Thanks. It seems to have the same big-picture effect as congestion fees, though it may be easier to administer and more egalitarian (at the expense of flexibility).

Any plan can’t be cookie cutter. Every city is different, and decisions need to be made based on what locally works.

Nice bike paths won’t be nearly as useful for daily use in Anchorage as they might be in LA. Most people won’t be ok with riding a little bicycle in -50C in pitch blackness as they go to get groceries for the week.

Reducing individual transportation options could probably help contribute to a growing distance between the rich and the poor.

private cities could…

Transit is inherently a public matter managed by the government. Massive expressways are just as much ‘big government’ as public transit. There are no constitutional or principled reasons to make cars/trucks the preferred transportation option. However, these changes would require support from state, county, and city governments (depending on the political structure for the metropolitian area)

I’m kind of anti-car so maybe we could talk out some solutions. but they also have a lot of benefits and the cons (as mentioned in the post) haven’t been seen as outweighing the benefits for a lot of people.

The apparent benefits are in part due to subsidies and other externalization of costs. Ideally we could address those externalities individually, but as long as cars are considered the default mode of transit (for the middle class), there will be continued political support for these externalizations of cost. Furthermore, much of the externalization is directly due to infrastructure. For instance, many zoning laws require developers to add parking spaces to their projects – it is not possible to eliminate those requirements without simultaneously making other changes to reduce overall traffic; otherwise, you end up with more cars than parking spaces, resulting in cars driving around the city looking for parking spots and creating even more traffic.

maybe getting rid of zoning would allow more housing and shops and things to be built next to each other?

High density housing is often opposed on the grounds that it would produce too much car traffic. Even if the local community supports it, it often doesn’t work well if through-traffic makes the area unpleasant and inconvenient for pedestrians.

idk has anyone hashed out a decent “urban planning” guide? also keeping in mind remote workers so the city may be less needed for collaboration?

There’s definitely been a lot of work on this. I don’t know the publications off the top of my head though. I’ll post them here if I find some good ones – please do the same. Some of these proposals have been implemented in places like Berkeley (side roads closed to through-traffic) – other communities have achieved the same effect by making tons of dead-end road sections, but this also blocks pedestrians and bikes from passing through, so it’s a pretty dysfunctional (and elitist) way of controlling car traffic.

because ironically if the OP anti-car points are for environmental reasons, cities themselves are kind of anti-environment. so maybe getting rid of cities is the outside the box solution to cars being bad in cities?

This is about the livability of cities (or high-density areas), but one benefit of high-density areas is lower environmental impact. For a given population size, high-density city centers are much less environmentally damaging than suburban sprawl (the current alternative). I can imagine some layouts that may be better (e.g. high-density urban nodes [small towns] surrounding interstate exit points or train stations), but any environmental conservation program needs to find a way to minimize high-energy transit (e.g. cars) and minimize gratuitous conversion of land to pavement/lawns.