Imagine waking up, putting on some comfortable clothes, and heading outside. You can feel your neighborhood waking up with you: families out walking, chairs being set out in cafés, the smell of a nearby bakery rising in the air. You take a leisurely fifteen-minute stroll down a few tree-lined blocks, running into people you know and others who are also participating in the shared life of your community—people building a sense of place together. Folks on their porches are reading the paper, having a cup of coffee, and waving as you walk by. This kind of neighborhood doesn’t just inspire you, it invites participation. Over time, you fall in love with it. It becomes part of you. You feel rooted, local, grounded, and alive. You are embodied in a place.

This is the feeling that comes from living in a beautiful, mixed-use, walkable neighborhood: a place designed at the human scale. Humans need time to soak things in; our minds are like sponges. We live in an open-system creation, full of infinite inputs and outputs. We don’t function in closed-loop systems like machines. We need to meander, explore, and daydream—taking in our surroundings.

Unfortunately, walkable neighborhoods are extremely rare in the United States, especially in Texas and in San Antonio. Most of our built environment is designed for machines. They are closed-loop systems. Our streets make up roughly 85% of our public space, yet they are almost entirely designed around high-speed automobiles.

The contrast is stark. We’ve all been stuck in traffic, driving down streets with no visual interest or identity, at speeds that could kill us. We’ve all felt anger toward our fellow drivers because we’re trapped in places where we don’t want to be—anonymous behind our windshields. We listen to our own podcasts, return home, and retreat into isolated houses to tune into mass media. Our cars disconnect us from local culture, our neighbors, and our communities.

In my view, automobile dominance in our public spaces is the number one issue plaguing our cities—and even our country. We were not designed for such speed. We were designed to walk, to notice, and to soak in our environment. The result of trading our feet for gas pedals reverberates throughout society: automobile dominance has created public health problems, a loneliness epidemic, a lost generation of young people, an isolated elderly population, and ugly, uninspiring public spaces.

In my last article, I wrote about zoning reform—an essential ingredient in de-prioritizing the automobile. You can’t have beautiful, walkable cities when zoning requires more space for parking cars than for human use and enjoyment. Equally important, though, is ensuring that our streets are designed for the human scale. You’re not going to get corner bakeries and flower shops fronting a narrow sidewalk on a 50-foot-wide street with cars flying by at 45 mph.

Zoning reform is essential for private creativity and for democratizing wealth and opportunity. Human-scaled street design is essential for public ownership and for reviving a healthy democracy. The public needs to have input into—and pride in—their local streets. When streets are designed for cars, they require pure technocratic expertise. When they’re designed for people, they only require common sense. We need to bring more common sense back to our public spaces. We’ll be healthier, happier, and more invigorated citizens.

We can do this. We can build streets designed by citizens for people, not by experts for cars. We can lift the veil between citizens and their built environment and inspire more civic participation.

A pragmatic first step is lowering speed limits—to below 20 miles per hour in residential neighborhoods and below 30 in commercial corridors. Lower speeds encourage smaller, human-scaled vehicles: golf carts, scooters, and electric bikes. How fun, and how much less expensive, would it be to take your family around on a golf cart for daily errands? We love to vacation in places where golf carts are safe; why not use them in our own city? Not only are they enjoyable and human-scaled, but they take up significantly less space, allowing for more “Main Street” style configurations instead of sprawling big-box layouts. The same goes for bicycles, scooters, and e-bikes—affordable, easy-to-maintain forms of transportation that should become the norm on our streets.

Next, we need to allow shade trees beneath utility lines. Most utility providers currently prohibit this within their easements, but shade trees are essential. They cool our streets and sidewalks, provide a visual narrowing that naturally slows cars, and bring beauty to our neighborhoods. We need beauty more than ever.

Alongside zoning reform, we should eliminate parking mandates and adopt form-based requirements that push parking behind buildings while incentivizing smaller setbacks. Buildings closer to the street provide shade in the Texas heat, add visual interest, and, like trees, visually compress the street, slowing traffic naturally.

For our widest streets, we can narrow them by striping on-street parking or converting part of the right-of-way into protected bike lanes. Many streets are built to accommodate large fire trucks, but we can transition to smaller, more nimble fire vehicles—like those used throughout Europe—without compromising safety.

San Antonio has already passed a “Complete Streets Policy” and a “Bicycle Network Plan.” We should do everything we can to implement them. I’m convinced that VIA’s Greenline will only succeed if it’s accompanied by wider sidewalks, shade trees, and a significantly better pedestrian experience. These plans may not yield immediate results, but over time we’ll be amazed at the vibrancy they bring.

Finally, our neighborhood metric should be: Can my kids safely play in the street?
And our commercial corridor metric: Is this a place where local businesses can flourish? We have great City staff and talented professionals that specialize in traffic planning and engineering. We need to invest in training them and empowering them to help us achieve human-scaled streets.

If we design with these ideals in mind, our neighborhoods will become better and our streets safer. We don’t have to get rid of cars—we just need to make other options a viable alternative, something we have neglected for decades.

Street design and zoning reform are the most critical first steps in curbing sprawl and transforming San Antonio into a more walkable, beautiful city. Still, after sixty years of promoting sprawl, the market has grown comfortable with it. The product is expected, normalized, and homogenous. To break the pattern, we must not only liberalize zoning and de-prioritize the automobile—we must also define what our ideal development pattern is and have the resolve to incentivize it to happen.

In my next article, I’ll explore why incentives are so important and what we can do to make them a reality.