Daniel sent us this one — he's pointing out something genuinely wild when you stop to think about it. We've poured trillions of dollars and decades of urban planning into optimizing cities around one specific user, the driver. And his question is basically, if we're finally moving away from car-centric living, what does it actually look like to redesign our streets and public spaces for the person instead of the vehicle? Not just fewer cars, but what do we build in their place?
Oh, this is the good stuff. And you know what makes this moment different? For the first time in about seventy years, we're actually running real experiments at scale. Barcelona, Paris, Milan, they're not writing white papers, they're pouring concrete.
Fun fact before we go further — DeepSeek V four Pro is writing our script today. So if I sound unusually articulate, now you know why.
That explains the pacing. I was going to say, I sound remarkably well-researched even for me.
Don't get used to it. So where do we even start with this? Because Daniel's question has layers. There's the history of how we got here, there's what's actually being tried right now, and then there's the trickier question of whether any of it sticks.
Let's start with the scale of the problem, because I think most people don't realize just how much of our cities we handed over to cars. Jan Gehl, the Danish architect who's been studying this since the nineteen sixties, points out that in most American cities, cars get about seventy to eighty percent of public space. Streets, parking lots, highways, driveways. The person on foot gets whatever's left over on the sidewalk.
Seventy to eighty percent. And we just... accepted that as normal.
We didn't just accept it. We actively chose it. There was a very deliberate shift starting in the nineteen twenties and thirties, but really accelerating after World War Two. You had the combination of mass automobile production, federal highway funding, and zoning codes that basically mandated car dependency.
The zoning piece is the one people miss. Everyone talks about the highways, but the zoning is sneakier.
This is one of those policies that sounds boring and technical but has reshaped the entire built environment. Starting in the nineteen fifties, most American cities adopted rules saying every new building had to include a certain number of off-street parking spaces. And these numbers weren't based on any real study. Donald Shoup at UCLA, he literally wrote the book on this, found that most cities just copied their parking requirements from other cities, adding a little more just to be safe.
We ended up with parking requirements designed by a game of municipal telephone.
The result is that in Los Angeles, parking covers about fourteen percent of all incorporated land. In some downtowns, surface parking alone takes up thirty percent of the land area. And here's the kicker — all that parking isn't free. It gets bundled into rent, into the cost of groceries, into everything you buy. Shoup estimates that free parking adds about a hundred dollars a month to the average American's housing costs, whether they own a car or not.
You're subsidizing drivers even if you walk or bike everywhere. That's the part that would drive me up a wall if I moved faster than half a mile an hour.
That's exactly why parking reform has become one of the most effective levers for changing urban space. Buffalo became the first major American city to eliminate parking minimums citywide in twenty seventeen. Minneapolis eliminated them in twenty twenty-one. And the effects show up fast. Without parking mandates, you start getting the kind of incremental development that's been illegal for decades — small apartment buildings on small lots, corner stores in residential neighborhoods, the sort of stuff that makes a neighborhood walkable.
Walkable is the word I want to camp on for a minute, because Daniel's question is about reclaiming space for the person. And there's a difference between "less bad for pedestrians" and "actually designed for pedestrians.
This is Jan Gehl's whole framework. He makes a distinction between "necessary activities" and "optional activities." Necessary activities are things you do regardless of the environment — commuting to work, buying groceries. Optional activities are things you only do if the space invites it — sitting on a bench, people-watching, letting your kids play. In car-dominated streets, people do their necessary activities and go home. In pedestrian-friendly spaces, optional activities explode. The street becomes a destination, not a corridor.
Which sounds almost romanticized until you see the data from places that have actually done it.
Right, so let's talk about Barcelona. The superilles, or superblocks. The basic idea is you take a three-by-three grid of city blocks, restrict through-traffic to the perimeter, and the interior streets become shared spaces with very low speed limits, priority for pedestrians and cyclists, and room for benches, trees, playgrounds. The first one launched in the Poblenou neighborhood in twenty seventeen.
What actually changed?
The Barcelona Institute for Global Health did a study and found that if the city implemented superblocks across the entire urban grid, it could prevent nearly seven hundred premature deaths per year. That's from reduced air pollution, reduced noise, more physical activity, and fewer heat island effects from all the new green space. On the individual block level, pedestrian traffic increased by about thirty percent, cycling by thirty percent, and car traffic on the interior streets dropped by over eighty percent.
Eighty percent fewer cars, and the businesses didn't collapse. Because that's always the pushback, right? If people can't park directly in front of my store, I'll go out of business.
It's one of those things where the fear is completely understandable but the evidence just keeps contradicting it. When Barcelona pedestrianized parts of the city center, retail sales went up. When New York City put in protected bike lanes and pedestrian plazas on Broadway, retail sales in those areas increased by about fifty percent in the first year. When Oslo removed parking spaces from the city center, retail spending went up. People on foot buy more stuff than people in cars. They stop more often, they browse, they're not rushing to beat a parking meter.
The economic argument for car-centric retail turns out to be backwards. But I want to push on something. Barcelona and Oslo and parts of New York, these are dense, old cities where walking was already part of the culture. What about the places that were built entirely around the car? The suburbs, the Sun Belt cities, where the street network itself assumes you're driving?
That's the harder case, and I'm not going to pretend there's an easy answer. But there are interesting things happening even there. Take parking lot conversions. California passed AB twenty ninety-seven back in twenty eighteen, which basically says any parking lot within half a mile of transit can be redeveloped into housing without needing a zoning change. Former mall parking lots becoming mixed-use neighborhoods.
The parking crater around the dead mall becomes housing with ground-floor retail.
Suddenly you've got a walkable node in the middle of a car-dependent area. It's not a full transformation, but it's a seed. You're not telling people they can't have cars, you're giving them a place where they might need one less often. One fewer trip per day per household adds up across a city.
That's actually a useful framing. Because I think one reason these conversations get stuck is that they feel binary. Either you're a car city or you're a pedestrian paradise. And most places are going to be hybrids for a long time.
The term that's emerged in planning circles is the "fifteen-minute city." The idea that most daily needs — work, school, groceries, healthcare, parks — should be accessible within a fifteen-minute walk or bike ride. Carlos Moreno at the Sorbonne popularized this, and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo made it the centerpiece of her reelection campaign in twenty twenty.
Paris has actually been moving fast on this. I've been following what they're doing with the school streets.
The "rues aux écoles." They've pedestrianized streets in front of about two hundred schools since twenty twenty. They close them to cars during drop-off and pickup times, sometimes permanently. They add trees, benches, play equipment. And it's one of those interventions that seems small but has outsized effects. Kids can play outside. Parents talk to each other instead of managing a car line. Air quality right around the schools improves measurably.
It's politically clever, because who's going to argue against safer streets for schoolchildren?
You'd be surprised. There's been pushback. But it's a much harder case to make than opposing a bike lane on a commuter route. And Hidalgo's administration has been strategic about sequencing. Start with the schools, build support, then expand. By twenty twenty-six, Paris has removed something like fifty thousand parking spaces and added over a thousand kilometers of bike lanes. The cycling mode share tripled in some arrondissements.
Fifty thousand parking spaces. That's a whole different relationship to public space. And I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier — the heat island effect. Because reclaiming space for people isn't just about mobility, it's about whether you can actually survive being outside.
This is becoming urgent. Surface parking lots and wide asphalt streets absorb heat during the day and radiate it back at night. In Phoenix, researchers at Arizona State have measured surface temperatures on parking lots hitting a hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit in summer. When you convert that to a park or even just a tree-lined pedestrian street, the surface temperature can drop by twenty to thirty degrees.
The same square footage goes from actively hostile to human life to actually pleasant. And we've been choosing hostile for decades because it was convenient for storing a two-ton metal box.
The cooling effect scales. Medellín, Colombia, built the Green Corridors project starting in twenty sixteen. They planted over eight thousand trees and created a network of shaded pedestrian and cycling paths through the city. They've documented a temperature drop of two to three degrees Celsius across the corridor network. Two degrees doesn't sound like much, but in a tropical city, it's the difference between people going outside and people staying in air-conditioned isolation.
Medellín is a good case study because it's not a wealthy northern European city with a biking culture going back a century. And yet they did it anyway, and it worked.
They did it in a city with serious topography. Steep hills, sprawl, all the challenges. What they figured out was that the green corridors could also serve as transportation infrastructure. They integrated them with the cable car system, with the metro, with bike lanes. So you're not just beautifying, you're connecting people to transit.
Which brings up a point I think gets lost. When we talk about reclaiming space for people, we're not talking about eliminating transportation. We're talking about a different mix of transportation. And the mix matters because different modes use space with wildly different efficiency.
Oh, this is one of my favorite data points. A single person in a car, at urban speeds, takes up about a hundred and forty square meters of road space including safe following distance. A person on a bicycle takes up about twenty square meters. A person walking, about eight. A person on a bus, if the bus is reasonably full, about three square meters. So when you convert a car lane to a bus lane or a protected bike lane, you're not reducing capacity. You're multiplying it.
The "war on cars" framing gets it exactly backwards. The most space-inefficient mode has been given the most space.
The most subsidy. When you add up the cost of road construction, maintenance, parking enforcement, traffic policing, and the health costs from pollution and crashes, driving is massively underpriced. The International Transport Forum found that in most developed countries, drivers pay about half to two-thirds of the true cost of their driving through fuel taxes and registration fees. The rest is borne by everyone else.
We've built a system where the least efficient mode gets the most space and the biggest subsidy. And Daniel's question is, what happens if we flip that? What if we optimized for the person instead?
I think the first thing to say is, it's not theoretical. We have examples now. Let me walk through a few that are instructive in different ways.
First, Pontevedra, in Spain. Small city, about eighty thousand people in Galicia. Back in nineteen ninety-nine, the mayor basically banned cars from the city center. Not gradually, not with pilot programs. He just did it. Traffic in the center dropped by ninety percent. Carbon dioxide emissions fell by seventy percent. And here's the part that always gets me — pedestrian fatalities in the city dropped to zero. From twenty six in the decade before the policy to zero in the decade after.
That's the number that makes you wonder why this is even a debate.
The economic piece is important too. Pontevedra's population had been declining before the pedestrianization. Afterward, it stabilized and then started growing. Young families moved in. The city found an identity.
Pontevedra is small. What about a city of millions?
That's where Milan comes in. Milan implemented its Area C congestion charge in twenty twelve, covering the historic center. Traffic dropped by about thirty percent. But the more interesting thing is what they did during and after the pandemic. Starting in twenty twenty, they launched the "Strade Aperte" or Open Streets plan. They converted thirty-five kilometers of streets to pedestrian and cycling priority. They widened sidewalks, added bike lanes, created outdoor dining areas. And they did it fast — within months, not years.
The pandemic was this weird natural experiment for cities. Suddenly nobody was driving, and you could see what was possible.
The lesson from that period, which a lot of cities are now acting on, is that the barriers to change were never technical or financial. They were political. When the politics shifted, the asphalt followed. Paris built pop-up bike lanes in weeks that had been debated for years. Bogotá expanded its ciclovía network. Oakland closed miles of streets to through-traffic. The question was never can we do it. It was always will we do it.
What's stopping more places from doing it permanently? Because the pandemic urgency has faded, and some of those pop-up changes got rolled back.
A few things. One is the political organization of opposition. Drivers are a concentrated interest group. They notice immediately when a lane is removed or parking is eliminated. The beneficiaries of pedestrianization are diffuse — everyone breathes cleaner air, but nobody's writing their city councilor to say "thank you for the marginal improvement in particulate matter.
That's the Mancur Olson logic of collective action. Concentrated costs, diffuse benefits.
The second thing is that we've locked in car dependency through land use. Even if someone wants to walk or bike, if their city has been built so that everything is miles apart, they can't. So the urban form itself creates a constituency for continued car prioritization.
Which means you can't just do transportation reform in isolation. It has to be paired with land use reform.
That's why parking reform is such a big deal. It's the connective tissue. When you eliminate parking minimums, you allow the kind of incremental densification that makes walking and transit viable. A corner store can actually exist within walking distance. A small apartment building can go up where previously you needed a parking podium that made the whole project uneconomical.
Let me play devil's advocate for a second, because I think Daniel would want us to grapple with the hard cases. What about people who need cars? The elderly, people with disabilities, families with small children, people who work night shifts when transit isn't running?
This is the right question to ask, and the honest answer is that the goal isn't zero cars. It's cars as an option rather than a requirement. In a well-designed city, the elderly person who can't drive anymore isn't trapped at home. The teenager can get to school without a parent chauffeuring them. The family with young kids might still own a car but use it for one trip a week instead of seven.
It's about degrees of freedom. Right now, in most American cities, if you can't drive, you're effectively disabled in terms of mobility. The goal is to make the car optional for more people, more of the time.
The disability angle is actually under-discussed. About a third of Americans don't have a driver's license. That includes children, the elderly, people with certain disabilities, people who can't afford a car. And yet we've designed our cities as if everyone drives. The curb cuts that disability advocates fought for in the nineteen seventies and eighties benefit everyone — parents with strollers, delivery workers, travelers with luggage. The same logic applies to pedestrian-friendly streets. When you design for the most vulnerable users, everyone benefits.
The curb cut effect. Universal design principles applied to public space.
There's good data on this from the Vision Zero movement. Sweden originated Vision Zero in nineteen ninety-seven — the idea that no one should be killed or seriously injured in traffic. It's not about reducing crashes, it's about designing streets so that when humans make mistakes, which they will, the consequences aren't fatal. Lower speeds, narrower lanes, protected intersections, pedestrian islands. Oslo and Helsinki have both gotten to zero pedestrian and cyclist fatalities in some recent years.
They seem to keep showing up in these success stories.
Oslo's been aggressive about it. They removed over seven hundred parking spaces from the city center starting in twenty sixteen, added bike lanes, pedestrianized streets, and invested in transit. In twenty nineteen, Oslo recorded zero pedestrian and cyclist fatalities. First major city to hit that. And the business community, which initially opposed the changes, has largely come around because foot traffic increased.
Let's pull on the thread of what's actually happening right now in American cities. Because I feel like the U.conversation has shifted in the last few years.
It has, and I think there are a few things driving it. One is generational. Younger people are getting driver's licenses later and driving less. The share of nineteen-year-olds with driver's licenses dropped from about eighty-seven percent in nineteen eighty-three to about sixty-eight percent by twenty twenty-two. That's a huge shift.
There's a growing constituency for alternatives.
They're showing up politically. The second thing is the housing crisis. Cities need more housing, and parking requirements make housing more expensive and harder to build. So you're getting this coalition between housing advocates and transportation reformers that's been surprisingly effective. California's parking reforms, Oregon's legalization of middle housing, Minneapolis ending single-family zoning — all of these are land use reforms that enable less car-dependent development patterns.
Minneapolis is an interesting case. They passed their twenty forty comprehensive plan, which eliminated single-family zoning and parking minimums citywide, and it was hugely controversial. But it passed.
It's working. Rents in Minneapolis have grown more slowly than in comparable cities. New housing has been built. And the political blowback that opponents predicted didn't really materialize. The neighborhood doesn't collapse when someone builds a triplex.
I want to push on the speed of change. Because urban form changes slowly. Buildings last decades, streets last generations. If we start now, what does a city actually look like in twenty or thirty years?
I think you see a patchwork. Some neighborhoods transform quickly, others barely change. But the direction of travel matters more than the speed. If every time a street gets repaved, it gets a protected bike lane and wider sidewalks, that adds up. If every time a parking lot gets redeveloped, it becomes housing with ground-floor retail instead of more parking, that adds up. The incremental approach is less exciting than grand visions, but it's how cities actually change.
There's a political advantage to incrementalism. Each project builds a constituency for the next one. People who got a bike lane in their neighborhood become supporters of bike lanes elsewhere.
This is exactly what happened in New York under Janette Sadik-Khan. She was the transportation commissioner under Bloomberg from twenty seven to twenty thirteen. They started with small pilot projects — a pedestrian plaza in Times Square, a protected bike lane on Ninth Avenue. People were skeptical, some were furious. But the pilots worked. Traffic moved fine. Businesses did well. And then they could point to the data and expand. By the time she left, they'd added nearly four hundred miles of bike lanes and created dozens of pedestrian plazas.
Times Square going pedestrian was one of those things that seemed impossible until it happened, and then immediately seemed obvious.
That's the pattern. The status quo feels inevitable until it changes, and then you can't imagine going back. Nobody in Copenhagen today thinks they should bring cars back to Strøget, the main pedestrian street. But when they pedestrianized it in nineteen sixty-two, merchants protested and predicted ruin. Now it's one of the most successful retail streets in Europe.
The question isn't really whether pedestrianization works. We have seventy years of evidence that it does. The question is how to build the political will to do it.
I think part of the answer is reframing. Don't talk about taking away cars, talk about giving back public space. Don't talk about restricting drivers, talk about liberating everyone else. The frame that's been most successful: we're not anti-car, we're pro-people. Cars will still exist, they just won't dominate everything.
That's the Daniel frame, right? Optimize for the person. The car is a tool, not the stakeholder.
When you optimize for the person, you end up making choices that benefit drivers too, paradoxically. Fewer cars on the road means less congestion for the people who do need to drive. Better transit and bike infrastructure means fewer people competing for parking. It's not a zero-sum game.
Unless you define the game as "how much asphalt can I personally occupy at any given moment.
There's a certain type of person who experiences a bike lane as a personal affront. But that's a small minority. Most people just want to get where they're going safely and conveniently. And if you give them options, they'll use the one that works best for the trip they're making.
Let's talk about the financial piece, because I think this is where the conversation gets real. Who pays for the transformation?
The beautiful thing is that pedestrian and bike infrastructure is dramatically cheaper than car infrastructure. A mile of urban freeway costs somewhere between fifty and a hundred million dollars. A mile of protected bike lane costs somewhere between a hundred thousand and half a million. A pedestrian plaza can cost almost nothing if you're just closing a street and adding some planters and benches. For the cost of one highway interchange, you can transform dozens of neighborhoods.
The cost argument cuts in favor of pedestrianization, not against it.
And when you factor in long-term maintenance — asphalt needs repaving every ten to fifteen years, pedestrian spaces last much longer because they're not being pounded by two-ton vehicles — the lifecycle cost difference is even bigger.
The health savings.
Physical inactivity costs the U.healthcare system something like a hundred and seventeen billion dollars a year. If you design cities where people walk more as part of daily life, you don't need to convince them to go to the gym. The exercise is built into the environment. The Barcelona superblock study estimated that the health benefits from increased physical activity alone would offset the implementation costs within a few years.
We've got environmental benefits, health benefits, economic benefits for local businesses, lower infrastructure costs, and zero pedestrian fatalities in cities that have gone all-in. At what point do we admit that car-centric design was just a seventy-year mistake?
I don't think it was a mistake exactly. It was a choice made under specific historical conditions — cheap land, rapid suburbanization, a booming auto industry, and frankly a lot of racial and class dynamics around who got to live where and how they moved around. The mistake is continuing to make that choice now that we know the costs.
That's fair. But we're fifty years past the point where the context changed.
The interesting thing is how fast the Overton window is shifting. Ten years ago, eliminating parking minimums was a fringe idea. Now it's happening in cities across the country. Ten years ago, congestion pricing was politically toxic in New York. Now it's implemented. The direction of change is clear, even if the pace is frustrating.
If Daniel's asking what the future looks like, I think we can paint a pretty concrete picture. Streets that are narrower, with wider sidewalks. Intersections raised to sidewalk level, forcing cars to slow down. Parking lots that become housing or parks. School streets closed to cars. Networks of protected bike lanes that actually connect to each other and to transit. Trees everywhere, partly for shade and partly because they make streets feel like places rather than corridors.
The cumulative effect is that the street becomes a room. That's a Jan Gehl concept. A good street has walls — the buildings on either side — a floor, and a ceiling, which might be tree canopy. It has furniture — benches, lights, planters. It has proportions that feel comfortable to a human being, not a highway. And when you design streets as rooms, people treat them differently. They slow down. They make eye contact.
The street as a room. I like that. It reframes the whole question. We're not building transportation infrastructure, we're building public living rooms.
That's the shift that Daniel's question is really about. For seventy years, we treated streets as pipes — their job was to move as many cars as possible as fast as possible. But streets are the largest public space in any city. In New York, streets and sidewalks are about twenty-five percent of the city's land area. That's more than all the parks combined. And for most of modern history, we've used that space almost exclusively for moving and storing vehicles.
Twenty-five percent of New York City. Imagine if even a third of that was designed for people instead of cars.
You'd have a fundamentally different city. And the places that have done it, even partially, show what's possible. Barcelona's superblocks are basically taking intersections that were used as cut-throughs for cars and turning them into small plazas. Kids play there. Old people sit on benches. The space didn't get bigger, it just got reassigned.
I think that's the core insight. We're not creating new space, we're reallocating existing space. The question is who gets priority. And for most of the last century, the answer was the driver, every time.
The driver didn't even get a great experience out of it, because when you optimize everything for cars, you get traffic. Induced demand means that widening roads just fills them with more cars. The only way to reduce congestion is to give people viable alternatives to driving.
Which brings us back to the person. If you optimize for the person, you give them choices — walk, bike, bus, train, or drive. And they pick the one that makes sense for that trip. If you optimize for the car, you remove choices, and then everyone has to drive whether they want to or not.
That's the tragedy of car-centric planning. It doesn't even deliver what it promises. You get traffic, you get parking shortages, you get road rage, you get hours of your life wasted in congestion. The average American spends about fifty-four hours a year in traffic delays. That's more than a full work week. And that's in the system that was supposedly optimized for drivers.
Fifty-four hours. Meanwhile, the Dutch spend about half that, because they have alternatives. When the roads are clogged, people take the train or bike.
The Netherlands is the classic example of a country that made the choice. In the nineteen seventies, they were heading down the same car-centric path as everyone else. They had a particularly high rate of child traffic fatalities, and there was a massive protest movement — "Stop de Kindermoord," stop the child murder. The government responded by fundamentally rethinking street design. They created the woonerf, the living street, where cars are guests and pedestrians have priority. They built the world's best cycling infrastructure. And now they have some of the safest streets and highest quality of life in the world.
It wasn't because the Dutch are fundamentally different from everyone else. They just made different choices.
They made different choices and they stuck with them for fifty years. That's the part we tend to gloss over. The transformation takes time. But the direction matters more than the speed.
If I'm hearing you right, the answer to Daniel's question has a few layers. First, we reclaim space by changing the rules — eliminate parking minimums, lower speed limits, narrow lanes, close streets to through-traffic. Second, we reinvest the savings into alternatives — transit, bike networks, pedestrian infrastructure. Third, we let the land use follow the transportation — allow more density near transit, convert parking lots to housing, bring back corner stores. And fourth, we do it incrementally, building political support project by project.
Fifth, we measure what matters. Not vehicle throughput, but pedestrian counts. Not parking availability, but retail sales per square foot. Not average speed, but number of people who can access jobs and services within fifteen minutes without a car. When you change the metrics, you change the outcomes.
Because what gets measured gets managed. And for too long, we've been measuring the wrong things.
The transportation engineering profession is actually going through a reckoning on this. For decades, the standard was Level of Service — basically, how fast are cars moving? An intersection that was slow for cars got a failing grade, regardless of whether pedestrians could cross safely. The newer standard is Multimodal Level of Service, which measures how well the street works for everyone. It's a quiet bureaucratic change with huge implications.
The kind of thing that never makes headlines but reshapes cities over decades.
That's really the story of urban transformation. It's not one big dramatic moment. It's thousands of small decisions — a curb radius here, a lane width there, a parking requirement somewhere else — that compound over time into a fundamentally different city.
Daniel's prompt, which starts with "isn't it crazy that we optimized everything for drivers," ends up pointing toward a quiet revolution that's already happening. The crazy thing isn't that we're changing it. The crazy thing is that it took this long.
The even crazier thing is how much better the alternative is, once you experience it. People visit Copenhagen or Amsterdam or Tokyo and come back saying "why can't we have this?" And the answer is, we can. We just have to choose it.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In nineteen seventy-three, a team of Japanese researchers on Hokkaido nearly weaponized the echolocation of bats by attempting to train a colony of greater horseshoe bats to home in on the ultrasonic signatures of Soviet submarines in the Sea of Japan. The project was abandoned after the bats repeatedly locked onto a local fishing fleet's sonar instead.
...right.
That's where we'll leave it. The future of cities is being written right now, one parking space at a time. Thanks to Daniel for the prompt, and thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping us on the rails.
If you want more episodes like this one, head to myweirdprompts dot com. This has been My Weird Prompts.
We'll catch you next time.
