curb, I've had a car stalk me for eight blocks driving inches from my back tire late at night. This is mostly West Oakland and the parts of of North Oakland along Adeline that gets you up to Berkeley -- I can't really comment on East Oakland or the hills. YMMV, of course.

I've been to your part of the world. The entire area felt unsafe everywhere. I got into a semi-fight on the bus for taking a seat. I've had poets aggressively push there words. It seems like the area is ready to explode.

Detriot feels much safer. People mostly leave you alone. Wear the wrong colors could be an issue. The boards over windows is a little bit scarier but in Detriot you feel more prepared, even expect something to happen so it rarely does. In Oakland/SanF things can be very calm but turn really quickly.

If there’s one thing that gets my goat it’s overly aggressive poets. The media really need to pay attention to this widespread problem. Once in Detroit a 15-line sonnet almost got me into fisticuffs with the so-called poet. Let’s just say I grew up in the mean streets of Anaheim and she didn’t stand a chance.

Pretty sure that's less about you being a bicyclist and more about you being in Oakland.

Cyclists really don't belong on the road. It's such an odd collective viewpoint that a vehicle which virtually always travels far below the speed limit should be allowed alongside vehicles that travel at the speed limit. I think this is because we conflate the benefits of cycling and the value of making our public infrastructure amenable to cycling with the opinion that cyclists should share highways with cars. It's simply not safe and no amount of "Share the road" stickers and driver education will compensate for that. Cyclists need their own infrastructure, bike lanes on the highways at a minimum. They don't belong mixed in with cars.

If we insisted bicycles only be allowed on dedicated bicycle tracks, there would be no track because there would be no bicycles (because there was no track!)

As a bicyclist, I would love to have a dedicated network of bicycle track all over town. But it doesn't exist, yet.

Also, this is way fuzzier than you present. There's little conflict between cars and bikes on lightly traveled, spacious suburban streets or sleepy neighborhood county roads. Even on collectors & minor arterials, on an e-bike I travel about the same speed as a slow car.

Speed delta is not an incorrect observation, but varies in significance. In terms of priorities, highways are certainly top candidates for the first dedicated bike tracks.

Do what downtown Vancouver, BC did - take out a travel lane and/or parking spots and create dedicated bike lane.

Sure, some businesses complain, but overall number of bikes on the road seems to have increased.

https://cyclingmagazine.ca/sections/news/opposition-to-propo...

http://dailyhive.com/vancouver/mobi-bike-share-vancouver-rid...

> It's such an odd collective viewpoint that a vehicle which virtually always travels far below the speed limit should be allowed alongside vehicles that travel at the speed limit.

Most cyclists are slower than the speed limit on most roads, but this does not occur "virtually always". Don't assume. Check the speed limit and the cyclist's speed!

As a cyclist, I find it really irritating to be dangerously passed by a driver, seemingly as punishment, catch up with them at a stop light, and then have them chew me out for not going the speed limit, when I actually was going the limit or faster. It's not hard for a fit cyclist to go the limit on a 15 or 20 mph road, particularly downhill. The problem here is that many drivers think anyone not going 30+ mph on those roads is being a jerk, and unfortunately some of those drivers believe dangerously passing slow vehicles is an acceptable response to their impatience.

But the reality is this: Going 30+ mph in a 15 mph zone is being a jerk!

I agree. The real solution is to eliminate cars from the roads, that way they wouldn't have to share with bikers.

I love small walkable shopping centers that are organically grown over decades that mix residential, commercial, and retail uses. I live in such an area and it is great, but, if society wants to find a way to move to a better human scale constructed landscapes, it might be a good idea to stop referring to people in cars as non-human inhabited objects and use a more human focus word like motorist. We use pedestrian for a person use their feet or a bicyclist or biker for someone using a bicycle.

Cars can be a great tool for humans to use and they are not yet running around without a human inside.

Cars are typically utilized under 5% of the time. A car most of the time is a non-human inhabited object that is wasting a lot of space

Similar to most rooms in a house/apartment? My living room and dining room is utilized way under 5% of the the time, both more square feet than my car.

I think the most intrusive part of cars are when they are moving. That is when they are dangerous, mess with peds and bikers, and occupying roads that break up community space. Look at how much parking structures are as a % of the total building space in downtown SF or Manhattan. Not nothing, but pretty small. Maybe 5%. Probably less.

This kind of snark, or perhaps just unrealistic statements, gets us nowhere...dedicated infrastructure for cyclists alongside the same infrastructure for cars is actually viable. Making a comment about how everybody should be using bikes isn't helpful.

I'm a cyclist and I drive a car. Dedicated infrastructure is usually for slow bicycles. I welcome it but I stay clear of it. I don't feel in danger in the road and I can go faster.

Problems with bicycle roads:

90% of traffic is much slower than me, which I do 20 km/h in cities (nothing special with some training)

They go up and down sidewalks and turn before intersections. This slows down everybody willing to go faster than 10 km/h

They are bumpier than roads

They are on the side of the road and more dangerous at any intersection, where they are close or before the stop line for cars coming from the side. Furthermore there is less space to look for incoming traffic. Being on the car's road is safer. I like bicycle roads when they are far away from car's roads, for example along rivers. Small low traffic roads are good enough.

On the other side, roundabouts and every other modern road layout that force cars and bikes to get close is dangerous for bikes. I feel safe to say that roads became less dangerous for cars in the last 20 years and more dangerous for bicycles.

I'd like to have the roads of the 70s: long straights, no speed bumps, no roundabouts (cyclists also don't like stop and go),

>>> Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

>> ban cars

> unrealistic statements

You, sir, are funny.

The United States is not Spain. Nitpick all you want - the vast majority of populated places in the US will never ban cars, at least for the foreseeable future.

Not because they can't though. Because they think they can't. Most cities in the US could do this with some adjustments to public transit, and by managing regional transit much better - for example it's insane that the default for suburban rail line stations is the "park and ride" - huge parking lot surrounding the train station, rather than using that area for residential development close to transit.

I wonder how much space could be allocated to residential development though. Here (Portland Oregon) The park and ride infrastructure isn't that built out (Or maybe it is and I just haven't noticed it???). I dont believe you could move all the people that need to drive into the city to work, into the new residential development provided by that conversion.

That's not the idea as much as moving parking away from IMMEDIATELY next to the station - and improving bus links to rail transit.

No... because they literally can't without massive upheaval of where schools, offices and shops are located.

"They literally can't change, because that would involve having to actually change".

They only want change that doesn't involve money, effort or change, or what?

Shops can move with the times, schools can continue to have buses to get kids there and offices can stay where they are as long as they'd like.

Banning vehicles has been shown to greatly increase shopping revenue and improve the healthiness of the area, so if a few businesses suffer, poor them... I'll not shed a tear for the strip malls.

Where in my comment do I suggest moving the suburbs? Nothing in your comment would be a result of anything in mine.

corndoge, it sounds like you assume that (an unnamed) we has to be in the United States.

I’m going to sorely disappoint you there…

However, if you want to talk about the United States, I would agree with you that it’s going to be expensive to shift the suburban sprawl away from personal vehicles. As much as that particular urbanisation failure is seen as typically American, it’s far from the exclusive option there. You will be surprised to learn that there are dozens of millions of Americans living in cities dense enough to justify not using cars as the default transport mode (“banning” isn’t a very accurate description of what that city did).

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-crowded-city-in...

Electric scooters or bikes, typically the dockless kind, combined with existing (but re-inforced) public transport sounds doable, especially if you invest the same order of magnitude as local authorities spend on highways. That would require little investment (most of it would be private and from people keen on giving away billions).

   it sounds like you assume that (an unnamed) we *has* to be in the United States.

I wouldn't say this to anyone on hn who uses "we" without a qualifier because I assume as a matter of course that everyone on this website is aware that there are non American users. The pedantry here isn't appreciated.

   I’m going to sorely disappoint you there…

   You will be surprised

There already exists dedicated infrastructure for cyclists. It's called roads. Just need to get cars off of them.

I'm joking just as much as the people saying that bikes don't belong on roads are.

You must live in America. Here in Portland, the bike are winning out and things like a city-wide 20mph speed limit are taking hold. It's faster to get across town on an ebike than in a car, because all the drivers are stuck in traffic that the bikes rarely see because they use different streets. It's far from perfect but pockets of success like this prove the investment is worth it.

If you are interested in a ROI based perspective on town planning, https://www.strongtowns.org/ makes a compelling case that sprawl is not economically sustainable.

Totally agree with the sprawl issue, but I cannot see why we have to make one more of transportation worse to make another better. Not everyone can ride a bike. Either because of their physical ability or because of the for they'd need to travel. Europe has better bike lanes and higher speed limits for cars. We can have our cake and eat it too. Let's get rid of the sprawl, add some decent public transit and prohibit cars in city centers and we get somewhere. The sprawl that's subsidised by everyone is the root of all Urban planning problems in the US.

Small note, cars usually get stuck in traffic because they are bad at handling intersections, while pedestrians and bicyclists have such a high troughput in intersections that this seldom is an issue.

Disagree, slow the cars down. I've seen good results with "road diets" where 4-lane roads are converted to two lanes for cars and more space for bike lanes and center turning lanes. Also, adding pedestrian activated lights to stop cars.

Why do we need to slow down and even stop cars if we in your proposal even have a dedicated bike lane? Why not put up a small barrier between cars and bikes and have everyone go their own way? Speed limits on the US already are insanely slow compared to most of Europe and the bike thing seems to work better their regardless. We need more diverse infrastructure for different modes of transportation. I want trains that go 200mp/h, dedicated bike routes, and smaller dedicated roads for cars that are better organized with much higher speed limits and walkable city centers where pedestrians can feel safe from cars AND bicyclists. Sounds crazy but works in parts of Europe.

As a cyclist I've seen too many barriered-off cycle lanes that left me trapped and unable to go where I wanted to go, so if my choice is the main road or a cycle lane behind a barrier, I'll stick to the road. Separate lanes make sense for between-city highways, but inside the town speeds are already low enough - and space limited - that we ought to be able to share.

In hindsight, maybe training a neural network on Betsy DeVos was a bad idea.

Wow, never heard of her but quite interesting background.

DeVos is married to Dick DeVos, the former CEO of the multi-level marketing company Amway, and is the daughter-in-law of Amway's billionaire co-founder, Richard DeVos. Her brother, Erik Prince, a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, is the founder of Blackwater USA.

What surprises me here is the fact that Amway has done so well in China yet is connected to Blackwater.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_DeVos

Just make the cars slower and this problem is solved. 20mph in cities is safer for everyone, doesn‘t take longer to drive and allows sharing the road.

I think there's a happy medium that already works fairly well. I live in a fairly bike-friendly mid-sized city. For the most part, cyclists stick to designated bike paths and neighborhood streets, where traffic is minimal. Someone who's riding a bike on a main trunk road is either inexperienced, or trying to prove something. Most people eventually find ways to avoid those roads.

For me, high speed and low speed are both OK. I take longer rides that get me out onto the trunk roads where people drive 55+, but they usually give me plenty of room. What I'm not OK with is congested roads where drivers are not controlling their cars -- if someone stops suddenly, there will be a crash.

The city is gradually adding bike lanes on the more congested main roads when there isn't a good alternative. They're also designating some side roads as "bike boulevards" with "traffic calming" features that effectively discourage cars.

A way of planning for bike paths is if bike traffic gets heavy enough on a road, then set aside a portion of that road for bikes and leave the rest for cars.

It really depends. The biggest safety issue for cyclists is being overlooked at crossings. Being on the road makes them safer for cyclists in those situations. Especially for bigger roads there are also other solutions to this problem.

definitely agree. in fact, one of the biggest dangers of accidents is difference in speed on the roads. Its my understanding that this is one of the primary reasons for a speed limit (note if you drive too slow you also get a ticket), which is to limit the variance of speed.

Do you have a source for that? I had always understood the speed limit as simply being an objective, statutory codification of the subjective notion of "appropriate maximum speed for conditions"

Which fits well with dynamic speed limits cropping up in places that get regular bad weather

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....

There is the source for California -- I see it gives exemptions for safety and law (I assume for road works, etc) but generally speed limits are objective based on conditions. It doesn't mean you can drive slow and impede other traffic traveling around you though, which is why there are laws for it. I don't see it enforced as much in San Diego, but when I lived in the Lake Arrowhead area it was enforced quite often on the highway up and down the mountain.

Quick edit -- that law is for highways, I haven't checked whether this also applies for other types of roads.

> Quick edit -- that law is for highways, I haven't checked whether this also applies for other types of roads.

Note that “highway” in California law has a very broad definition; see https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....

“Highway” is a way or place of whatever nature, publicly maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular travel. Highway includes street.

Thanks for that, I wasn't aware of how broad the term was for California. Do you know if (silly question I'm sure) that definition can differ per county or municipality?

I started to reply to thinking there was a federal minimum speed limit but decided I should confirm what I believed and glad I did because I was wrong. In the US, states have full control over the speed limits that are set on both the state hwys and the interstate freeways within that state. That said, I'm pretty sure every freeway I've ever been on had a posted minimum 45mph speed limit, and bikes are not allowed.

Whether or not speed variances between vehicles increase accidents doesn't seem to be clear. With a quick search I found this(1) that indicates that speed variances don't play a role in causing accidents. I also found this (2), which says "that the greater the difference between a driver’s speed and the average speed of traffic—both above and below that average speed—the greater the likelihood of involvement in a crash". And I found this (3) which basically says the speed limit should be set at the 85th percentile of what everyone is driving. Kind of like how you should build sidewalks where people walk ("Don’t make any walkways this year. At the end of the year, look at where the grass is worn away. That shows where the students are walking. Then just pave those paths"), set the speed limit at the speed most people drive.

Everywhere in the US I've lived, the max speed limit laws were written like "whatever speed is safe for current conditions up to a maximum of XX Mph" So you can get a speeding ticket for going slower than the posted limit if conditions are bad. I've actually been pulled over going well under the posted max speed limit during a hard snow storm.

(1) https://www.caee.utexas.edu/prof/kockelman/public_html/TRB04... (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_curve (3) http://onlinemanuals.txdot.gov/txdotmanuals/szn/determining_...

>That said, I'm pretty sure every freeway I've ever been on had a posted minimum 45mph speed limit, and bikes are not allowed.

There are exceptions, especially in the US West, where interstates may be the only path for miles and miles through some mountain ranges. Of course, they mostly have wide shoulders where people ride.

As someone who lived in Eugene and now PDX, the model I advocate is the wagon spoke. You need to ferret the people between the large spaces as the population density is that of the Ukraine which presents little in the way of the geographic challenges we have here. Get people to the perimeters and in parking garages and then make it so they're able to use alternative transport. We won't be building fast rail between Portland, Salem and Eugene but we can certainly make it so you limit the amount of driving you need to perform.

Or we could do what they do in the Netherlands and physically separate bikes.

Edit: phone auto-"correct"

"Livability", in America, doesn't really exist as a concept. I get blank stares from most people. They all want a single-family 2000 sq. ft. home somewhere in a suburb that will doom them to be behind the wheel of a car for every little thing and see nothing abnormal about it.

In America, a city is a place where cars drive to get from business A to business B. People enter the equation only as a necessary side-effect. But fuck you if you're a pedestrian or don't have a car.

In Europe, cities exist for people. Streets are built with people in mind, businesses are placed with people in mind, infrastructure is built with people in mind.

I grew up in Europe, and the entire city was "mine" as a teenager - I could go anywhere, cheaply, quickly, and never needed a driver's license. I shopped for groceries, paid bills, hung out with friends, went to school - everything was within walking distance or a short bus ride away.

Here - I don't know how kids do it. To rely on parents to drive you to - where - shopping malls???? - to "hang out" or be doomed to watch tv/play video games all day - I'm so glad that was not my child-hood - I really think it's one reason I'm not on various anti-depressants, nor obese, nor anti-social.

I really wish someone would do a study that looked at the number of depressed/anti-social/about-to-go-on-a-shooting-spree people in a country whose only interaction with other human beings is to say "good how are you" at the clerk at the grocery aisle check-out lane or to curse at other people behind the wheel of their car while getting there.

I really believe (no evidence, just belief) that if cities in America didn't make you stressed out just for trying to get from place A to place B, or putting your life in danger by having to drive, we'd see a lot fewer problems - a lot fewer.

It's the same everywhere, I can vouch for rural Illinois.

Check out strongtowns.org, a non-profit that explores this EXACT phenomena and how it happened.

Basically, infrastructure == progress to a LOT of poorly informed communities who don't bother factoring in maintenance costs or look at the actual economics of building huge roads through their main street.

Throw in a dash of pork-barrel spending and lobbying to secure funding to build more roads for the hell of it and you have the US's current mad-max roads-to-fucking-nowhere infrastructure nightmare. It was all a big experiment where everyone but the guys getting paid to build the roads lost.

Chalk it up to the fact that almost literally every European city developed while people still traveled on horses, and nearly every American city saw 90% of its development when cars existed. If Americans already need cars because cities are so far apart and it isn't yet feasible to rely on public transportation across states and the country, why bother making cities that resemble European, pre-steam engine city layouts unless you are dealing with a city like New York or Los Angeles, where there is no practical reason to leave?

It always comes back down to money. Suburbs are inherently less efficient; you need more sewage, more electric, more road, etc. to serve the same amount of people. And this is before we consider that suburban houses are much farther away and apart, much bigger spaces with more heating and AC requirement, etc. Suburbs generally don't make enough money through taxes to cover their lifecycle costs.

The first generation of suburbs is already failing as they become choked by the next generation of suburbs. Ferguson, MO was once a rich suburb of St. Louis. The suburbs of Nassau County, one of the richest US counties by median income, have been under state fiscal control since 2000.

It is less efficient if all you care about is money and people working for your company.

It is far less efficient if you have a partner, children, pets, and like having peace and quiet. You know, things that make you happy.

You can have all of those things in a city. It's not as if the Europeans are all single slaving away in cubicle farms. Most people would say that the Europeans work far less than Americans do.

In fact, suburbs can be some of the most limiting places for kids. Every activity needs a driver, so until you get a license you need a chaperone. You mostly can't walk to the shops, or the park, or your friend's house, with limited exceptions. And biking and walking are out of the question if you have to navigate a main suburban arterial to get there. As a parent your choices are to trap them in the house or spend your precious time driving your kids everywhere.

Half of Kansas City's downtown is parking lots which generally sit empty during the day. To make matters even worse, the city is constantly building mixed-use areas with retail and office space, restaurants, hotels and apartments intermixed with roads running every which way. Walking around these places is just a constant hazard.

Can you explain how the mixed-use makes this worse? Not having seen it, I'd expect it to make the situation better that I have a restaurant right next to my apartment or office and don't need to get in the car.

I haven’t spent any time in Kansas City to know what the parent referred to — but with a lack of knowledge I could imagine this aesthetic could lead to some pretty bad designs if the feeling was that each mixed use function needed its own entrance and each entrance needed to be as close to parking as possible. Such could encourage all the buildings to be islands surrounded by a moat of parking lots which would help ensure that walking anywhere would involve a lot of walking through parking lots ...

Separation is good, to stop the flue :P