To follow up, this only illustrates the advantages of using cars and roads to get around. That is: it’s really easy to reconfigure traffic patterns so you can make changes to a city like turning streets into outdoor plazas. Since cars aren’t stuck on a single route, you can take a whole street and turn it into a nice little shopping center like this and drivers will simply find a different way to get where they’re going. Highways can be removed, or added as needed, because roads are all building blocks, interchangeable and modular that can be easily and cheaply added, removed, or reconfigured to suit changing needs. Modern growing cities need this modularity as they discover which areas attract what, and plan accordingly. Train lines are extremely expensive and time consuming to relocate, expand, or shut down, which leads to them being essentially stuck where they are already, unable to adapt to how cities grow, and you find areas that become hotspots don’t get transit service for years afterwards, or lines that are extremely unpopular run for a long time because of sunk cost.
But roads? Sure, change one into a shopping area because there’s another one people can take instead, and you can widen that one to support the extra traffic. Huge street in a shopping area? Put some bike lanes on it and expand the nearby highway instead. Modular. Configurable. Responsive. Future.
