Welcome to My Weird Prompts. So Daniel sent us this one — he's been thinking about cities and cars, specifically about how noise and air pollution turn what should be a pleasant walk into something stressful. His Shabbat-versus-weekday air quality comparison really drove it home for him. He's looking for the thinkers and urbanists who are articulating a practical vision for reducing car dominance — not "ban all cars," but a real theory of change that handles emergency access, inter-city travel, and actually works. Who's shaping that conversation, and what does their proposal look like?
This is the kind of question that sits right at the intersection of about four disciplines and about forty years of accumulated research. And the timing is interesting — twenty twenty-six is genuinely a watershed year for this. London's ULEZ expansion just hit its final phase, Paris had its fifteen-minute city referendum results come through, and the US federal infrastructure bill's Complete Streets mandates are actually taking effect now. So the policy machinery is moving, but the intellectual scaffolding under it is what's worth mapping. And I think Daniel's Shabbat observation is the perfect entry point, because it captures something visceral. He's not citing a study. He's describing what it feels like to walk the same street on two different days and realize the Saturday version is fundamentally a different place than the Tuesday version. Same buildings, same trees, same width of sidewalk — but one feels like public space and the other feels like a corridor for machines.
I want to flag something before we dive in, because it's the rhetorical trap that stalls half these conversations before they start. There's this "car abolitionist straw man" that gets deployed constantly — the idea that anyone who criticizes car-centric design wants to confiscate everyone's vehicle and replace every road with a wheat field. It's nonsense, but it works as a debate tactic because it lets people avoid engaging with the actual proposals. You see it in every city council meeting, every op-ed, every Twitter thread. Someone says "maybe we should narrow this six-lane arterial that runs past an elementary school," and the response is "they want to take your car and strand you in your home.
Right — and every major figure we're going to talk about today explicitly rejects that position. The goal isn't zero vehicles. It's ending car dominance as the default design assumption. Emergency vehicles, deliveries, accessibility permits, people who need cars — none of the serious proposals eliminate those. They just stop designing every street as if the private car is the most important user of that space. Think about it this way: if you go to a hospital, the building is designed around the needs of patients and medical staff. That doesn't mean visitors are banned. It means the architecture prioritizes the core function. A street should prioritize the people who live on it, walk on it, and spend time on it — not the people who are just passing through at forty miles per hour.
Which brings us to the actual intellectual landscape. There are really three camps of thinkers doing this work, and they approach the problem from different angles. You've got the tactical urbanists and traffic-calming advocates — the people who change streets with paint and planters. You've got the economists — the parking and pricing reformers. And you've got the technologists — the mobility-as-a-service and curb-management people. They're not competing camps, really. They're working on different parts of the same problem. It's like three surgeons operating on the same patient from different angles — one on the circulatory system, one on the skeletal structure, one on the nervous system. They all need each other for the patient to walk out healthy.
Let's start with the tactical people, because they're the most visible. The foundational text here is Janette Sadik-Khan's "Streetfight," which came out of her time running New York City's Department of Transportation from two thousand seven to two thousand thirteen. She took over an agency that was basically a traffic-engineering monoculture — move cars faster, that's the job — and turned it into a laboratory for reallocating street space. Times Square pedestrianization, the Citi Bike program, hundreds of miles of bike lanes and bus lanes. All of it done fast, cheap, and with paint and planters rather than concrete. And the thing that's remarkable about her tenure is the speed. She didn't spend years in planning studies. She looked at Times Square, saw that pedestrians were crammed onto narrow sidewalks while cars had five lanes, and just... moved the barriers. It was almost shocking to the system. People had been talking about pedestrianizing Times Square for decades, and she just did it over a weekend.
The paint-and-planters approach is actually central to the philosophy. The term "tactical urbanism" was really crystallized by Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia in their twenty-fifteen book of the same name. The idea is that instead of waiting for a ten-year capital project, you test changes with temporary materials, gather data, and iterate. It's the urban design equivalent of a software beta. You push a minimum viable product, see how users interact with it, fix the bugs, and then commit to the full build. The alternative — the traditional approach — is like trying to design a whole operating system in a vacuum and then launching it all at once, which is how you get massive failures that are too expensive to undo.
It works because it changes the political calculus. When you propose a permanent street redesign, you get years of community meetings and lawsuits. When you put down some orange cones and paint and say "let's try this for six months and measure it," the opposition has a harder time arguing against an experiment. And then once the data comes in — retail sales up, crashes down — the temporary becomes permanent. The burden of proof shifts. Suddenly the opponents have to explain why they want to remove something that's demonstrably working, rather than the proponents having to prove it will work in advance.
Let's get concrete on one of these interventions because the mechanism is elegant. The "neckdown" or curb extension — where you extend the sidewalk into the intersection at crosswalks. The Federal Highway Administration did a meta-analysis in twenty twenty-three that found these reduce pedestrian-vehicle conflicts by roughly forty percent. The reason is straightforward: you're shortening the crossing distance, so pedestrians spend less time in the roadway, and you're forcing turning vehicles to take a tighter turn, which slows them down. You haven't banned cars. You've just made the geometry favor the pedestrian. It's a nudge, not a ban. The driver still gets where they're going. They just do it at a speed where they're less likely to kill someone if they make a mistake.
"daylighting" is the companion intervention — removing parking spaces near intersections so drivers can actually see pedestrians before they enter the crosswalk. It's one of those things where you hear about it and think, "why wasn't this always the rule?" The answer is that parking storage was prioritized over visibility. It's a design choice, not a natural law. If you've ever tried to cross a street and had to inch out past a parked SUV to see if anything's coming, you've experienced the failure of that design choice. You're basically gambling with your life because we decided that storing a private vehicle was more important than you being able to see oncoming traffic.
The FHWA data on daylighting is striking — pedestrian injury crashes drop by about thirty percent at intersections where parking is removed from the approach. And the cost is basically some paint and a few bollards. The barrier isn't technical or financial. It's political — every removed parking space has a constituency. And that constituency is vocal, organized, and shows up to meetings. The pedestrian who might be injured in a crash next year doesn't have a lobbyist. They don't even know they're a stakeholder yet.
Which is the perfect segue to camp two — the economists. And we cannot talk about parking economics without talking about Donald Shoup.
Donald Shoup is an economist at UCLA, now retired but still active in the discourse. His book "The High Cost of Free Parking" came out in two thousand five and got an updated edition in twenty twenty-five. It is not an exaggeration to say this book reshaped how cities think about parking. Shoup's argument is deceptively simple: free parking isn't free. It's bundled into rent, retail prices, and taxes, and it distorts every decision about land use and transportation. The analogy I like is that free parking is like a mandatory bread purchase baked into every transaction in the city. You buy an apartment, you're also buying a parking space whether you eat bread or not. You buy a coffee, part of the price is paying for the parking lot the coffee shop was forced to build. And if you don't eat bread, too bad — you're paying for it anyway.
Shoup's three principles for parking reform. One: price on-street parking to achieve roughly eighty-five percent occupancy — meaning there's always one or two open spaces per block so people don't cruise for parking. Two: return the parking revenue to the neighborhood that generates it, so residents see a direct benefit. Three: eliminate minimum parking requirements — the mandates that force developers to build a certain number of parking spaces regardless of whether the market wants them. That third one is the real sleeper. Parking minimums are essentially a mandate to subsidize car storage. They increase housing costs because structured parking is expensive to build — something like thirty to fifty thousand dollars per space in an underground garage. They force developers to allocate land to parking instead of housing. And they make car-free living artificially difficult because they ensure an oversupply of parking everywhere.
Here's where the Shoup framework gets really subversive. It reframes the entire debate. It's not "we're taking away your parking." It's "we're going to stop forcing everyone to pay for your parking whether they use it or not." That's a much harder argument to dismiss. You become the person defending a hidden tax on renters and shoppers, rather than the person defending your right to store private property on public land for free. The rhetorical ground completely shifts.
When you pair parking reform with congestion pricing, you get a coherent economic framework. London's ULEZ — the Ultra Low Emission Zone — is the most studied example. Transport for London's twenty twenty-five annual report shows nitrogen dioxide down forty-six percent in the central zone since twenty nineteen. That's a dramatic public health outcome. And critically, emergency response times were unchanged. The fire trucks and ambulances still get through — they're exempt from the charge, and reduced private car traffic actually makes their routes more predictable. The congestion doesn't just disappear, but it thins out enough that the vehicles that need to move fast can do so.
Let's talk about the third camp before we get to case studies — the technologists. Robin Chase is a name worth knowing. She co-founded Zipcar, so she's been thinking about shared vehicle access for decades. Her concept of the "mobility internet" is basically the idea that transportation should work like the internet — a network of shared resources with standardized protocols for access, routing, and payment. You don't need to own a car if you can summon the right vehicle for each trip from a shared fleet. Think about how you use cloud storage versus owning a hard drive. You don't buy a terabyte of storage for every file; you access shared server space as needed. Car ownership is like owning a server rack when most of the time you just need to send an email.
The curb management layer is where this gets really interesting. Companies like Coord and Populus are building digital platforms that let cities treat the curb as a dynamic asset rather than free storage. A loading zone might be for delivery trucks from six to ten in the morning, ride-share pickups during the day, and restaurant parklets in the evening. The pricing changes based on demand. It's the same logic as congestion pricing but applied to the curb itself. The same physical space serves three different functions across a single day, allocated by time and price rather than by whoever got there first and left their car.
The curb is the most undervalued real estate in every city. It's a strip of public land that in most places is given away for free to store private vehicles. Dynamic curb pricing is basically saying: this asset has value, different uses compete for it, let's allocate it rationally. If you wouldn't give away park land for free storage units, why are we doing it with the curb? It's the same principle — public space being used for private storage at zero cost to the user and enormous opportunity cost to everyone else.
The privacy concerns are real — these platforms collect granular data on vehicle movements, and the data-sharing agreements between cities and private mobility companies are still being negotiated. You don't want a situation where the city is selling detailed movement profiles to advertisers or where law enforcement gets warrantless access to where every vehicle in the city has been. But the core concept is hard to argue with. Right now, most cities have no idea what their curb space is actually being used for. It's a completely unmanaged resource. You wouldn't run a port without knowing which ships are docking where and for how long. The curb is a port for the urban logistics system, and we're running it blind.
Let's move to the case studies, because this is where the theory meets reality. Oslo is the one I find most instructive. Starting in twenty nineteen, they removed about seven hundred parking spaces from the city center and replaced them with bike lanes, seating areas, and public space. The city government's twenty twenty-five evaluation showed retail foot traffic increased ten percent. And here's the part that addresses the emergency-access objection directly: emergency vehicle response times actually improved. Reduced congestion meant faster travel for the vehicles that needed to be there. The fire department wasn't stuck behind a line of private cars circling for parking.
The pedestrianizing-streets-kills-retail myth is remarkably persistent given how thoroughly it's been debunked. Multiple studies across different cities and countries show the same pattern: when you remove cars from a street, foot traffic increases and retail revenue goes up. The mechanism is intuitive — people on foot linger longer, notice more storefronts, and are more likely to make impulse purchases. Drivers blast through and might stop at one destination. A driver is a transaction. A pedestrian is a customer. There's a study from Copenhagen that tracked spending patterns on pedestrianized streets versus car-oriented streets, and the per-person spending was actually higher on the pedestrianized ones because people stayed longer and visited more shops per trip.
The Barcelona superblocks are the counter-example that proves the rule about iteration. The initial implementation faced real backlash from residents over delivery access — if you can't get a truck to your building, that's a genuine problem. You can't carry a refrigerator on a cargo bike. So the city revised the model with timed loading windows. Delivery vehicles could enter during specific hours, and the rest of the time the streets were for people. It's not about purity. It's about finding the configuration that works. And that's the thing — the backlash wasn't a failure of the concept. It was feedback that improved the design. The second version was better because of the complaints about the first version.
That iterative approach is actually the through-line across all three camps. The tactical urbanists test with paint and adjust based on data. The economists adjust pricing until occupancy hits the target. The technologists build platforms that let different uses share the same space at different times. Nobody is proposing a one-size-fits-all solution. The whole intellectual tradition is anti-dogmatic. It's empirical. Try something, measure it, adjust, try again. It's closer to the scientific method than to political ideology.
Let's dig into the knock-on effect, because this is where the conversation gets interesting and where a lot of the public debate goes off the rails. The induced demand corollary in reverse.
This is the "disappearing traffic" phenomenon. The UK Department for Transport did a massive -analysis in twenty twenty-four, looking at over a hundred road-space reallocation projects — streets where capacity for cars was reduced to make room for bikes, buses, or pedestrians. They found an average twenty-five percent reduction in vehicle miles traveled in the treated areas. The traffic didn't just shift to other streets. A significant portion of it simply evaporated. This is the mirror image of induced demand. We've known for decades that when you add highway lanes, traffic increases to fill them. The reverse is also true: when you remove road capacity, some trips just... stop happening, or shift to other modes, or get combined with other trips.
Which makes sense when you think about it. People aren't making trips for the joy of driving. They're making trips to get somewhere, and they choose their mode based on what's convenient. When driving becomes slightly less convenient relative to other options, some trips shift to transit, walking, or cycling. Some trips get combined — instead of two separate errands by car, you do them in one trip. Some trips just don't happen because they weren't that important in the first place. The system adapts. It's like a gas in a container — it expands to fill the available volume, and it contracts when the volume shrinks.
This is where the equity critique gets complicated. The "bike lanes cause gentrification" argument has become a standard talking point against car-reduction policies. There's a real correlation — Portland State University did a study in twenty twenty-five showing property values near new bike infrastructure rise five to eight percent. But here's the key finding: displacement rates were not statistically different from control neighborhoods when paired with inclusionary zoning. The bike lane isn't causing the displacement. It's a marker that the neighborhood is receiving investment, and whether that investment displaces existing residents depends entirely on housing policy. The bike lane is the canary, not the coal mine.
The critique is valid as a warning about sequencing — build the affordable housing protections first, then add the bike infrastructure — but it's not an argument against the infrastructure itself. It's an argument for doing housing policy and transportation policy together. If you treat them as separate silos, you get perverse outcomes. If you coordinate them, you get neighborhoods that are both walkable and affordable. The problem isn't the bike lane. The problem is that we've underbuilt housing for so long that any neighborhood improvement triggers a speculative feeding frenzy.
And that's actually how Vienna approaches it. Their "supergrätzl" program — superblocks, modeled on Barcelona — puts social housing integration at the center of the design. The street redesign and the housing protections happen simultaneously. Different political contexts produce different implementations, but the underlying principle is the same: car reduction is a bundle of interventions, not a single policy. You can't just drop a bike lane into a neighborhood with no rent control and no affordable housing strategy and then act surprised when property values spike. That's not a failure of bike lanes. That's a failure of integrated planning.
Let's talk about the emergency services objection, because it's the one that comes up in every single city council meeting about street redesigns. The concern is real — if you narrow streets, add bollards, or close streets to through traffic, can a fire truck still reach a burning building? Nobody wants to be the person who voted for a street design that delayed an ambulance.
The answer from cities that have actually done this is: yes, and sometimes they get there faster. Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Freiburg have been designing car-reduced streets for decades. They use a combination of approaches. Bollards that lower automatically when an emergency vehicle approaches, triggered by the siren or a transponder. Dedicated emergency lanes that are physically separated from pedestrian zones but allow direct access. GPS-linked traffic signal preemption systems that clear intersections ahead of responding vehicles. The technology exists. It's not speculative. It's deployed and working in dozens of cities.
Oslo's data backs this up — emergency response times improved after the car-free center implementation. The reason is intuitive: when there's less congestion from private cars, emergency vehicles spend less time stuck in traffic. The narrower streets actually help because there's simply fewer vehicles competing for space. A fire truck on a street with ten private cars is going to move slower than a fire truck on a street with two private cars, regardless of how wide the street is. Width isn't the constraint.
The fire truck access problem is real but it's a design constraint, not a design prohibition. You design streets wide enough for a fire truck — which, by the way, is about twenty feet for a modern ladder truck. That leaves plenty of room for sidewalks, bike lanes, and street trees on most urban streets. The problem isn't that car-reduced streets can't accommodate emergency vehicles. It's that car-dominated streets use all that width for car storage and movement, and then claim nothing else can fit. When you look at a typical American arterial, you've got two travel lanes in each direction plus parking on both sides. That's sixty-plus feet of width. A fire truck needs twenty. The rest is car subsidy.
The inter-city travel problem is the other big objection. If you can't drive into the city, how do people from outside get to jobs, medical appointments, cultural events? And this is where the mobility-as-a-service layer becomes important. Nobody's saying you should bike from a farm town sixty miles away. The question is what happens when you reach the edge of the metropolitan area.
Regional rail is the backbone. But the last-mile problem is what kills it — you get off the train and you're still two miles from your destination. The solution set emerging is car-sharing hubs at transit stations, so you can take the train for the long-haul part and pick up a shared car for the last few miles. Integrated mobility apps like Moovit — now used in about thirty-four hundred cities — let you plan a trip that combines train, bus, bike-share, and car-share in a single itinerary with a single payment. You don't need to own the car. You just need access to one for the segment where a car is actually the right tool.
The Paris fifteen-minute city under Anne Hidalgo is probably the most ambitious implementation of these ideas at scale. The school streets program, running from twenty twenty through twenty twenty-six, closed three hundred streets to cars during drop-off and pickup times. The Paris Public Health twenty twenty-six report found childhood asthma emergency room visits dropped by thirty-three percent in the affected arrondissements. That's not a transportation statistic. That's a pediatric health outcome. You're not measuring traffic flow. You're measuring children's lungs.
It connects directly to the prompt's observation about Shabbat air quality. The Paris data shows that when you remove cars from the immediate vicinity of schools — even just for two hours a day — you get measurable health improvements in children. The mechanism is exactly what you'd expect: less tailpipe emissions, less particulate matter from brake dust and tire wear, less idling. It's the same phenomenon the prompt observed in Jerusalem, just applied as a deliberate policy intervention. Daniel noticed it intuitively on Shabbat. Paris measured it systematically with epidemiological methods. Same phenomenon, different levels of rigor, same conclusion.
What I find compelling about the school streets model is that it's politically hard to oppose. You're not proposing some abstract urbanist vision. You're saying: let's stop poisoning children outside their schools. The opposition has to argue in favor of cars idling near eight-year-olds, which is not a great look. It's the Overton window shift in action. Once the question becomes "should we reduce childhood asthma or not," the debate is effectively over. The only remaining argument is about implementation details.
It builds a constituency for broader change. Parents who experience what a car-free school street feels like become advocates for extending that to their own residential streets. They've tasted it. They know what a quiet street sounds like. They've seen their kids walk to school without gripping their hand in terror at every intersection. It's the tactical urbanism logic applied to a specific, sympathetic use case. You start with the intervention that has the most moral clarity and the least political resistance, and you build outward from there.
Let's pull all of this together into something actionable. The prompt asked specifically who to follow and what to read. So let's name names.
Janette Sadik-Khan is the first name. She's now at Bloomberg Associates, advising cities around the world on street redesigns. Her book "Streetfight" is the accessible entry point — it's part memoir of the NYC DOT years and part playbook. If you want to understand how a city agency can transform from a car-moving bureaucracy into a public-space creator, start there. It's written for a general audience. You don't need a planning degree. She tells stories about specific projects, what worked, what didn't, and what the political fights looked like from the inside.
"The High Cost of Free Parking" is a doorstop of a book — the updated twenty twenty-five edition is something like eight hundred pages. But you don't need to read the whole thing. The first few chapters lay out the argument, and the rest is evidence. His three principles are the takeaway: price to eighty-five percent occupancy, return revenue to the neighborhood, eliminate minimums. If you only remember those three things, you've got the core of the framework. The rest is just documentation of how badly the current system fails.
Robin Chase for the technology and shared-mobility angle. Her book "Peers Inc" is about how platforms enable shared resource use, and while it's not exclusively about transportation, the mobility applications are central. She's also active with Partners for a New Economy, thinking about how digital infrastructure reshapes physical infrastructure. Her argument is that we're underutilizing most of our physical assets — the average car is parked ninety-five percent of the time — and that digital coordination layers can dramatically increase utilization rates without requiring new construction.
The Strong Towns movement, founded by Charles Marohn. Strong Towns approaches car reduction from a municipal finance angle — their argument is that car-dependent development patterns are financially insolvent. The infrastructure is expensive to build and maintain, the tax revenue per acre is low, and the long-term liabilities exceed the short-term benefits. It's not an environmental argument. It's a balance-sheet argument. Marohn will walk you through the math of a typical suburban subdivision and show that the replacement cost of the pipes and roads exceeds the total taxable value of the properties they serve. It's a Ponzi scheme paved with asphalt.
The Strong Towns framing is particularly effective in politically conservative areas because it doesn't rely on climate change or environmental values. It just says: this development pattern is a Ponzi scheme, and here's the math. Marohn is a former traffic engineer, so he comes at it from inside the profession. He's not some outside activist. He's a guy who designed roads for a living and realized the numbers don't work. That gives him credibility with audiences who would tune out an environmentalist immediately.
For someone who wants to actually do something rather than just read, the Parking Reform Network at parkingreform dot org maintains a map of local advocacy groups working on parking minimums. Shoup's research suggests parking reform is the single highest-return intervention because it unlocks land value and reduces car dependency simultaneously. One zoning code change can reshape development patterns for decades. You don't need a billion-dollar light rail project. You just need to stop requiring developers to build parking they don't want to build and their tenants don't want to pay for.
If you want to engage at the local level, the most effective lever is attending city council meetings on street design and parking minimums. Submit public comments citing the FHWA daylighting data — the thirty percent pedestrian injury reduction is a number that's hard for council members to ignore. Request a school streets pilot using Paris's template — your local department of transportation probably already has the authority to do temporary street closures; they just need political cover. Most DOT directors know what works. They're constrained by what they think the political market will bear. Show them there's a constituency for it, and things start moving.
The -takeaway across all three camps is this: the theory of change is not "ban cars." It's "make not-driving so good that driving becomes the inferior choice." You build a city where walking, cycling, and transit are the obvious, convenient, pleasant options, and driving is something you do when you specifically need a car, not the default for every trip. It's the difference between prohibition and competition. Prohibition creates black markets and backlash. Competition creates better options that win on their merits.
That's the through-line connecting Sadik-Khan's protected bike lanes, Shoup's parking pricing, and Chase's mobility platforms. They're all working to change the default. Not to prohibit driving, but to end the assumption that every street must prioritize the private car above all other uses. The car becomes a tool you use when it's the right tool, not the tool you're forced to use for everything because every other option has been designed out of existence.
Which brings us to the open question that's going to define the next decade of this conversation. What happens when autonomous vehicles arrive at scale? The twenty twenty-six Waymo expansion in San Francisco is a live experiment in this. There are two possible futures. In one, robo-taxis cruise empty between passengers, adding vehicle miles without adding value, reinforcing car dominance. In the other, shared autonomous fleets replace private car ownership, and the number of vehicles in a city drops dramatically because each vehicle is utilized more hours per day. Same technology, radically different outcomes depending on the regulatory environment.
The curb management layer is where these futures diverge. If cities price curb access dynamically — if an empty autonomous vehicle cruising costs more than parking in a designated waiting area — then the economics push toward the shared-fleet model. If cities continue to treat the curb as free storage, the robo-taxis will cruise. The technology doesn't determine the outcome. The policy does. We're not passive recipients of whatever the tech companies decide to deploy. We get to set the rules of the game, and the rules determine who wins.
That's really the core insight of this entire intellectual tradition. Car dominance is not a natural law. It's a set of policy choices, design standards, and pricing signals that can be changed. The thinkers we've discussed have built the intellectual scaffolding. The case studies show it works. The question is no longer "should we reduce cars?" It's "how fast and in what sequence?" The evidence is in. The remaining obstacles are political will and institutional inertia.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the seventeen twenties, the Basque language was documented as having an ergative-absolutive grammatical alignment — a feature that linguists once believed had gone extinct in Indo-European languages but survived in Basque, making it a kind of living fossil of a grammatical structure that predates the language families we know today.
I don't know what to do with that.
a lot of syllables. I'm going to need a diagram to understand how that connects to anything we just discussed, but I appreciate the commitment to intellectual diversity.
The next frontier in all of this is curb management. Cities are beginning to treat the curb as a dynamic asset with real-time pricing for different uses — delivery, ride-share, accessible parking, parklets. This is where the tactical, economic, and tech camps converge. The curb is the interface between the street and the city, and right now it's the most mismanaged piece of public real estate in the world. It's the final frontier of street design. We've figured out travel lanes and sidewalks and bike lanes. The curb is the last piece of the right-of-way that we haven't systematically optimized.
That's the note I want to leave on. The prompt's Shabbat observation — the dramatic difference between a quiet street and a weekday street — is not just a personal anecdote. It's a data point in a global shift. The question is whether we design our streets to produce the Shabbat experience more often, for more people, in more places. Not once a week. Not as a religious observance. As a design outcome. As the default condition of urban life. That's the vision. Not a city without cars, but a city where the default sound is conversation and birdsong, and the car is a guest that knows it's a guest.
If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review — it helps other curious minds find us. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. This has been My Weird Prompts. I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. We'll be back soon.
