We need to redesign cities to tackle climate change, IPCC says
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
In most American cities, try getting even something as simple as a bike lane or a new park built. You're looking at many years, possibly even a decade in most cases.
You've got environmental reviews (local, state and federal!), public hearing after public hearing, community outreach sessions to every aggrieved group that's ever existed, and a funding process that's so convoluted hardly anyone alive actually understands it.
Look at the Second Avenue Subway in NYC. It was originally proposed in 1920, revived again in the 1970's, revived yet again around 2004, and it's STILL not finished. When all is said and done it's going to have taken more than a century from the time the idea was proposed to when it gets completed. And there's no guarantee it will actually ever get fully completed.
Without a complete overhaul of how public projects get funded, designed, and built in the U.S. there is exactly zero hope of any meaningful redesign of American cities. And ironically, it's a lot of the same folks pushing for redesigns to prepare for climate change who are responsible for the bureaucratic nightmare that is U.S. urban planning.