This is the cost of automobile orientation. Given a fixed area of land—say, a city block—if you want to accommodate cars for every person coming and going, you can fit a lot less productive activity on that land. And yet your infrastructure and service costs will be the same or even higher.

This is fundamentally a geometry problem: cars simply gobble up space, both when they’re in use and when they’re parked. Autonomous technology doesn't solve that. Electrification doesn't solve it. Uber and Lyft don't solve it. Elon Musk certainly has no idea how to solve it.

An essay from all the way back in 1973, titled The Social Ideology of the Motorcar by André Gorz, brilliantly captures the basic futility of designing a city around universal car ownership. Gorz argues that the automobile is, by its nature, a luxury product. This doesn't mean there's something elitist about wanting to have or drive a car. It means that the car is a product whose greatest benefit—the ability to travel farther, faster, with greater convenience, than other people—hinges on most people not having access to it. As soon as everyone has access to it, the benefits don't scale, and in fact are largely negated.

In other words, if you want everyone to have a car, you can't have New York City anymore; it’s impossible. You have to turn New York City into Atlanta or Houston. And once you've done that, everyone lives farther from each other and still can't get anywhere fast, and everyone still experiences crowding and congestion—just of a different sort.

Cars result in “spiky” patterns of crowding.

Amid California’s shelter-in-place order, which allows you to leave your home for exercise, reports emerged this week of beaches within driving distance of Bay Area cities being overwhelmed by day-trippers. Many neighborhood parks and streets in San Francisco are quiet and could accommodate a lot more socially distanced recreation.

Shoppers around the world are consistently reporting long lines and shortages of basic staples like toilet paper at big-box superstores like Costco. Meanwhile, your best bet to obtain such staples may be a neighborhood bodega, whose customers are largely coming from within walking distance.

The common thread here is how universal car usage tends to collapse distance. Popular destinations become even more popular, and more crowded, than they would be otherwise. In a world designed to facilitate walking, rather than one that crowds out walkers in order to afford luxurious amounts of space to drivers and their vehicles, we would have more decentralized patterns of movement. A handful of shoppers at each of a few dozen corner stores instead of hundreds of shoppers at one Walmart would likely result in less crowding and less spread of contagion.

We have a chance right now to see things with new eyes.

Collective crises are interesting moments in which the boundaries of the possible become fluid. And when they solidify again, it’s not by snapping back to where they were but by settling into a new shape, at times both familiar and unfamiliar. We’ve all experienced historical phase shifts like this—consider the permanent changes to everyday life brought about by the fall of the USSR, the 9/11 attacks, or the 2008 financial crisis.

This is not to be at all glib about the tragedy of what is occurring right now. It's merely to observe that in a crisis, we re-evaluate things that weren't up for discussion in normal times.