The fact that you are reading this means that you, like me, were born into the only 100-odd years in human history where people will have driven cars in cities. Cities have existed for thousands of years, and until very recently they were almost entirely built around people walking. In the future, cities will return to this paradigm, for the millennia to come.

One hundred years from now, people will look back at the amount of space we’ve allotted for car travel and find it puzzling, if not hilarious. They will see photographs of crowded freeways and barren parking lots and apartments that look as if they are eating cars as food. They will ask “is it true that you brought five chairs along with you to the grocery store? Did grandma really have to drive herself, even in the rain? Why was it normal to have cars drive so fast, so close to you? What happened if somebody made a mistake?” Probably, not many of us will get to laugh along with such questions. Instead, we can only recognize that the experiment of cars in cities has been successful, in that it has yielded a clear, consistent result. This result is best summed up by Enrique Peñalosa, the former Mayor of Bogotá:

At this point in time, most citizens of cities built around cars are all too aware of the problems they cause. Cars are dangerous. In Los Angeles, where I live, about one person a day is killed in a car accident, and half of time, the victim was on foot². Cars require tremendous space for operation and storage. Building city streets around cars and building around people require designing at two fundamentally different scales. Cars also contribute significantly to harmful pollutants in the air, leading to increased health problems, such as asthma, cardiovascular disease, and premature death³.

Human-scale vs Car-scale design: Tokyo (left) has ample examples of what streets, buildings, and storefronts look like when designed at the human scale. Meanwhile, Sunset Junction (right), despite being considered a walkable part of Los Angeles, is designed at the car-scale. Source: Getty Images

And, of course, cars create traffic. In 2024, commuters in the Los Angeles metropolitan area collectively spent over 1 billion hours delayed by traffic⁴. Yes, 1 billion. This equates to more than 100,000 years of human potential lost to traffic each year in Los Angeles alone. 100,000 years that could have been better spent taking a nap, playing with your kids, or learning an instrument. And still, this number increases year after year. In the words of Jean-Louis Missika, Paris’s Deputy Mayor of Urbanization:

As the experiment of cars has reached a conclusion, we can only choose whether or not to ignore the results. Understanding this, many cities have begun dismantling the vestiges of their car-centric experiments: San Francisco tore down its Embarcadero Freeway⁶ and New York pedestrianized Times Square⁷. Seoul demolished a freeway that had been built over the Cheonggyecheon river in its downtown area and reopened the river as a public park⁸, which perplexingly led to a reduction in traffic⁹.

But undoing what didn’t work is only the beginning. Across the globe, cities have been experimenting with new, radical transformations. Paris has implemented slow traffic zones in more than half of its streets¹⁰, and last year committed to becoming a “100% bikeable city”¹¹. Chengdu encircled its entire city with a 100-kilometer bike highway¹². Bogotá closes over 120 kilometers of streets to car traffic every Sunday¹³. And each summer, Montreal pedestrianizes its main street, Mont-Royal Avenue¹⁴. The contemporary search for post-car urban solutions is an exciting, collective, global endeavor.

A section of the Tianfu Greenway in Chengdu, China, a 100-kilometer bike highway wrapping around the entire city. Source: Melissa & Chris Bruntlett

A 2.5-kilometer stretch of Montreal's Mont-Royal Avenue, closed to car traffic during the summer. Source: Henri Gionet / montreal.ca

And yet, some cities, like Los Angeles, are far behind. When systems become sufficiently normalized, it’s easy to lose the ability to imagine alternatives. Perhaps this lack of imagination is why LA has decided to invest $900M in widening freeway lanes next year¹⁵, creating future technical debt¹⁶, even when it has been shown that this does nothing to alleviate traffic^{17, 18}. Los Angeles’s resistance to meaningful, coordinated change has resulted in Angelenos experiencing the highest traffic delays¹⁹ and the most traffic deaths²⁰ of any city in America. The irony is that this resistance to change is rooted in fears of making traffic worse.

Fortunately, the incompatibility of cars and cities is an observation, not a preference. It was not “decided on” as much as it was discovered. And as such, the transition away from cars can only be delayed, not reversed. The question then becomes one of endurance. How much longer will Angelenos put up with rush hours, parking tickets, unprotected left turns, and aggressive drivers? So far, the answer seems to be a lot. But as the beauty and quality of life seen in human-scaled cities becomes more and more obvious, it will become increasingly difficult to deny Los Angeles’s need to radically reimagine the city.

Source: Instagram @gabrielle.drolet

But perhaps, such a radical reimagining is not entirely necessary. Los Angeles began as a transit-oriented city, and once had the largest electric railway system in the world²¹. The blueprints for a better city are already here, buried under the streets we’ve built for cars, literally. 70 years ago, my grandfather lived in Downtown LA and took public transportation to his job in Santa Monica. We need only to imagine a future where our grandkids navigate the city in this same way.

My grandfather's ID card when he worked at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. Source: My Dad

Sources

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmyQgeHKkuI

2. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-01-25/los-angeles-traffic-deaths-pedestrian-safety

3. United States Environmental Protection Agency. Near Roadway Air Pollution and Health: Frequently Asked Questions. 2014, https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-11/documents/420f14044_0.pdf

4. Texas A&M Transportation Institute. Urban Mobility Report 2025. 2025, https://mobility.tamu.edu/umr/report

5. https://www.ft.com/content/882ebf59-d14a-4d4c-beb7-af72df31a4f3

6. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reflections-on-the-loma-p_b_324350

7. https://www.snohetta.com/projects/times-square

8. https://udcsa.gsd.harvard.edu/projects/9

9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

10. https://senseable.mit.edu/slow-zones/

11. https://www.paris.fr/en/pages/a-new-cycling-plan-for-a-100-bikeable-city-28350

12. https://mobycon.com/updates/chinas-new-cycling-infrastructure-a-ride-through-chengdus-100-km-greenway/

13. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/30/the-tranquility-frees-you-bogota-the-city-that-shuts-out-cars-every-week

14. https://www.mtl.org/en/experience/stepping-montreal-pedestrian-only-streets

15. https://la.streetsblog.org/2026/03/20/metro-plans-to-spend-nearly-900m-expanding-freeways-next-year-a-40-percent-increase

16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt

17. https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

18. Duranton, Gilles, and Matthew A. Turner. “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities.” American Economic Review, vol. 101, no. 6, Oct. 2011, pp. 2616–52. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.101.6.2616.

19. Texas A&M Transportation Institute. Urban Mobility Report 2025. 2025, https://mobility.tamu.edu/umr/

20. National Center for Statistics and Analysis. Traffic Safety Facts 2023: A Compilation of Motor Vehicle Traffic Crash Data. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Aug. 2025, https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813738

21. https://www.trains-and-railroads.com/pacific-electric