Four wheels good, two legs bad?

Arrol Gellner writes today on Inman News about America's fascination with their cars and the lack of city planning that could do something about it...

We Americans are a puzzling bunch. We travel to Italy, France or Spain and come back smitten with the charmingly walk-able streets, close-knit houses, and humanly scaled public spaces we find there. Yet we seldom stop to wonder why our own built environment is so utterly lacking in those traits.

It's no mystery: In spite of rising population and dwindling resources, America remains saddled with long outdated planning ideals that are the furthest thing from the European examples we admire so much.

America is a vast nation, and perhaps in consequence, our planners and engineers have historically been trained to think big. This tendency has produced some magnificent civil engineering projects such as railways, dams and bridges. Yet it hasn't been nearly so successful at the scale of human habitation.

Thanks to the megalomania of our traffic engineers, for example, American cities are among the least pedestrian-friendly in the world. Each year, larger and larger swaths of urban and suburban land are paved over with ubiquitous six-lane thoroughfares bristling with redundant arrays of traffic signals. Aside from creating barren, monotonous and alienating cityscapes, such roads are also daunting barriers to people on foot, no matter how many kinds of whiz-bang pedestrian signals we install. Rather than drawing our cities together, our roads tear them apart, providing one more incentive for Americans to drive instead of walk.

I guess we have some semblance of 'planning' in San Francisco... The planning department waits for the Supervisors to come up with something, then they all fight over it with the mayor for a while, and it appears now that eventually there will be nowhere to park your car... So dammit, get out and walk!

Mayor vetoes C-3 parking legislation, but offers amendment [SFHomeBlog]