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A comment on Too many Americans live in places built for cars – not for human connection. Parent comment

Re:Too many Americans live in places built for cars – not fo... by xhkkffbf on Thursday August 25, 2022 @11:35AM (#32595143)
No. You're missing my point. Those giant four lane roads were built for cars AND people moving together. The people are a big part of the equation. All of them are going some place. Some might be going to yoga. Some to church. Some to work. Some to the hospital. Etc. Yes, some might be doing something completely worthless and bad for society too, but, in general, people are the ones using the roads. The cars are only vehicles.

There's a slow movement back to urban environments, in part, because people understand the tradeoffs. But it comes off as foolish to pretend that these suburbs and four lane roads were imposed by some distant, evil presence. No. They were created by city planners trained by the best universities. They were created by progressive folks who wanted to build a nice place for people to live. This is what people wanted-- and many still want it in some form or another.

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Re:Too many Americans live in places built for cars – not fo... by dont__panic on Thursday August 25, 2022 @11:44AM (#32595308)
We might be missing each other's points!

In suburbs, those stroads are essential to get people from place to place. IMO that "essential" ends at the edge of a city -- at high density, cars selfishly dominate public spaces, and actually detract from that environment's utility. It's a scalability problem; single occupancy cars can only move so much meat. Walking + biking + transit can move a lot more meat in a dense space.

I think a lot of people do want those suburban environments even today. I'm not sure many people want today's US city center environment that has been compromised by the car.

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Re:Too many Americans live in places built for cars – not fo... by mlsu on Thursday August 25, 2022 @02:00PM (#32597501)
You may want to look carefully at the motives of some of those 1950s and 1960s planners. The phrases "White Flight," "Redlining," "Blockbusting," "Steering" would be a good place to begin.
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