5 July

One of the main reasons cars dominate cities, is that city design has been handed over to property developers. A car is a dream to a property developer, because they can keep building millions of houses on unoccupied land, and not worry whether there’s an integration with city life more generally. People can just hop in their car and drive to get stuff, rather than the developer having to provide it. So we end up with vast car parks, which we call suburbs (mostly devoid of any sort of cultural, social or even economic life), surrounding modern cities. And the traffic gridlock we see is people driving to get all of the things that the property developer doesn’t provide, where they live.