[nikk1]

St Pete is bike/pedestrian friendly relative to other parts of Florida, and I think it's getting better. I actually think that is one reason why the area has been growing so much over the past decade. There is actually a bike trail [1], which was made by paving over an old railway track. I used to take that trail to bike to downtown, and it was extremely safe.

In contrast, I now live in a newer FL city on the Space Coast that is currently booming. Seeing all of the car-friendly development makes me cringe. Nothing is in walking distance. Traffic is terrible. A man backed into me at a stoplight. I have to take a shuttle from my company's parking lot to my building because we have to accommodate so many vehicles, despite the fact that many employees live within an acceptable biking distance.

[1] http://www.pinellascounty.org/trailgd/

[mancerayder]

What kills me isn't just the stuff that people are complaining about in the U.S. regarding existing conditions...

It's that new development isn't, and I hate to use this word, progressive. Don't people WANT to be able to walk around, sit outside and so on, get to work quickly, etc. How can the answer to that be no?

The obesity epidemic is extremely tied to this misguided way of continuing to build cities.

[nikk1]

It's a reinforcing feedback loop: new cities are developed to accommodate cars -> more people own/drive cars because of the city's design -> repeat.

It's a type of trap that leads to these undesired effects. I do not see much changing until self-driving cars change the dynamics of how US society thinks about cars and transportation.