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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 stop subsidizing cars and low density and it would result in denser cities where most people still drive everywhere. Then, after it became much denser, people would gradually start walking, things would move around to accomodate this, and it would become more walkable.
Can you clarify exactly what you mean by "subsidizing cars"? I can't think of any way we're doing that which would be a quick-fix to stop.
The most direct way we're "subsidizing cars" is by requiring large parking lots on every business in most cities. We could stop that, but it's exactly the problem I'm talking about - there are tens of thousands of already-built lots with them in every city, with millions invested in each one. You can't change it without spending millions more per lot on demolishing and reconstructing everything, and whoever did it first would be at a massive disadvantage.
Drivers don't have to pay for roads, street parking is underpriced, zoning by-laws require excess parking. You could require drivers to pay for these things and then they'd use them less, and then they'd start disappearing.
Drivers are paying for roads through various taxes, including on fuel, tires, and registrations. It probably doesn't fully cover the cost of road construction and maintenance, but I've never heard of a transit system that charged fees high enough to cover the costs of construction, maintenance, and operation. Since both types of systems are effectively subsidized, there's only an ideological difference between which one is preferred. Parking is true, but has the issues that I cited, which you haven't provided any accounting for.
If you forced these things, which effectively just mean drastically higher charges with no other changes in the short term, you would be voted out of office in any type of democracy. If you intend do to it anyways, then you are practicing authoritarianism, not democracy. You would effectively be making every single resident's life much worse for the decades it would take to actually reconstruct everything.
It's subsidized compared to walking and biking or just not travelling as much.
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