3 ms·

I generally agree, but "many centuries"? Come on. :)

• trgn 9y ago
  ha, imho, it reads as a stylistic choice that fits the exasperated tone I think. But there's a certain logic to that statement too. American cities always had very wide streets, 100 years before the car was invented even. In hindsight, it's hard to rationalize why really, but it seemed to have been because of this obsession for utility and practicality. Those very wide rigid grids were a transport-oriented design choice. To keep the horse shit away, so carts could make U-turns, so you could dump your bathwater in the middle. The tragedy was that those wide streets were the seed for cars eventually destroying urban cores. When cars were invented, they had the space for them right there. A street that was used for everything (markets, recreation, horses, ...), suddenly became a 4-5 lane highway filled with loud, stinking, dangerous cars. Of course nobody wants to live next to that, it's genuinely awful. It set in motion a vicious cycle of people moving out of the cores and needing more parking-infrastructure to accommodate that commuting.