You can overcome the forced working against you if you care enough, but nobody does.

(i.e. my experience is that people do, on the whole, care. But they generally care about different things, and especially have different priorities in terms of how they allocate their resources, especially time. This blog is a rant about people caring about things that the author cares about, a lot of which are reasonable, but are not the be-all end-all of priorities)

Particularly so in a world of longer lifespans and careers, higher information connectivity and so on.

It's arguably one of the reasons nations tend to experience boom periods in the aftermath of major wars. The destruction has a way of clearing out the accumulated complexity, giving people a clean slate to decide what's _really_ important/valuable/productive.

(To avoid any doubt, this is not an argument in favour of major wars.)

I live on the fringes of an old European city which was damaged but, largely, not destroyed by WWII bombing. The difficulty of building new transit lines here is legendary, essentially they're almost entirely paralysed by the web of competing interests, and this grows more every year, not less, as new ones arise.

Places that suffered nearer total war damage have a two-fold advantage. First, they could build back a city-plan that was more suited to the modern era - and secondly, nobody had time to get all that attached to the new city-plan, so they've had the flexibility to iterate further, things like retrofitting trams, relocating the main traffic arterials further from the city centre, new metro lines to adjust to changing demographic/geographic patterns and so on.

To this specific example - it's not that the competing interests are worthless exactly, but their sum total value is surely orders of magnitude less than a new metro line. However, because of the due processes that hold sway in a peaceful, democratic and rights-based society, they're able to gum up the works to the point that we can only build about one genuinely new metro line every 30 years, despite being one of the richest cities in the Western world.

This may be the case for many things, but I would add that a lot of things suck because of conflicting incentives. Whether it's laziness or even because they are actually getting paid MORE to do the sucky thing.

As an example, where I live a running joke is about the number of road cones whenever work is being done. They don't need THAT many road cones, but they put them there... why? I have no evidence, but I suspect someone is getting paid to add extra road cones - OR potentially another incentive is at play.

The biggest one that gets me is traffic lights within roundabouts... how anyone thinks that is a good idea.... arghh #sigh :(

Everyone complains about traffic, but nobody realizes that traffic is just what it's like to drive in a city. Stop driving.

The reason that angle is that "sharp" (I don't think it's very sharp tbh) is because cyclists are explicitly not supposed to zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour. That's how you kill someone. If you're going too fast to make a 30-degree turn and avoid crashing, you're going too fast to be on the sidewalk. It's like complaining that the tight curves on a residential street make it unsafe to drive down it at 60mph.

Anyway, the influence of the auto lobby on urban infrastructure is really well-established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dependency

Any normal sidewalk would be wide enough that a single person could not conceivably block it, and wearing headphones while walking, especially noise canceling ones, is popular because US cities are largely unpleasant, deafeningly loud places full of fast-moving cars.