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How many people do you see driving vs cycling? There's a reason for that. It's very silly to ban driving, I don't believe you think it's more reasonable to ban cars than bikes. And I don't even want to ban bikes.
"we designed a huge majority of the land use of the built environment for only one modality of transportation, and now that modality is the dominant form. Checkmate atheists"
You're not exactly working with a control group here...
Horse and carriage, here in the East. The pavement's gotten better, the rights-of-way often haven't. Driving's just a lot better than cycling for most things. You can carry more stuff (and passengers), you're protected from the weather, it's harder to steal a car, you don't get tired doing it, etc. Downsides are it's bigger, takes a lot of space to park, and creates more traffic.
Fully agree, that's why I own a car. I am typing this from the waiting room at the dealership as they replace my underside cover.
There is one thing that driving profoundly fails at though, both on its own and really really badly once you compare to cycling.
Scale.
The road capacity of downtown cores is fixed. The population, as more and more towers get built, is not.
Each human wants to go places, if they all pick "car", eventually it all stops working. Nothing can fix this aside from having people go places not in a car.
Coincidentally, bikes are ridiculously better than cars downtown as they are much faster.
From my apartment to the dealership is 19 minutes right now by car or bike. This afternoon rush hour, it'll be over 30 minutes by car, and still 19 minutes by bike.
Yeah great plan, let's see how that's working in cities which have leaned that way like LA.... Oh wow no way, it's one of the most congested places on the continent? That's crazy! Who could ever have predicted that...
Maybe Dallas and Houston? They're doing better than LA, but no suprise their traffic congestion stats get worse every year. It's almost like this doesn't work at scale.
Putting aside the fact that cities that are 50% parking area absolutely suck.
Los Angeles has fewer miles of roadway per capita than any urbanized area in the US with 1,000,000 people or more.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2020/hm72.cfm
That's kind of my point though.
Even major cities which have tried to prioritize driving as the primary transport modality fail, because it doesn't scale.
I'm sure 50 years ago the LA road per capita stat was way better. And then LA's population continued to rise, and amount of roads stayed fixed.
The sunbelt cities are earlier in this life cycle. Their populations are lower and they're not so sprawled you can't drive across them. But they'll keep growing, eventually more up then out, and traffic will continue to get worse and worse, which we already see.
LA did not try to prioritize driving. It neglected it. This has been true for decades -- LA has long been held out as an example of a place which built out its road infrastructure and had terrible traffic, but that whole time it has in fact been near the bottom in terms of road infrastructure per capita.
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