Car brain, amirite?

Cities should not sacrifice their residents’ quality of life on the altar of suburban motorists’ convenience.

Designing our cities exclusively around cars and car-related access is just repeatedly solving this geometry problem over and over again, but with diminishing returns. Focusing on walking, biking, and taking transit is often better (and more fun).

Every neighborhood should have a cute, walkable coffee shop in it

Some people will tell you we can't build new buildings that fit the neighborhood character without adding acres of new parking. Corktown, Detroit.

Wow. After a month and a half closure, looks like Detroit’s People Mover is back.

I left Detroit in 2008, so the city is VERY disorienting for me now.

You don't hear about this bc it is specifically related to adding protected bike lanes and its illegal in the usa to imply that infringing on people's god given right to 8-lane residential roads might be necessary for traffic safety

Many city parks depts view “commerce” in parks negatively. No one can adequately explain why, but it’s reality. It’s also self-defeating as it creates a revenue source & drives higher usage. Unfortunately many parks dept heads measure success by acres owned, not visitors per acre. More cities need to adopt the kiosk strategy of Lisbon and elsewhere.

This place was super fun and it’s a shame that it didn’t last.

We dig these up often in Michigan. I’ve seen a couple different styles too. I’ve heard Monroe even still has some in service!

1. Humbly observe where people in your community are struggling. 2. Ask "What's the next smallest thing we can do to address that struggle *right now*?" 3. Do that thing. Right now. 4. Repeat

The people in this photo aren't friendlier than you. Their apartments are just smaller. So small that Parisians basically gave up on living indoors and moved their living rooms onto the sidewalk. And that was the whole plan. In the 1850s, a city planner named Baron Haussmann tore apart medieval Paris and rebuilt it. He widened streets into boulevards, capped every building at five stories, and added one rule that explains this entire photo: the ground floor of every building had to be a café, a bakery, or a shop. The apartments above were intentionally tiny. Some were single rooms carved out of old mansions. No garden. Barely any sunlight. A private balcony was something most Parisians would never have. So the café became home. You ate breakfast there. Held meetings there. Received your mail there. By the late 1700s, Paris already had close to 2,000 of them. In 2002, there were still 1,907. Even now, after years of closures brought that number to about 1,410, the coverage is absurd: a 2020 city study found 94% of Parisians live within a five-minute walk of a bakery. When COVID shut indoor dining in 2020, Paris ripped out parking spaces, turned them into outdoor terraces, and let 9,800 cafés and restaurants keep them permanently. An American sociologist named Ray Oldenburg wrote a book in 1989 called The Great Good Place. He had a name for spots like the Parisian café: "third places." Not your home, not your office, but the casual in-between spots where you actually get to know people. Cafés, pubs, barbershops, the corner store where the owner knows your name. His whole argument was that American suburbs were built with only two zones, your house and your job, connected by a car. No sidewalk café, no place to bump into a neighbor by accident. The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national health epidemic in 2023. Being alone all the time is as bad for your body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Half of American adults say they feel lonely. Weekly socializing dropped from 5.5 hours in 2003 to just 4 hours in 2023, and it never bounced back after COVID. Americans between 15 and 29 now spend 45% more time alone than they did in 2010. The scene in this tweet looks like a personality trait. It is a 170-year-old engineering project that works exactly as designed.

This is public joy!

Retvrn

Street trees ✅ provide shade ✅ improve drainage ✅ provide visual interest ✅ encourage drivers to slow down Why wouldn’t we save them?

Bring back the town square

The American Third Space is the Car