See this is definitely one of the best solutions, but American land use policies severely restrict the walkability of many cities. If there was more mixed-use land designations, it would greatly improve the walkability of a city. People simply don't find walking or biking a good option when home, work, food, and every other thing you need are divided up into different areas of a city.
the best solution I’ve seen is to design cities around foot and bike traffic, like in many European cities such as Amsterdam. They’ve outright banned cars within certain distances from the city iirc, and it’s significantly reduced their carbon emissions while still allowing commuters to freely travel throughout the city en masse. This is largely impossible in America bc we’re so built around car travel, but it’s not impossible to switch over. I believe Berlin has also limited many roads to strictly bike traffic.
I also wanted to point out that this circles back to the climate change problem. Transportation is a huge chunk of pollution, and there’s no easy way to fix many of the environmental problems that come with it. The aforementioned overhaul of urban infrastructure would cost billions of dollars and possibly decades. Decades we don’t have in terms of fixing the climate crisis. Public transport is a great way to solve pollution problems, but it’s simply not designed efficiently enough for it to be a viable option for many commuters in terms of speed and efficiency. Because of this, people keep circling back to other means of transport like cars, which contribute significantly to many climate issues.
I know this is kinda all doom and gloom but thanks for hearing me out
I was just watching an interesting series of YouTube videos.
The first one: Urban areas are being dominated by tangled messes of highways that do nothing to solve congestion! They should go back to the neat and orderly grid system!
The second one: The grid system is inherently flawed because humans’ decision-making time is not fast enough, which causes more cars to slow down, which causes gridlock. Public transport should be used more often.
The third one: Public transport is set out in a way that makes it very inconvenient for many commuters and wastes a lot of time.
What I kind of learned from this is that all of these different ways of getting places are products of each other. Public transport is by far the best option, but it’s designed in such a way that it’s not a viable alternative to the already-inefficient means of commuting by car. It’s a vicious cycle. Why take a 1.5-hour train ride to work when it’s a half-hour by car on the most congested days? The way all of these different means of transport interact means that even if all of the options are inefficient, even the ones that are slightly less inefficient are the best option. The problem is that to fix this, there needs to be a complete overhaul of cities’ infrastructure, potentially costing billions of dollars. And this isn’t something that happens overnight.
Thanks for coming to my rant guys idk where I was going with this but I thought I needed to say it