by panick21_ | 2025-04-13 06:15:29+00:00
Except that many European cities copied US cities in their development styles, and then later reversed them. So we absolutely do know how to reverse it.

> But it is nice to live in the Mission and take the techbus to Mountain View and handwave all the hard trillion dollar problems and say let the poors eat cake. Which is effectively how these discussions seem to go.

Every study shows that the poor are hurt the most because of car centric development.

Here is a guide on how to improve American cities that are surrounded by lots of suberbia:

- Remove/close all highways that go across the city, only keep the ring road. People will simple reclaim those space for recreational uses as soon as cars are gone.

- Increase price of parking space or eliminate them completely. Most parking in city is not used by residents anyway.

- Redo even if its with paint and few concrete bolders, the city streets according to Dutch street regulations. Massively increase safety for everybody.

- That frees up lots of space for bike lanes (as US cities tend to have far to many car lanes). This is actually a benefit to the history of US cities, we can't do that in some of the older dense cities.

- Change your zoning code and other access regulations, so proper urban development is actually allowed to happen. The US could adopt something like Japan zoning laws. A heavy use of mixed use and allow living in almost any zone. The US has a hilarious amount of commercial development land that completely underutilized. This also means no more minimum parking space and all that nonsense. See maybe like this: https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/news/land-use-zones-in-japa...

- This will make it so suburbs can go from single house only to a mix of single house, duplex, fourplexes, townhouses and so on. Like suburbs used to be. And it will make it so that light commercial developments can happen in subburbs. Meaning a single house can turn into small shops, coffees and such.

- In the city select a few core blocks in different places in the city, make those pedestrian only. Or like Montreal does, a whole long street. Each year add more of those pedestrian zone, improve walking infrastructure between them.

- Make it so subburban residents start to pay full price for their utilities including water and other infrastructure. New subburban developments are often hilariously subsidized, needing more water pumps and such.

- Redevelop current stroads into much fewer lanes and create separate access roads to the commercial developments. This improves flow on the stroads, reduce accidents and makes walking and biking along those stroads safer. Of course some of those lanes would turn into bike infrastructure.

- In the subburbs, also reduce road with, install protected cycle lanes. Break open the horrible cul-de-sac, the city can buy part of peoples garden to create cross connects between different cul-de-sacs and surrounding developments (cross connects for people and bikes, not cars).

- Make all the bus services public, heir a real transportation engineer to come up with a plan. Consisting of a few main routes, using the old stroads and highways, and smaller buses that serve as connectors to these major routes. Of course for that you would make some lanes on the highway, busways. Despite what some people in the US think, you can actually do decent bus service in suberbia. Combine that with public on demand service, that gets you cheaply to the next closes major public transport node. Maybe start planning a tram route along the major bus-routes.

- Look at your old rail infrastructure and develop a plan for a decent regional service. Develop a 50 year rail plan.

- The city can also simply buy up some cul-de-sacs that are strategically located and redevelop them into proper nice walkable neighborhoods. The city can even own the land and only rent half of the appartments, some at affordable price. This worked well in Britain and still does work well in Austria. And of course develop a transportation plan for those new neighborhoods. See an example, where old soviet style neighborhoods were developed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfonhlM6I7w

- Change your property tax into a land tax, or a property tax heavily focused on land. Or potentially do more with sales or what taxes, importantly, just don't do property tax.

- Like in Japan, require anybody that wants to own a car in a city, to first prove the have a private place to part.

- Make all car registrations based on weight, meaning you pay more for a heavier car.

- Focus development on the city and the first suburban ring around the city. Offer intensives for people in the outer rings to move into the inner rings. So for example somebody that owns a small house in the far outer ring of the city, could move into a duplex in the inner rings.

- If yours city has repair backlog (and most cities do) focus on the city core and the inner ring of subberbia.

- Do not develop more land, US cities already are far to wide spread. Simply announce no new infrastructure or roads. And not taking over into city property stuff that developers have built.

I could list more, pretty much all of these have been discussed in urbanism research.

Pretty much all of these have been done in different places at different times. And the all pretty much work. Doing them all together hasn't been done but there is no reason to believe it wouldn't work.

Of course this does not mean that for 1 day to the next everybody will go from suberbinate to die hard city person. But the culture after 1-2 decades of such changes will be dramatically different.

I also suggest to see this video about comparing two cities over time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uqbsueNvag