Jan Gehl Interview: How to Build a Good City

> so what's the alternative I think it's quite odd we nowadays think cars are the only possible form of transportation. We are not born with 4 wheels underneath our butt. The alternative is to build structures build for foot or bicycle traffic. Everything within 10k can easily be reached by either bicycle or foot traffic. By building infrastructure for cars, you create distances which are for cars only. They would otherwise not exist. > enabling them to find houses and jobs in the most economical and convenient places That's only possible due to the external costs of cars not being accounted for. Burning dinosaurs and destruction of nature is nowhere to be found in cars. If you would price cars accordingly, we would start planning differently. > once public transit become monopolistic We already have the same monopolistic issue just right now with cars as the only means of transportation. Without cars, you're not able to move in large parts of the U.S. This excludes about 50%+ of the U.S. population (children < 16yo, people who cannot afford cars or cannot drive themselves due to health reasons). > private cars win over public transit because it's a better product Why are cars a better product? Commute and travel time are a huge economical factor destroying time. They take up loads of space and require infrastructure and maintenance paid by society. > dependency on public transit times. That's a political issue which could be solved. Most of the money spent nowadays is spent on parking spots and car roads. If you would spend the same amount on public transport, you could probably run a train every 5 minutes. > too bad, transit only gives peak service at peak hours. That's also how we design our roads. They need to accomodate peak traffic at peak hours. Otherwise they're an unused piece of asphalt. > the car has been a great economical equalizer and still is Again, not taking into account external costs. Road traffic kills ~ 1.2M people each year insuring even more which do have a massive impact on the health system. > pollution is something to be solved By solving pollution but still focusing on urban sprawl and keeping traffic as-is, we will do the wrong thing better. That's an achievement but not solving the issue. Feel free to watch the interview mentioned before. It does clarify some of the points I just mentioned: ▶ this video [edit: formatting]

Quite interestingly, the social aspects of urban sprawl was completely left out when designing post WW2 cities. When people think about beautiful cities, they would mention Venice or Paris or Rome. All these cities were built for 'foot traffic' which still works perfectly fine nowadays. In those cities, the elderly and children do have an environment to move around by themselves and socialize freely. When it comes to planning cities for people, it is worth checking out Prof. Jan Gehl: ▶ this video