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American developers and urban planners claim their objective is to create vibrant pedestrian districts that are desirable tourist/shopping/dining areas. 1
Cars are antithetical to the creation of pleasant pedestrian spaces. The automobile (and its roadways) threaten and destroy the security of pedestrians. So, in order to create a desirable pedestrian space, they have to remove the automobile. 2
If you eliminate cars, you have to provide public transportation solutions. The problem is that public transit is regional and capital intensive. This requires a regional government with a long-term view. We don’t have such a thing in America. 3
Cars and their attendant infrastructure are far more expensive than public transit, but creating transit demands a change in the way we think. It also challenges entrenched monetary interests. Hard to do in the USA. 4
So developers and urban planners design handsome, expensive places with the stated goal of creating a desirable pedestrian tourist/shopping/dining space, and then make cars dominant within it, because while they can build, they can’t change systems. 5
And so, people aren’t very comfortable in these spaces, and they exclude those who don’t want to drive, and they fail. 6
Then, to justify and excuse their failure, the developers and planners throw up their hands and say, “people don’t really want pedestrian spaces.” They draw the exact wrong conclusion from the results. 7
It was Upton Sinclair who said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” 8
