I get Dan's animosity to cars and car centric urban design. I hate them too. I would love to have our cities have subways, light rail, pleasing sidewalks, bike infrastructure and so much more. But in the end, people still need cars and it's naïve to think that we can magically do away with them and force everyone onto a train, bike or onto a sidewalk. You can't do that. We can improve what we have and attempt to reduce car dependency and increase transit options, but people are still going to need personal (or business) vehicles.
The best we can do is work with what we have and advocate for change in our urban environments. If it is a serious topic to your heart, attempt to fix things through advocacy, participating strongly in politics or even make it part of your career. I made architecture and planning my livelihood because I want to be able to directly change these things. Far too many people will have opinions and ideals, but then they may not really do much to tangibly change things, whether it is rallying people behind an issue, running for a council position, publishing writings and research into the topics or becoming directly involved in urban planning, engineering etc.
North America is what it is. We're not Europe or East Asia which has old dense cities, drastically different transit systems and different philosophies on urban design. We were (fortunately and unfortunately) heavily involved with the first combustion engines and gave birth to the car and cities as we know them today. That can change - through advancing rail systems and rethinking the way we design our cities (and we are doing that) - but it'll take a long time to achieve and will require a lot of people working towards it. It's one thing to watch people like Not Just Bikes romanticize Netherlands and hear him shit talk the country he is from (I do that a lot too when I compare us to Germany or France) but if we want to change our environments to resemble something we idealize, we need useful discussions and willpower to personally and collectively change things.
The best we can do is work with what we have and advocate for change in our urban environments. If it is a serious topic to your heart, attempt to fix things through advocacy, participating strongly in politics or even make it part of your career. I made architecture and planning my livelihood because I want to be able to directly change these things. Far too many people will have opinions and ideals, but then they may not really do much to tangibly change things, whether it is rallying people behind an issue, running for a council position, publishing writings and research into the topics or becoming directly involved in urban planning, engineering etc.
North America is what it is. We're not Europe or East Asia which has old dense cities, drastically different transit systems and different philosophies on urban design. We were (fortunately and unfortunately) heavily involved with the first combustion engines and gave birth to the car and cities as we know them today. That can change - through advancing rail systems and rethinking the way we design our cities (and we are doing that) - but it'll take a long time to achieve and will require a lot of people working towards it. It's one thing to watch people like Not Just Bikes romanticize Netherlands and hear him shit talk the country he is from (I do that a lot too when I compare us to Germany or France) but if we want to change our environments to resemble something we idealize, we need useful discussions and willpower to personally and collectively change things.