Urban Planning Opinion Progression

Be aware, after living in the Netherlands every other "developed" city is horrible, at least in the west. There are still small towns which have not been "modernized" and are enjoyable. Cities could be designed so much better. I always wonder if the people who make decisions for the cities actually live in those cities, or they are just incompetent.

For example:

- Most european cities, with a coast, chose to place a BIG noisy avenue right in front of it, and let's not talk about the surf ghost towns with massive parking lots facing the beach. How can you allow that in the place where you live?

- Outside London's touristic center, there's barely space to walk, no sidewalks. In the few fancy places with sidewalks, every house receiving sunlight in the frontyard has a car completely taking over it. In the netherlands, you literally see people put a small table to have a drink or snack, even without a frontyard!

- So much noise comes from cars, Amsterdam it's a big city but it's so quiet, in the good sense. Of course if you like the noise, you can go to noisy areas with tourists or parties, but that's different.

For anyone who wants to learn where it started (in the US), see Peter Norton's (no, not that one) Fighting Traffic:

> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as “road hogs” or “speed demons” and cars as “juggernauts” or “death cars.” He considers the perspectives of all users—pedestrians, police (who had to become “traffic cops”), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for “justice.” Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of “efficiency.” Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking “freedom”—a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.

* https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/

Also a reminder that these are societal policy decisions, and things are not inevitable. Amsterdam used to be much more car-centric, but people decided to go in another direction:

* https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...

* https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in...