Underpaid Genius

Imagine a City Without Traffic

The old car is toxic and stupid. The old car is dead. The most amazing thing about the 20th century design of the car is how effectively we were able to disguise its reality. If you were sitting in a room with an engine running you couldn’t hear yourself think you would be dead in no time. An internal combustion engine is a continuous toxic explosion. Think of a freeway as a poisonous river of fire. That is the 20th century reality of the car. But we disguised that. We designed a way for you to sip your starbucks and listen to Vivaldi sitting on top of this continuous explosion. And more than any other design, this design of the car reshaped our cities and changed the world. Everywhere, we designed our cities for cars. Even places in the world where the people are dead set against the American values of liberal democracy, they embrace traffic. Traffic is the lingua franca of the 20th century.

Bruce Mao, Urbanity Revised