I want good urban design, but I realize that converting our existing construction is tremendously expensive and fraught with project risk. Our car-centric cities and suburbs cannot easily be undone. While it would be nice to have additional mass transit lines and increased density, all of these things are decades away at best.

It took decades to demolish vast swaths of US urban centers and replace them with surface parking, highways and sprawl. 1930s Dallas could be mistaken for 1930s downtown San Francisco. It will take decades more to undo this damage.