Cars wouldn't be so much of a problem if there were fewer of them. A mostly-pedestrianized street with a car going down it at low speed every 5 minutes isn't m

Cars wouldn't be so much of a problem if there were fewer of them. A mostly-pedestrianized street with a car going down it at low speed every 5 minutes isn't much of an issue. There was a time in many major US cities where cars coexisted with pedestrians and other vehicles, because there were simply fewer cars. But there seems to be a certain tipping point where you get enough cars, and they push everything else off of the roads (either de facto or de jure), and what you have left is an automobile-dominated wasteland. The straightforward solution in places like Manhattan with limited entrances and exits is simply to limit the number of cars at the bridges and tunnels and toll the hell out of them. If it cost $150 or $200 to drive into Manhattan (rough guess at the market-clearing price for "car permits" if you wanted to return to a pre-1960s level), I suspect there wouldn't be nearly as many cars on the road, and you wouldn't have very many pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities. The political will to do this, of course, is the problem.