Improve the walkability of modern cities by making sure that city planners don’t even know that automobiles exist AT ALL. But how can we find such people? Read on for the secret.

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Background:

In the years before the invention of the car, the only way to design a city was with walking (or at least public transit) in mind.

However, once cars became widespread, cities started being designed with wide roads and large areas set aside for parking.

The Issue:

This style of design made driving very convenient, but accidentally also made cities very sprawl-y and unwalkable, with giant expanses of baking-hot parking lots separating all points of interest.

Let’s compare a city planned around car ownership (Figure 1) to a city that was designed before cars existed (Figure 2):

Fig. 1: A typical image of a city designed around car ownership. (Note the railway, which is not used for public transit.)

Fig. 2: A more walkable downtown. This city was laid out hundreds of years before the invention of the automobile.

The Issue:

To improve the walkability of modern cities, we need to select a person with the right qualifications to perform the important urban planning work. There are three plausible choices:

  • A licensed urban planner (Figure 3, top). This is the most common selection. Unfortunately, this has been proven to be a complete failure over 99% of the time (see Figure 1 for an example).
  • An individual who belongs to a non-car-using subset of society (e.g. most Amish, or members of certain monastic orders). This is more promising: such planner may not instantly gravitate toward a “car for everything” solution. However, even if they don’t personally use cars, these people still know that cars exist, which may subtly influence their decision-making.
  • A member of an uncontacted tribe deep within a jungle on a remote island. This is the best solution: such an individual is only familiar with walkable communities, and would have no idea that “giant parking lots” and “six lane roads with a human-impassible divider in the middle” could even exist. This is the recommended selection for planning a walkable community.
Fig. 3: Here we see the potential urban planning outcomes of 1) a modern urban citizen (top), 2) a monk who lives a medieval-style lifestyle in a monastery (middle), but who is still aware that cars exist (and thus has subconsciously recreated a parking lot without realizing it), and 3) a hypothesized caveman who was just thawed from a glacier (bottom).

Conclusion:

City design must be done by an urban planner who does not even know what a car is. This requirement is likely to be completely successful and have almost no downsides.

PROS: Should improve the lifestyle of most city-dwellers. Provides economic opportunities for members of uncontacted tribes and recently-thawed cavemen (who are underrepresented in the modern job market).

CONS: The car-unaware planner will also not know about bicycles, so bike paths will definitely not be included in the walkable city plan either.

Originally published 2024-11-25.