You can adapt cities.

Most British cities predate cars. They have had tramlines put in, taken out, and put in again. They have had roads widened, then bus and cycle lanes added. Train underground lines have been built.

> “Build it and they will come” won’t get you housing density, small local retailers, geographic compression of services, suitable climate, a different way of living.

You can build and change housing. We have lots of what used to be big houses that are now blocks of flats. You can encourage small retailers in many ways. Services can be reorganised or public transport routes designed to ensure access to them

Not sure what you mean about climate - there are cities you can manage without cars from the tropics to very cold places.

You can pedestrianise roads in existing existing towns and cities.

People always say stuff like this, but plenty of European cities like Utrecht have shown that it's very much possible to turn the tide. A few years ago Utrecht replaced an entire highway and turned it (back) into a canal and the area is indescribably nicer in every way, it's called the Catharijnesingel.

This canal was, in fact, always there, they just turned it into a highway at some point in the 70s. So the reverse is more than possible, it's a question of will to do so and convincing the, frankly, selfish car drivers. Having lived in the US myself for a stint, there's plenty of cities that could easily have work done similar to what happened in Utrecht, it's just that there's a lack of a will to do so to make things much better.

Sure, you won't have a direct train from NYC to Dallas (although, seeing China's high speed rail I don't see why that couldn't be on the table), but we're talking about individual cities making these changes a bit at a time.

I think you are being unnecessarily defeatist. Cities can’t be redesigned from the ground up, but at the same time we’ve seen that investment into roads can’t fix traffic in cities once they reach a certain population and density.

The first thing we should do is target development. For example, planning laws should require new development (suburbs etc.) to be built around some kind of transit (ideally rail). Zoning should always be mixed - for example it should always be permissible to have at least small apartment blocks, groups of townhouses (like row houses), and small shops and cafes in suburbs. The idea of mandating areas be dedicated to only detached single family dwellings should be consigned to the dustbin of history.

There’s just so much like that that can be started right now. But we don’t - we just keep making the same mistakes and things get worse.

I beg to differ. A few Dutch cities did exactly that. Here's a video with a great example of the city I live near:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9kql9bBNII

Utrecht did something similar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPGOSrqXrjs

People centric infrastructure didn't fall out of the sky, we recognised bad ideas and reworked cities over decades to make them liveable. And it worked!

Car infrastructure takes so much space that you can repurpose parts of it in place. Just turn one of the lanes into a tram line, make dedicated bus lanes. On huge parking lots you can just split parts of and build housing or more smaller stores there.

Of course there are limits to this, but cities are often grown historically over centuries and city planning usually takes place in such constraints rather than planning cities from scratch. Don't let the perfect be the enemie of the good.

> “Build it and they will come” won’t get you housing density, small local retailers, geographic compression of services, suitable climate, a different way of living. All key ingredients for walkable cities with well served public transport.

Yes it does. It will take 20 years, but if you don't start now you will never get there. Are you willing to invest in a better future or just accept the status quo?