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I recently found an interesting post about the driving/transit+walking divide that I'd like to discuss some here: If We Want a Shift to Walking, We Need to Prioritize Dignity.
The basic point that this article makes is that a good and necessary measure as to whether people would actually want to walk somewhere looks like so:
I would like to use this to assert that: For 99% of modern-day American cities that are not currently pedestrian-friendly, there is no reasonable change that will ever make them so.
The problem is that, once you build a city to be car-friendly in the modern American style, with 3-4+ lane arterial surface roads and expressways everywhere and all businesses having massive parking lots that are virtually never full, the structure of your city is fundamentally unwalkable. You can toss in some sidewalks and buses, but you'll never create a landscape where people actually want to walk places. Not that literally nobody will ever walk anywhere, but where people who have money and status and can afford to keep cars will actively choose to walk and take busses to places instead of driving.
Here's a link to a Google Street View of a random road in a random medium-small city in America. It's actually fairly urban compared to the surrounding region, but I'm pretty sure nobody who has any alternatives chooses to walk there. And in fact, there aren't any pedestrians visible on that road in Street View. You can create some paths to walk on, but you can't duct-tape making walking dignified and respectable onto a region where it isn't already.
IMO, the majority of attempts to make walkable neighborhoods in non-walkable regions are not particularly useful. Usually, they're in residential areas, and you can maybe make that one neighborhood walkable, and create one little walkable urban square with some restaurants, coffee shops, light retail, a bar or two, etc. But you're not going to be able to create an area where a successful person can access everything they want to be able to do regularly with walking and transit, because they can't get anywhere but that one little urban square easily. Not saying that they aren't pleasant or that people living there don't like them, but they're never going to lead to a region or society where people choose not to have cars.
You can do micro vehicles like golf carts that travel only 15-20 mph, which are small and cheap because they need less padding for deceleration. They can even have mounted temperature control systems. Since road capacity is proportional to road width, and golf carts use about half a lane's width, they can have a much higher capacity, and also much smaller parking.
The problem is that a golf cart is a low-security vehicle and the point of US car-dependent suburbs is to exclude judgment-proof defendants by excluding anyone who cannot afford a 20-year mortgage or maintain a $5,000 piece of capital equipment. Any attempt to build a city that excludes judgment-proof by other means will be deemed to have disparate impact, and even if it could be done the mechanisms won't hold intergenerationally.
I'm a bit of a broken record at this point, but also: bicycles.
You're a bit more exposed to the elements on a bike compared to a golf cart, but you don't need a garage, they take up individual levels of space, and having a non-electrical fallback is important.
Another minor downside of golf carts is they're quite the injury / death machines relative to their use. Those tend to cluster around children too, not too much different than ATVs. Existing greenway infrastructure can't support golf-carts, and they exist in an uncanny valley between cars and bikes/pedestrians.
Walking is fucking slow. Excruciatingly so. I'm amazed at how long it takes for me to walk from one subdivision to another via a greenway connected directly to both. Quite frankly, trying to make a "walkable city" with arguably one of the top five fattest and laziest societies on the planet is a pipe dream, wegovy or not.
The bottom line is that a solution that excludes vehicles isn't a real solution at all. I've loved being in golf-cart-only spaces (generally near beaches).
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Glad you brought up golf cart cities because I think that is the best of all worlds.
I think the reason it hasn't been done yet is not because of a conspiracy to keep the poors out, but simply because of network effects. All the infrastructure is already built for cars. To get to the better state of golf cart cities will require massive switching costs.
If we had golf cart cities, it would be pretty easy to add secure storage compartments into them. And, I'll be honest, I don't feel that my car is that secure when I park it in Seattle. In fact, a golf cart might be superior since when I get robbed I won't have to replace my auto glass. Although I do agree that I wouldn't feel comfortable driving my golf cart in, let's say, the South Side of Chicago.
The Villages, Florida is an interesting place. It's possibly America's fastest growing
city, err CDP. A mere mobile home park in the 1980s, it had a few thousands residents in the 1990s, and now has over 80,000.Since the 1990s it has been a master-planned community which consists of retirement homes surrounding several "villages". Apparently you can drive your golf carts lots of places there. Also, the Villages requires that 80% of the residents be at least 55 years old, and people under 19 are forbidden entirely. The golf carts seem to work there. In a "vibrant" urban core I agree it could be more problematic.
What do you do in the winter though?
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Small golf-cart like cars exists in europe, for example this brand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_(marque)
The general problem is that they are so light that thieves just take the whole thing.
Smart is a proper car, just a very compact one. There are even smaller four-wheel vehicles that are classified as quadricycles:
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For better or worse, I think one of the less-prominent reasons that cars are so popular is that they're just big enough to be hard to walk off with. Bikes, and to a lesser extent motorcycles, are forced to depend on locks, which for better or worse are pretty universally inadequate if left unattended for hours. An angle grinder or bolt cutters aren't regulated equipment, but tow trucks are harder to conceal and use illicitly: as far as I can tell, most car theft involves taking the car under its own power.
From a cursory look at Facebook Marketplace, another problem is that golf carts are kind of expensive. A decent used one seems to run about $3000, and they can cost over $10,000 for a new one. That's a lot of money for a vehicle that's useless anywhere the speed limit is more than 25MPH. $10,000 will get you a decent used car.
If you're already spending thousands of dollars plus a car-sized space to store the thing, you might as well just get a compact car that can go on any road in most-likely air-conditioned comfort.
I could see going from being a 2 car household to 1 car + 1 golf cart if I lived somewhere like that. I'm looking now though and the $10k ones are mostly 2 seaters so to haul kids around you'd need a bigger one so now you're in the $15k-$20k range. I'm really confused what makes these things so expensive.
One nice thing I've seen is that you don't need a drivers license so older kids can have some independence.
I'd imagine insurance is quite a bit cheaper too.
They're very much status symbols. Neighborhoods with a bunch of Carts rolling around are affluent.
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