This is, of course, the inability to visualize a different life that I referred to in my original post. There are many alternatives to car-oriented life, as cities that grew before cars plainly evidence. Those are the cities that people want to spend their vacations in.
Instead of building shopping malls with parking lots, Colombia could relax zoning to allow chain restaurants and McDonalds near housing, and build dedicated bike lanes to get to them. Instead of building suburbs and freeways, it could build more public space like open pedestrian plazas to give people a feeling of space, and metros/bus rapid transit to make it easy to get around. Colombians who want to live a quiet suburban-style life can still do that in a rural home, which could be connected by rail when traveling to a city is required - but their choice to live a suburban life should not require those of us in cities to give up our space for wide roads to fit their cars and endless free car storage, at the expense of our way of life.
These options aren't the only alternatives Colombians could have, nor are they a fantasy - they exist today in places like Europe and parts of Asia.
Cars are not a requirement for human flourishing. We only designed our lives to make them that way.
It's worth mentioning most European cities didn't skip cars entirely. Amsterdam in the 70s was as much a traffic sewer as Detroit. They just realized they fucked up in the 80s and spent 30+ years correcting course.
Most rebuilt postwar European cities were built for cars. Then the people realized that sucked, often quicker cuz their legs y built environments accommodated cars poorly, and instead we got effective metro systems instead.
They never built the sprawling suburbia that much of the US has now though. Public transit remains viable in places built for humans even if it gets colonized by cars for a few decades. Low density suburbs with winding roads doesn't allow for non car transportation to be viable.
Exactly, cities like Rotterdamn and Berlin were flattened in WWII. They're still much better to live in without a car than any American city except NYC and maybe Montreal.
The excuse that postwar development is the reason for car dependency in north america doesn't hold water.
Sometimes I imagine an alien visiting Earth (America) for the first time and assuming cars enslaved humanity to force us to build convenient paths for them and harvest their food and bring it to convenient locations. I don’t see a practical difference.
By that logic dogs would probably win since you have to literally pick theirs up twice a day with your (admittedly covered) hand instead of scooping it just once in the morning.
This is, of course, the inability to visualize a different life that I referred to in my original post. There are many alternatives to car-oriented life, as cities that grew before cars plainly evidence. Those are the cities that people want to spend their vacations in.
Instead of building shopping malls with parking lots, Colombia could relax zoning to allow chain restaurants and McDonalds near housing, and build dedicated bike lanes to get to them. Instead of building suburbs and freeways, it could build more public space like open pedestrian plazas to give people a feeling of space, and metros/bus rapid transit to make it easy to get around. Colombians who want to live a quiet suburban-style life can still do that in a rural home, which could be connected by rail when traveling to a city is required - but their choice to live a suburban life should not require those of us in cities to give up our space for wide roads to fit their cars and endless free car storage, at the expense of our way of life.
These options aren't the only alternatives Colombians could have, nor are they a fantasy - they exist today in places like Europe and parts of Asia.
Cars are not a requirement for human flourishing. We only designed our lives to make them that way.