How Commute Culture Made American Cities Lifeless
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I never liked going into the city until I lived in Europe. So what separated American cities I grew up around from their European counterparts? Well, it come...

This video outlines some of the relationships between US commuting culture and the perspectives that it’s engendered about the role of the city. The, when compared and contrasted to other nations’ approach to city design and perspectives shows that it’s possible to have a city core that’s more than just a workplace.

My city is currently clinging to a small area of interesting downtown core. Everything else has either been bulldozed for parking lots, turned into office buildings with no store fronts, or plowed into wider roads. Every time I show the maps of the city with how car-focused we’ve made downtown to a city council member they recoil at the desolation, but it’s so hard to get change happening.

We need fewer roads, cars, and non-human spaces in our city core areas. Making wider walking paths, biking roads, mass transit (not just busses!), and planting trees to make spaces more attractive will all continue to invite people to come downtown, not just someone desperate enough to drive there, park, hit one store and drive away.

  • P1r4nha@feddit.de
    3·
    1 year ago

    The car lobby thing is true for LA, but I’m not sure you can apply this to every city. What is evident, is that cities that existed before cars were invented or introduced are still more pedestrian friendly (see east coast cities or European ones for example) and the ones founded after are more grid like and car friendly.

    Public transportation is only worth it if there is a high enough density of people (yeah, this sub may not like to hear it), so if you have huge sprawling suburbs it’s not obvious where to even put your bus/train stations. Usually it’s great to connect centers of some sort.

    So yeah, if there had been more incentive to connect centers and dense clusters of population with each other, they may have planned according to that.

    • Nathan@montevista.net
      2·
      1 year ago

      @P1r4nha @Dmian

      “… cities that existed before cars were invented or introduced are still more pedestrian friendly”

      Every city in #PuertoRico is older than the car. Here we suffer a 66:100 car:people ratio. There are no walk-able cities, no public transportation, sidewalks are only parking spaces cars, car dealers own the banks and the politicians.

      #fuckcars, they are killing us.