American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage
Until cities have a better alternative to driving than &quot;use our terrible mass transit in our poorly-designed cities,&quot; this will remain a problem.<p>American cities are designed for cars, so that bicycles, scooters, or any other human-scale transportation is not just inconvenient, it&#x27;s dangerous. Forcing skateboards, scooters, gyros, bicycles, etc., into the road with 4,000 pound cars is insanely dangerous. If you&#x27;re riding something that can&#x27;t be carried into a building with you, it&#x27;s inconvenient at best to park it outside.<p>Just removing parking from new construction won&#x27;t solve the problem, it will compound it. People still won&#x27;t want to get on slow, crowded, uncomfortable buses or packed, unreliable, dirty trains. We&#x27;ll just get more people driving endlessly around the block looking for parking and polluting the air, more accidents from drivers hitting people in the road, more sprawl as people shun the city so they can drive in the suburbs instead.<p>Roads have to be repurposed to make light personal transportation safe. Take every two-way two-lane and split it into a one-way, with a physical separation between a car side and a personal transport side. Remove parking from the curbs, and put it in the middle so one side can be for cars and the other for bikes, scooters, skaters, etc.<p>Public transit needs a major overhaul, major investment, and a new attitude. It has to be about riders&#x27; comfort, convenience, and happiness, not just jamming people into routes as if they were statistics in a planning meeting.<p>New development should be aimed at walkable, human-scale neighborhoods, planned for people first, not cars.<p>All these things have to happen to solve the problem. It won&#x27;t be easy, but unless we do something like that, we&#x27;ll be living with the car problem for a very long time to come.