Cities kick out the car: Part 2 of ‘And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile’
Part two of a three-part series exploring how cities around the world are snapping out of autopilot and moving beyond the automobile.
Ed. Previously, on ‘And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile’, I looked at how cities often got themselves into today’s mess, rebuilding around the car in the middle of the 20th century. Part two looks at how cities are moving on from the century old thinking embodied in the car, and its impact on our streets and places.
Over the last hundred years, city after city performed open heart surgery on themselves by building around the technology of the car. The ongoing complications of that surgery—in terms of environment and health, social and cultural life, politics and economics—are so extensive that we might think of the car as the single worst invention that we, as a species, have really got behind.
As the architect Peter Calthorpe put it:
“(Cars are) too much for the climate, too much for people’s pocketbooks, too much for the community in terms of congestion, too much for people’s time. I mean, every way you measure it, it has a negative — no walking is a…
