[8jef]

In an average checkered square North American city, every second street or avenue reserved to any and all personal transportation not larger than a cargo trike, not longer than a tandem bike. From there you can have one ways, two ways, fast lanes, non-powered lanes, longer green lights than cross car streets, overpass, underpass, etc. The Works.

You keep boulevards and any street with speed limitations over 30mph to cars and trucks. You arrange for permanent secured and weatherized personal parking and storage areas on street sides, back alleys, and/or other public places

It's that simple. No change to zoning, no fancy street rebuilding, nothing else different from what already is.

Your street doesn't have cars in it? You park next street. You're disabled and can't walk a hundred feet? Get a trike. Or a folding anything you shove in the trunk of your car. Delivery companies can do cargo trikes.

But hey, let's be real for a moment and acknowledge you'd instantly get giant pickup truck twats ramming into bike lanes for not liking where evolution goes. As always.

[blacksmith_tb]

I like the vision, already in many cities I have ridden in here in the US there are attempts to gradually achieve something similar (though I find that bike streets don't announce themselves very well, so I often see new riders on busy/bad roads when there's a much nicer designated alternative just a block or two away, if only they knew). As for the pickup trucks, just removing the subsidies from gas prices will make them fade away pretty quickly I expect.

[ItsMonkk]

There's a realization you come to short after you understand what you described as an easy transition to a much better community - the transition from grid streets is much simpler than the transition from suburban streets. All of the suburbs filled with stroad connected cul-de-sac developments might be nearly permanently disfigured that aren't worth the costs to retrofit.

[noahtallen]

To be fair, suburb streets aren’t that car unfriendly. Many of the subdevelopments I’ve been to are extremely chill, low traffic, low speed.

The problem is really twofold:

- suburbs are far away from anything worth biking to. Strip malls and chain stores aren’t great destinations. The nice stuff (or bike friendly stuff) is closer to the city and many miles away from the subdevelopments.

- Those connection stroads are dangerous to walk and bike on. On the flip side, the public right of way used to built them is so large, it’d be “easy” to add bike lanes and sidewalks. By easy, I mean it won’t make people’s lives worse. You could remove a lane or a handful of parking spots and it wouldn’t make a huge impact to human life.

But at the end of the day… if there’s nowhere to go, no one would use those modified roads.

So it’s a catch 22, and I doubt it will get better with small local initiatives because the suburb lifestyle is so ingrained in many people’s lives.