>>1644371The area highlighted is small enough to walk across, and is bounded by high capacity roads already, with larger long-distance roads outside the boundaries. 4 million people aren't driving down every local downtown street every day, numerous other metro areas larger than Minneapolis have narrower streets in their downtowns, and the streets in the area being looked at weren't laid down for the purpose of car traffic, but instead are the result of path dependence from 19th century surveying and land platting.
But fine, for comparison, here's the same land area in Ginza, at the center of the largest metropolitan population in the world. There's more infrastructure density, of course, and the street layout is more rectilinear, but there is still a clearly visible pedestrian street hierarchy. Somehow, Tokyo manages to function without every single street being a 90 foot wide automotive sewer. A city looking like Minneapolis is not an inevitable consequence of population and economic activity, but a set of accumulated design choices and social priorities.
