I know it sounds hypocritical but hear me out. My city’s suburban streets were mostly built in the 1900s and 1910s, before cars were ubiquitous and before streets were built to accommodate them. So like 90% of the streets in the immediate suburbs (I’m talking 1 - 5 minutes from downtown) are either way too skinny to drive on or they don’t have driveways. In a select few streets it’s even both. And so you end up with streets that are littered with parked cars, and a lot of streets are two lane but end up functioning like one-ways. There have been moments where I drive on these streets because GPS told me to, and then I question my sanity because it really feels like a 1-way and yet there’s signs facing me. I mention this because I’m a pizza delivery driver and so I have to navigate these streets at least a few times a day, usually dozens of times if we’re offering coupons in those areas. And every time it becomes far more of a hassle than it has to be just because of how there are so many cars and so many people driving on them. I hate how we’ve built this city that had a downtown where people would walk to and shop around in, but now everybody drives to the superstores on the outskirts and uses the freeway to go to work. It’s like we’ve ruined the act of driving simply by forcing everybody to drive more.

I actually lived in Japan for a period, and while I wasn’t old enough to drive there, I noticed that people seemed to have a far better time driving on their ultra-narrow suburban streets, and I’m willing to hedge a bet that’s because not everything there was car-focused. Obviously once you got out into the rural regions more people drove, but in Tokyo especially people seemed to walk or take the train most of the time.

I wonder if maybe in an alternate universe where we didn’t place superstores and supermarkets and home depots a 1-hours walk away from the old suburbs, and where we didn’t develop this culture that everybody needed a car, would it be a much less irritating and frustrating experience driving around? Hell in that universe I might even be able to get my store’s drive times down a couple minutes.