For #EarthDay let's look at how car-dependent infrastructure is threatening the bio-physical basis of our own existence 🧵/16

It's hard to overstate what a crisis automobile dependence is. Cars are a depreciating, toxic asset that devour valuable land and the money, time, health, and lives of Americans. Car dependence is a key driver of low US life expectancy (crash injuries/deaths, PM2.5, inactivity).

Shoutout to Ithaca, NY 🇺🇸 for designing a city where 20% of residents feel safe walking or biking around town. This is quite an achievement for an American city.

London 🇬🇧 street with 2 🚗 lanes and 1 narrow bidirectional 🚲 lane
➡️
Transforms into a street with 1 🚗 lane and 2 wide unidirectional 🚲 lanes

You build it and they come. It's that simple. We should know by now because we've been doing that with cars for the last century.

New pedestrianized street in London 🇬🇧 (2008 ➡️ 2024)

Beautiful 😍

Now imagine what this would look like if it was car parking

To be fair to Albuquerque, they really helped to showcase the dreary and isolating effect that car-centric infrastructure creates.

I wonder if Chat-GPT does this because it uses the thousands of real pictures showing cars parked/driving in the bike lane. And so now it thinks this is a normal streetscape 🤣