Build Cities for People, Not Cars

It will never stop to amaze me how much time and money Americans spend to visit walkable cities without ever thinking, “Hey…maybe we should replicate this at home”. Every year, millions across the U.S. will flock to cities across the world to feel the magic of being somewhere that is actually designed for a human. We love to romanticize the narrow streets of Tokyo or cobblestone alleys across Europe, and yet we still settle for this.

This is America. Or at least the America we’ve drawn up for now. Most of the U.S. is perfectly content with our home looking like this. Completely accepted as the status quo. For a nation brimming with so many bright, ambitious, and proud people, it’s pretty sad that this has become the norm. 

Actually, this is better than the norm. In this image above, this road would be considered “Level of Service A” which has been enshrined by the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) and American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) as the golden standard for how to design roadways.

Level of service, with rankings A through F, was introduced as a method to measure motor vehicle traffic service, and in return has now created an incentive structure that awards the development of roadways geared towards this vehicular flow. Transportation engineers studying across the country are taught that this is the best way to build, and as such, there is little to no focus on what it feels like to actually “exist” in the space outside of an car.

While highly subjective, much of the best cities and urban areas in the world resemble principles of new urbanism. Very different from what is seen across America today. First arising in the 1980’s, new urbanism is a design philosophy that emphasizes creating walkable, interconnected neighborhoods, integrating a diverse mix of residential, commercial, and public spaces. By focusing on pedestrian-friendly environments, it aims to reduce reliance on cars, fostering a more sustainable, community-oriented urban life. This approach not only enhances the quality of life and social interactions but also contributes to environmental sustainability and urban vitality.

One of the more comical aspects about our resignation to this hellscape is that our best applications of new urbanism are at amusement parks or indoor facilities. Any Disney themed park is probably the most notable example. Hilarious, yet so backwards when actually thinking about it.

Picture this. You hear the lapping of water against mossy stone steps and slender boats. Distant footsteps echo, reverberating off brickwork, and somewhere, a church bell tolls, its sound floating above a maze of canals. 

Now, if I had to ask you where you think you were in this above passage, I’m confident many of you would have guessed Venice, Italy. Unfortunately, this is the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. One of the only places where you would be able to legally experience a feeling like the one I just described above.

Yes, it is literally illegal to build these walkable, mixed-use, neighborhoods in the United States. Human-centric urban development has been outlawed. This is due to an array of zoning and land-use requirements that have led to the proliferation of auto-centric development. Strip malls, massive parking frontages, and wide highways have been cemented as the de-facto features of this style of planning. This misguidance has prevented our ability to build places for people. 

Arguably most infuriating of these perverse regulations are minimum parking requirements. A quintessential example of how awry American urban planning has gone. Minimum parking requirements are local zoning regulations that mandate a specific number of parking spaces for new buildings or developments based on their size, use, or capacity. They are designed to ensure adequate parking, but in turn encourage auto-oriented land use.

Donald Shoup, a legendary UCLA urban planning professor, perfectly distills the issues of parking requirements in his 1999 piece The Trouble with Minimum Parking Requirements. In one passage Shoup analogizes parking requirements to lead therapy, which was used for centuries as an antiseptic due to immediate observable benefits, but ignored the long term harm caused.

Shoup’s words still ring as true as ever. Decades of poor planning has cascaded The U.S. built environment into a equilibrium state of failure, to a point where it has now seemingly made us delusional. In 2021, AASHTO announced that the Utah Department of Transportation had won the top prize in the Quality of Life/Community Development for this absolute monstrosity of an interchange.

Not sure in which universe this picture contains any semblance of “quality of life” or “community”, but here in the U.S. this has become the gold standard. How far we have strayed from the light, indeed. 

What Does Good Look like? 

Good looks like this street in Valencia, Spain. Trees, a nice mix of materials for the roadway, and a good sense of enclosure. 

Good also includes access to frequent transit, housing density, narrow and connected street networks, bike infrastructure, and street furniture. All key components of people-centric urban planning. Luckily for us, most of what makes livable places functional is not rocket science. Although we have badly forgotten how to build cheaply, there is still time to build cities that are made for people, not cars. 

There are plenty of different focus areas for how to fix U.S. cities, but for the sake of not turning this into a much longer read, we will just focus on one of the most important aspects of building cities for people – walkability. This is arguably America’s most glaring weakness when analyzing the urban design of our communities. 

Walkable cities enable those without access to a car the ability to get anywhere in their community and have access to any basic goods or services within a 5-10 minute walk. Older cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia have characteristics that set the standard for what a walkable city can look like, but the rest of the U.S. has failed to replicate this at scale. 

One of the most important factors in creating walkable cities is street and road design. A walkable city does not include roads with 5 lanes of vehicular traffic flowing in each direction, and definitely does not include the suburban cul-de-sac pattern that become widespread in the mid 20th century.

The street design on the right in the image above is representative of what many suburban neighborhoods in the U.S. look like. The dark shaded areas represent where a pedestrian would be able to access in 10 minutes of walking. A stark difference.

Intersection density is a key ingredient for a walkable neighborhoods as it enables high connectivity, therefore allowing the pedestrian fantastic access to surrounding areas. This density is also crucial for pedestrian safety as it helps to slow the speed of cars down. When there are four way intersections at a high frequency, drivers are forced to be more aware of their surroundings, and pedestrians are usually given the upper hand in terms of mobility. 

Here is a good list of ten features that walkable communities have if interested in reading more on this topic. 

The Underappreciated Panacea

Good urban design, with walkability at its core, can solve many of the issues that plague our nation today. From socioeconomic to climate issues, looking at the built environment as a mode for fixing many of society's ailments has been overlooked for too long.

One of the most notable solutions that is given little attention, is how walkable cities could help cure loneliness. 

Loneliness in the United States has recently been declared as an epidemic, with the U.S. Surgeon General defining it as one of the most serious public health crises of our time. Research has shown that loneliness can significantly increase risk for premature death. Numbers show that loneliness contributes to a 29% increased risk of heart disease, a 32% increased risk of stroke, and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults. A complex issue that transcends across disciplines.

One way for the U.S. to engage in “pro-connection” public policies, as encouraged by the U.S. Surgeon General in his letter, is to rethink the built environment. Social interaction between people is a fundamental feature of a thriving urban experience. By switching from building our communities for cars and instead for people, we may actually be able to develop a solution to solve this loneliness epidemic. 

This concept, while not consensus, has been studied for quite some time. Donald Appleyard, a late professor from University of California, Berkeley, published the book Livable Streets in 1981 that highlighted this topic. Appleyard conducted a study comparing three residential streets in San Francisco that had similar characteristics, but differed on their levels of traffic. 

He classified the subjects as a Light Street or that with 2,000 vehicles per day, a Medium Street with 8,000 vehicles per day, and a Heavy Street with 16,000 vehicles per day. His research concluded that residents of the Light Street had three times more friends and twice as many acquaintances as the people on the Heavy Street. He also noted that the “territory”, or exchange space, for which residents considered their own, was much larger for the Light Street than the Heavy Street. 

Residents were also asked specific questions on comfort, safety, noise, social interaction, and identity of the street. Those who lived on the Heavy Street, had a lack of kinship to their street and their neighbors. There was little sidewalk activity and the residents kept to themselves, leaving little sense of community. This was a total juxtaposition for residents of the Light Street, who noted plenty of spontaneous interactions and the roadway serving as a place for children to play. 

Tragically, Donald Appleyard died in 1982, only a year after the release of his book. A victim of a speeding automobile. His work has lived on, however, and represents a key insight into solving for our loneliness epidemic. 

Maybe the reason that so many Americans want to travel to walkable cities around the world is to chase a feeling of nostalgia they may have from University days. For many, college was the only time spent living in a place actually built for people. There are few words to describe the feeling of spontaneous interactions with friends and acquaintances strolling around campus. These are experiences that people will cherish for the rest of their lives, yet never question why it can't continue into their adult years. 

I do feel a renewed sense of optimism that things can change going forward. Seeing is believing, and many were exposed during the Covid-19 pandemic to the beauties of roads closed off to cars and restaurants serving people in the streets. There are serious efforts going on to reverse decades of poor planning (shoutout Culdesac!) and change the narrative around how we perceive and engage with the built environment. It’s time for all of us to demand our neighborhoods and cities be built for people, and not cars. I promise it will be worth it. 

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