Why does your city feel like it's built for cars, not for people?

Have you ever felt this way: walking through the city center, yet it feels like you've stumbled into a buffer zone for a highway; wanting to walk from a café to a bookstore, but finding you have to cross an eight-lane road and wait two minutes for a red light. The city always seems to whisper to you: this place doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to cars.

This is not your imagination. In their new book Transportation and the Shape of Cities, three urban researchers—engineer Christof Spieler, planner-illustrator David Copeland-Loredo, and architect-turned-planner Mandi Chapa—use hundreds of scaled diagrams to prove that space, not policy or politics, is the most scarce resource in urban transportation. Every mode of transport has its own geometric “footprint”—a parked car requires 9×18 feet of space, while an office workstation is only 8×8 feet; a train traveling at 200 mph has a turning radius of about 13,000 feet, while a bicycle only needs 8 feet. When these geometric blocks are forcibly crammed into a finite urban grid, conflict arises.

The book traces how this conflict has shaped the face of American cities. Los Angeles is a quintessential product of the freeway network—low-density sprawl, extra-wide lanes, and a sea of parking lots. San Francisco, on the other hand, halted freeway construction during a certain period in the last century, preserving more compact neighborhoods and a more coherent pedestrian experience. Two cities in the same state, yet they arrived at vastly different urban forms due to different transportation decisions. In Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, the fate of the metro system is even more stark: Washington has been building its system steadily since 1969, with all planned lines operational by 2001; Baltimore proposed a 71-mile metro plan in 1976, but due to political vacillation, only a short segment has been built to date. Spieler says: “The key is network completeness. In the U.S., we default to the idea that the car network is always complete—every development is legally required to have driveways connecting to roads. But transit systems have never been treated the same way, and scarcity breeds inequality.”

This scarcity in turn amplifies “transit gentrification” in cities—only a few neighborhoods with subway stations enjoy convenience, which drives up housing prices and changes demographics. And the book’s sharpest critique targets the current state where “pedestrians are technically ignored.” Spieler points out: “Cars are treated rigorously—their turning radii, lane widths are all standard parameters. But pedestrians are also mechanical objects; they need space and slope just the same. When we talk about transportation, we simply don’t calculate the ‘geometry’ of pedestrians.” This omission results in sidewalks often being compressed into a thin line between lanes, with streetlights, benches, and trash bins becoming optional decorations.So, what does a "pedestrian-first" city look like? Spieler laughs and says, "Look at any city with a history of over 250 years—they have a completely different scale, because pedestrians don't need that much space." Chapa adds, "For pedestrians to thrive, you need to provide diverse services, activities, and amenities within walking distance. Pedestrian streets should be like a living room: with lighting, seating, awnings, and trash cans."

What about bicycles and scooters? Spieler believes there are three ways to think about it: treating a bicycle as a larger, faster pedestrian, or as a smaller, slower car, or as an independent mode in itself. Different choices lead to vastly different street designs. Copeland-Loredo, on the other hand, advocates for the combination of "bicycles + rail transit": "When you bring your bike onto a train, your travel radius expands dramatically." He cites the example of Houston: during this year's World Cup, due to a lack of shared bikes, a large number of fans were stranded around the stadiums, unable to explore different neighborhoods. "If they could ride a bike for 15 minutes to reach a station, the city they see would be completely different."

Ultimately, the insight of this book lies not in grand narratives, but in the daily experience of the streets. When we view urban space as a scarce resource and re-examine the allocation of every square meter, perhaps we can, amidst asphalt and concrete, reclaim for people a territory where they can stroll, linger, and meet.