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Of course it's possible. We reverted millennia of pedestrian centered city planning in a century; I'm sure we can figure out how to reverse the damage done to c
by sundaeofshock 11y ago
Of course it's possible. We reverted millennia of pedestrian centered city planning in a century; I'm sure we can figure out how to reverse the damage done to cities over a single century.
- meddlepal 11y agoTearing down is a lot easier than building up. We leveled massive neighborhoods and rewrote how transportation infrastructure works in the US due to the car. Not to mention everything is much much more expensive now than it used to be and the political will to fix things isn't their. You've also got decades of voters who think in terms of the automobile. People in their 60's, 70's and 80's remember denser more urban cities where cars didn't dominate, but those people moved to the suburbs in their adult-hood and raised kids in the burbs who then raised their kids in the burbs and so on. Car culture is going to be here for a long time and the damage it has done will be slow healing because the people who could speed up the change the most have had an auto-centric world view from childhood.
- ghaff 11y agoSome of it's also that the large-scale buildout of automotive infrastructure happened at a time when governments at all levels in the US had pretty wide latitude to "make things so." While there are some pretty bad examples of urban planning from that era, there are other things that are pretty much net positives. This includes much of the interstate highway system but also includes other projects like Lincoln Center in New York. Today, for better or worse, outside of extreme urban blight it would be incredibly difficult for a city government to just bulldoze an entire neighborhood.