I'm not against dense cities that were designed before cars. Those can be great and I really am happy they exist. I just think that trying to make Los Angeles into a Manhattan or a Paris should not be the goal of the urban planners of LA. Houston and Atlanta are also not going to be able to change that much. It would be very hard to do; really impossible without some kind of wholesale destruction by war. Maybe some other way of city living can be a great also. Let humanity try it out. There are lots of cities in the world. If Elon Musk leads a group to start building a tunnel from his house to SpaceX as an experiment, I'd say encourage that effort. LA with lots of tunnels should be much better that what it is now and could be something great and completely unexpected.
> I just think that trying to make Los Angeles into a Manhattan or a Paris should not be the goal of the urban planners of LA. Houston and Atlanta are also not going to be able to change that much. It would be very hard to do; really impossible without some kind of wholesale destruction by war.
It's possible to get incrementally better though. LA is building more and more metro lines, because they're working.
> Maybe some other way of city living can be a great also. Let humanity try it out. There are lots of cities in the world.
Building in a sprawling, car-oriented way has been tried though, and it's resulted in cities that aren't very nice to live in. At what point do we draw a line under it and say the experiment has failed? I'm all for having city design experiments, but at some point we have to put those experiments into practice and use the results to create more livable cities.
