The widespread use of huge, highway-built vehicles (that is, all American cars) for short trips in US cities has been sticking out to me recently as a major safety hazard and detractor from pleasant urban living. Highway-built cars are fundamentally incompatible with human-scale living: they are loud and accelerate quickly while being soundproof, isolating the occupants from the effects they have on their environment. Sleek, reflective windshields and tinted windows also make it difficult for pedestrians and bikers to make eye contact with car drivers, dehumanizing interactions with vehicles and increasing reliance on inflexible measures like traffic lights that would not be required on a more human scale.

I would love to see small cars like these come into more widespread use in the the U.S., with carsharing programs providing cars as needed for highway driving. This change could come much more quickly than the large-scale urban design improvements we will eventually need to totally reduce reliance on cars in cities.

As it is, many city streets are too fast for these cars to be comfortable. I would love to see a general slowing-down of vehicles in US cities and towns that makes city vehicles like these practical, and, on top of the obvious safety benefits for all the cities that claim to have “vision zero”, I don’t think it would come with many downsides. Even outside of a city center for in-town trips of a few miles, 28mph is really quite fast—a matter of a few extra minutes compared to current dangerous city speeds.