Some European cities have car-free city centers. I live in one, which serves as the shopping center of roughly 1 million people living in the suburbs. If you want to shop in the city you need to park in one of the big underground parking lots and pay sth like more than 10 Euros/hour. Alternatively you can park just outside the city at a park & ride spot for 10 Euros/day and take the public transport included in the parking price.

It's inconvenient for people, yes. It was inconvenient to drive and park in the narrow streets of a medieval city too. This is unfortunately not easy to implement in North America, as the cities are relatively new. What we have feels very privileged.

Just sounds absolutely miserable to prioritize that way of living that is so car dependent. So many negatives come from it:

- pollution

- traffic deaths

- heat generation from all the infra

- inefficient use of space

- ugly aesthetic of strip malls and parking lots

It doesn't have to be this way. We can do better to build diverse housing in our cities, leverage space at the ground level for businesses, invest in our transit to make it safer and more convenient.

Instead we just go with what's easy and continue to build roads and sprawl.

I don't really buy this argument. I live a happily (nearly) car-free life with 3 kids. It's not hard, it really isn't. I bike them everywhere, we take transit. I even do our weekly grocery shopping by bike. I bike them to school year round (yes, even today when it was 10F this morning). I wouldn't consider myself "hardcore" at all. I'm just your average middle-aged dad.

I use our car approximately once per week. In 2024 I used my car a total of 32 times (I actually tallied it out for the whole year)

It's really just a matter of city design. Do you think there aren't families in Copenhagen who need to get to their job and shops? They manage with much lower car mileage than the average American. American suburbs are car-centric and those cars end up clogging up urban cores where people are trying to live their lives.

Many Americans/Canadians probably cannot even imagine what my life is like. They can't even picture what it means to pick up a week's worth of groceries for a family of 5 on a bike (with a kid!). It just doesn't even register that this is a possibility.

> American suburbs are car-centric and those cars end up clogging up urban cores where people are trying to live their lives.

I wonder how much of that is the case - anymore. I am suburb or even exurb, but I don't go "to the urban core" unless basically forced to; these days that's specialized medical only.

And surprisingly numbers of what people call "suburbs" are decently walkable, if you're willing to compromise on where you walk to - e.g., you might not have 20 restaurants in short walking distance, perhaps only 5.

(I've literally walked young kids - including a baby! - to school when it's -40°. A big big part of the change is to slowly move people to fewer car trips - not try to get them to reduce the number of cars. That comes later once they realize they only used it 32 times!)

You have to keep in mind that at this point, a substantial majority of Americans are overweight, and something like a full third of the US population can be considered "Obese," and so the notion of them doing any form of physical exercise whatsoever is utterly anathema to their world view. They live their lives in actively avoiding physical exercise at every turn, and so they cannot even fathom that someone would prefer active transportation like cycling that is also a form of excercise to being stuck in traffic in an automobile.

Basically to a lot of Americans, Jesus invented the pickup truck so they could "Exercise" their god-given right to never have to walk anywhere ever, as that's the way they like it. Walking is hard work when you're obese, and its uncomfortable to have your rolls of cascading fat rubbing against one another on a hot, humid day, where as sitting in a rolling leather recliner in their air-conditioned Ferd FteenFiddy is comfortable and requires no physical effort whatsoever.

The thing of it though is they know their choices are unhealthy for both their bodies and their communities on some level, but they'd rather drag everyone else down to their level than have to make and hard personal changes. They see us on our bikes getting where we need to go just as fast or faster than them (Since we're not stuck waiting in traffic), and getting exercise in the process, and they don't just resent us, they flat out hate us for it. We hold a mirror up to their unhealthy lifestyles, and unattractive bodies, and rather than following our lead by trying to be more active themselves, they'll fight tooth and nail to make the rest of us as miserable as they are trapped in their rolling metal prisons.

Parking exists in cities that are transit-first. But you are living in a car-dependent city for most things, so obviously it’s not going to be as convenient: the city isn’t built to be livable without a car. More developed countries put the amenities with the transit. IE your kids school has a metro stop named after it, and the grocery store is also the subway station.

It’s unfortunate that NA developed the wrong way because it takes a while to repair stupid planning decisions

Good thing that this article is not arguing for the elimination of parking!

Heck, I'm happy just parking close enough to walk to a downtown area, so parking doesn't necessarily have to be in the middle for me to use it, but there's no way I'm taking public transport to get close enough.