So how do you get from a non-walkable city to a walkable city? We can't remove parking minimums because everyone needs a car because it's not walkable. But we can't take out the parking lots, because no one walks, because there's too many parking lots between the places people want to go. And we can't put in dedicated bus lanes, because that would reduce parking, which we need because buses are too slow. How do we break the cycle?

For me, it was pretty simple: I packed up and moved to a walkable city (which meant leaving the US). The only way you're going to get a walkable city out of a non-walkable US city is to completely change the zoning laws, eliminate the free parking and making driving horribly inconvenient and expensive, then go through a cycle of death and rebirth as the city largely dies out and then gets revitalized a couple decades later. I don't want to wait for this process, and I don't even see any serious action this way anywhere yet; I'll be dead of old age before there's a decent number of walkable cities in the US.

Here is what I see taking shape across a number of cities:

1. A big micromobility boom. This describes a number of phenomena: the e-bikes are perhaps the most visible since they add a lot of power to a bike commute and make it easier to justify doing big distances by bike. But equally, the docked bikeshares have found a foothold in many places big and small, and those help extend transit range quite a bit while creating an institutional platform for bike-friendly streets: the bikeshare services will always lobby for whatever makes them the best option.

2. The "unbundled car". This is something Tony Seba uses in his discussions on disruption: the car bundled a large number of services into one solution: "get in the car and drive." Many of those solutions have transitioned to online, delivery, etc. So the car's raison d'etre is diminished today and diminishing further as we develop more alternatives.

3. The future rebundling of transport as a service. The first step in this was the reshuffling of taxi/delivery drivers to gig economy labor. This was probably too early and too reliant on zero interest rates, but one of the things that always courted investment in these businesses was that robotics could take over and perform self-driving. And while it's still not an evenly distributed phenomenon, Waymo exists. I have it on my phone. Waymo itself may not be the last word in how self-driving tech is deployed, but the tech will increasingly realign "cars" with "transit" by lowering the cost of professional vehicle operation. In the current US market, there's been a shortage of bus drivers, and scheduling them is a large pain point for deploying transit. You can't drop driver quality because of the liability involved in operating huge vehicles. Private autos have gotten away with a legal hack that normalizes poor driving by making the individual an owner-operator and blaming them for their inevitable failures. So the economics will work out that cars and fixed-route mass transit are still competitive, but you will get more mobility per dollar invested by adding self-drive to your transit system, because then high-quality driving and scheduling scales and you can flood the streets with both big and small transit vehicles. Therefore, in the future, city buses will run more frequently on more routes and at later hours.

You can slowly, gradually reduce parking minimums.

It doesn't need to be slow. Private developers are not stupid - they know when their customers arrive by car and thus demand parking so they have incentive to figure out how much parking they need. As people switch to other modes of arriving they will decide that the parking isn't needed and eventually worth tearing up for something else. (but this assumes you provide those other options - if transit remains terrible people will drive and need the parking)

Pretty much sums up the problem imho.

Everything you are describing can be solved by paying for parking. Even in the busiest areas of a downtown American city, you can find a monthly parking lot that will rent you a secure parking spot that is truly yours.

Of course, it won't be free -- it will cost what it should cost, market rate.