When it comes to modern urban planning, cars are the ultimate monkey’s paw of transportation. In case you’ve never heard of this literary device, in classic folklore, a monkey’s paw grants your wish, but fulfills it through a twisted, problematic catch. Technically, you get exactly what you asked for, but the unintended consequences leave you far worse off.
Not that this ever happened, but you could imagine someone around the time cars were invented asking for a way to conveniently and quickly get around their city or between cities with ease. On its face, personal motor vehicles seem like a widely positive development, and in the ways most people view personal transportation, they really are. But over the decades, the catches have continued to pile up.
How We Got Here
Technological advances over time have made cars everything there are today. Innovation after innovation has led to personal transportation that can go very fast, offer supreme convenience, carry cargo, and travel endlessly with minimal stops for fuelling. Through decades of research, engineering, and monumental infrastructure spending, we built amazing modular machines in all shapes and sizes. Cars, trucks, buses, and even trains and airplanes can do all of that and more. In today’s context, driving feels effortless in comparison to every other type of transportation specifically because we have bent our entire built environment over backward to suit the automobile. But because we granted this wish without considering the fine print, everything else about the way we move people and things around cities has been flipped completely on its head.
Safety
Consider safety. No matter how you choose to get around on a given day, everyone wants to be safe getting from A to B. In response, engineers designed car to be hyper-protective, and as safe as possible. Bigger frames, higher grilles, giant trucks and SUVs where drivers sit high above the road and feel secure in a collision. But by engineering cars to be so safe to ride in, and to enable safe higher road speeds, we have inadvertently made our city streets incredibly unsafe for anyone *not* driving. Being outside of a car in an environment dominated by automobile traffic has become inherently dangerous. To survive on these streets, residents are incentivized to buy larger and larger vehicles just to feel safe on the road themselves, fueling a dangerous arms race.
Environment
We see the same ironic logic in our environmental solutions. Chemists have developed catalytic converters and transitioned toward electric vehicles to curb tailpipe emissions and reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide. Yet while an electric car doesn’t burn fuel anymore, every other negative externality or cars is still present in an EV. Some downsides, like vehicle weight, are actually WORSE in electric cars. EVs still demand massive road networks, consume vast amounts of physical space, degrade pavement quickly, and can pose even more lethal risks to people outside of cars.
Everything is Cars
Ultimately, the entire urban landscape—from neighbourhood design and highway planning to mall layouts and building setbacks—has been whittled down to a single question: How do we accommodate the maximum number of cars moving at the maximum speed from point A to point B, and leave enough room for anybody to store any vehicle anywhere they need to? That’s right, it’s time to talk about perhaps the biggest monkey’s paw of all. With cars, the biggest issue we have to deal with in cities is the twin spatial paradoxes of parking and traffic.
The bigger and more capable a vehicle is, the more convenient it seems—until you have to store it. Ideally, a machine this large would drive off, fold up, or simply disappear when not in use. Instead, a typical private vehicle spends 95% or more of their useful lives parked, and all those cars have to go somewhere. To accommodate this need for parking, cities subsidize free or cheap street parking, we build sprawling parking lots, and every dwelling needs multiple parking spaces, typically both inside and outside our homes. Everything about North American cities are decided by the ebbs and flows of car parking and peak traffic. By spreading destinations further and further apart to make room for all these cars, we have destroyed the human scale of our communities. Simple errands, like dropping a child off at school or even having them get there themselves, is now more difficult or requires a drive because so much of the neighbourhood has been replaced with roads and parking lots.
This has all proven disastrous, especially for the kinds of motor vehicles that do confer broad social benefits to large numbers of people. Delivery trucks, emergency services, and public transit also all get trapped in traffic congestion created primarily by solo drivers, driving up costs and wait times for everyone. Meanwhile, municipalities spend unsustainable sums maintaining endless kilometres of roads and parking infrastructure, blowing massive holes in city budgets.
We got exactly what we wished for: ultimate speed and personal convenience on demand. But in making that bargain, we sacrificed safety, balanced spending, and livable human communities. It is a classic monkey’s paw trade-off—and it is time to ask if the sacrifice was ever worth it.
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