Cars Don't Kill Cities (Silly Assumptions Do)

Atlanta is rapidly consuming Barrow County, so I think I can comment as someone in Atlanta. It's much easier and far more practical to get people to change the kind of car they drive than to change what moves them.<p>I like to be able to take a peaceful ride along the highways that run through Barrow and go right up to any place along the way, then go back at will.<p>Cars have come a long way, and their impact on the environment will be just about none by the time we could get a ring of walkable suburbs built just outside the perimeter. The problems seem to be going away. Dense cities are potentially more efficient, but Georgia is a nest of roads and sparse population and still manages to be clean and productive. Forcing everyone into a skyscraper is probably overoptimizing.

Sukin is using "over-engineering" to mean multi-purpose, which isn't what Edwards is saying.<p>When the Edwards article uses the "over-engineering" term, it's in the context of a long-distance vehicle being used for a short-distance, mundane errand. Edwards is simply contending that the "average American sedan" with the specs he gives is, by its very design, supposed to do one thing and one thing only: go on road trips. Citing multi-purpose items like computers or calling out more people who use machines against their designs (Sukin's example with Jeeps) doesn't refute Edwards' argument.<p>Cars Kill Cities makes a fair point that the frequent short-distance commute is a misuse of the "average automobile," done so at the expense of large cities and even other motorists themselves; the fact that it's convenient is what makes it so problematic.

"Beautiful green spaces" does not describe the suburban experience. Highway medians, drainage ponds, and generic billboard-studded forests are not examples of natural beauty. If you're willing to go out past suburbia to the real country, sure, there you may have natural beauty, but the notion that seas of parking lots and cheaply constructed strip malls are more beautiful than traditional cities is absurd.<p>In fact, almost any infrastructure which supports a large number of cars is going to result in bad scenery, because the wide highways will dominate the field of view, and every possible element of visual interest will be too far away to have impact. You need some pretty dramatic hills to restore visual interest to a four-lane highway.

This piece doesn't address the issues brought up in the original article. Your dry cleaner is a 10 minute drive away? Surely there is a more efficient way to make that same journey that won't involve an "over engineered" car with a massive possible range. Certainly you don't need four passenger seats when traveling to the dry cleaners. Thus, you could probably get by with a smaller vehicle or a smart form of public transportation to accomplish the same task (and reduce the amount of space used for parking lots).<p>I think I am putting more thought into this comment than Isaac Sukin put into understanding the original piece.

Isaac doesn't really refute any of the original article's points. He (clearly and persuasively) asserts that Atlanta's development pattern reflects the preferences of Atlantans.<p>The original author of "Cars Kill Cities" seems to hope that all cities can be more like NYC. A laudable goal, but an unlikely one. Many cities, like Atlanta, are low-density and high-parking because their residents like it that way.