Counterpoint: Walkable cities can still make cities walkable by dismantling the interstate highway system a la Godzilla

Yes... doing away with motor vehicles. That will solve all the problems with Democrat ran cities...👍

Yeah, have fun with that when all the interstate traffic including thousands of fully loaded semi trucks is rerouted onto city streets because Mayor Trevor thought it would be a good idea to destroy those highways keeping that traffic away from people. I’m all for walkable cities, but throwing more traffic onto city streets really doesn’t improve walkability.

A lot of traffic is caused by zoning, which keeps small grocery stores, and other amenities outside walking/biking distance.

Local traffic, yes. You still need the interstates to keep long distance and truck traffic off the roads though. There are things cities can do to help improve walkability, such as putting highways underground like they did in Boston with the Big Dig project or in Seattle with the replacement tunnel for the Alaskan Way viaduct. These projects are massively expensive though and take years to complete, so the odds aren’t really in the favor of Strong Towns-minded people.

Interstates going through a city utterly destroy land values and effectively divide it in half. Roads should be reserved for areas with low population density to get people and things from point A to point B. City/towns should be mostly streets with lower-speed roads in the outskirts, not a freaking interstate going through the middle of the place. Sure you could do what Boston did with the Big Dig but was it really worth 14.6 billion for a couple of miles? Personally, I think that tax money could have been spent more wisely.

You still have to get traffic through the city though, and simply put, you need highways to do that, regular city streets can’t handle thousands of semi trucks driving on them every day trying to get through the city, plus all the extra traffic on the streets means that there’s more risk to pedestrians. Think of it like your body’s circulatory system: your blood cells need the capillaries to bring what your body needs to where it needs to go, but you can’t have a circulatory system of just capillaries, you need arteries and veins to transport blood cells in a timely and efficient manner. I like what Strong Towns has to say about urban planning, but tearing down the necessary arteries that keep traffic off city streets is not the answer. Even cities that the urbanism community can’t stop praising like Amsterdam still have highways to keep through traffic away from the rest of the city.

I'm not against highways; I simply think they shouldn't be in the middle of the city or extremely fast near populated areas. Since we're using blood analogies, think of interstates in the middle of a city/town as high blood pressure, if it continues, vital organs will be damaged. Just look at pictures before and after a highway is run through a city and you'll see what I'm talking about.

And I’m not saying they need to level Chicago and build a 30 lane freeway through there. You have to give traffic a way to get in, out, and through the city. We can debate in circles for hours about this, it still doesn’t change the fact that traffic needs a safe place to go that’s out of the way from pedestrians, which means highways are here to stay. Also, if you’ve ever been on a road trip that wound up taking a highway through a major city, you’ll notice that the speed limits are much lower than they are in rural areas, so no, they’re not going “extremely fast”, plus it’s not like pedestrians are allowed on the highways anyway so it really doesn’t matter how fast traffic is moving. There’s also the fact that part of the reason the Interstate Highways were built in the first place was in order to transport military personnel and equipment around the country in a timely manner and odds are that the city is likely where those troops need to go. bUt THeY kEn JuZT taKe CIty StREEtZ! Seconds matter, not only for the military, but also for trucking; both of them can’t afford to slow down because some NIMBY twats have sticks up their butts about property values.