The U-Turn Not Taken

But what of the road not taken? There was nothing inevitable about the way cars were adopted, first in America, and then by imitation in Europe and elsewhere. Are there other rules, and other ways of arranging urban spaces, that would have allowed cars to fit more smoothly into cities, rather than simply taking over the streets? Experiments in rece

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With government backing, behavior had shifted entirely by 1930, and the default was that streets were for cars, and pedestrians should limit themselves to crosswalks. The industry had successfully changed attitudes from always blaming the driver to assuming any collision was an unavoidable accident and probably the fault of a reckless pedestrian—an

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Creating pedestrian plazas like the one in Times Square is prevalent in many European and Asian cities like Amsterdam and Tokyo. They prioritize public transportation and cycling infrastructure while U.S. cities often favor cars.

It would be a massive cultural and behavioural shift to radically recast the automobile as a symbol not of freedom, but of restriction.

Cities around the world are proposing to replace the space taken up by parked cars with usable areas for people.

With this sort of amenity-rich cocoon, there is a relentless focus on the object, absent of any context or community. The future of mobility is assumed to be car-dependent, while a vision based more on public transportation is thought to be old-fashioned. But isn’t planning for the car the thing that is most out of date?