Indoor malls used to be similar gathering places for people who wanted to walk without being in the weather.
Basically, look anywhere the 20- or 30-somethings aren't.
I have no idea what the difference between here and America is. Amazon is not super big here like it seems to be in America.
In the U.S., there are ~2,827 people per mall.
In Australia, there are ~15,337 people per mall.
There are probably just way too many malls in the U.S. given a population that's moving to online shopping.
In the case of American suburbs, places will need to change by basically tearing everything down and rebuilding differently, either a piece at a time or all at once.
You make this statement like there are national zoning laws. Doing exactly this is common in northeastern New Jersey, and the result is pretty dense and walkable suburban areas. That said, much of this is due to momentum; many of the suburbs were platted before car ownership was widespread and the later ones continued similar, familiar patterns.
Separately a lot of state and local legislation that is contentious can be copy pasted and sent along by lobbying groups.
They need family members who care. The family members need parking spaces. The fewer steps from bedroom to car, the better. A nice goal would be to have less than 50 feet from bedroom to car.
It’s a huge subsidy that society pays to have cars around. There is a huge cost due to the space dedicated to cars, parking them, driving them and keeping them from killing people.
My grandma was very feeble at the end of her life and the biggest pain point for her was getting her in and out of the car. If we could get her in her wheelchair and just roll her down the street for brunch, she would have gone out so much more. Instead we had to get her to the car, then pick her up to get into the car, buckle her down, fold up her wheelchair, drive somewhere, then do everything in reverse. Then do it two more times on the way home. She disliked the entire process so much she usually didn't want to bother leaving the house.
I can’t imagine any elderly person with mobility issues being able to cross any road with more than a 25mph speed limit, especially the main roads that are 4 to 8 lanes wide at intersections with 40mph speed limits.
I’m not sure how you get to this without literally shutting down the country, but that aspect was nice.
Letting me go where I want, when I want, means I can't let my kids go anywhere, ever.
Seems like there are two attractors in the mass transit space:
Attractor 1: The mass transit is safe and clean. Everyone uses it, because it is convenient. Because everyone uses it, people care about keeping it safe, clean, and convenient.
Attractor 2: The mass transit is dirty and dangerous. Only poor people use it, because they have no other choice; all middle-class people use cars. Because no one important uses mass transit, no one really cares about making it less dirty and less dangerous.
From what I heard, the former attractor seems more frequent in Europe, the latter in USA.
There are also other things involved in the attractors, such as width of roads, sizes of blocks, whether sidewalks exist or not, etc. These would be even more resistant to change.