It looks like we value concrete a lot more than, e.g., trees. And perhaps it’s worth noting that while there’s a nice big green patch near where I live, being a cemetery and all it’s not very lively.

What my initial analysis has found is that sidewalks represent about 17% of all city land, and roads represent about 25% of all city land, adding up to about 42% of all city land*. Meanwhile, we know this land is publicly owned. We know that adding 10 more trees on a single city block delivers a 100x return on investment over 5 years, in terms of cumulative happiness increase of residents during that time, and we expect financial ROI to track that closely, considering that properties tend to be much higher in value when close to parks with lots of trees, especially well-curated parks like the High Line. We know that a lot of the history of real estate and urban development has been done through really ancient and insular frameworks, i.e. pre information age. Our transportation system is probably one of these frameworks, designed hundreds of years ago, iteratively optimized with more and more concrete; it is probably in need of a complete redesign, based on modern mathematics and statistics and public health research, in addition to better integration with today’s and tomorrow’s technologies (e.g. autonomous vehicles).

But is this what we want? It’s important to remember that roads and sidewalks can sometimes feel harsh. On a sea of lifeless concrete, we often need to watch out for and evade these massive machines, because they can present grave danger to us — as walkers, bikers, parents. Always they are roaring and squealing and fuming with their internal combustion engine explosions and oily hydraulic brakes and poisonous carbon dioxide emissions. Every once in a while, they remind us who is boss — who has the right of way — by suddenly blasting their horns for all to hear.

Why does almost half of our city feel like this way? It’s indeed stressful just to get to point A to point B, and that’s all that roads and sidewalks are doing for us. But it’s the places that branch off from them that are all we really care about. At the very least, can’t we design better branching systems?

As you know, we’ve been developing a thesis for some time about using breakthroughs in areas like public health and computer science to maximize metrics like happiness and connectivity per square meter — something like a Yelp meets WalkScore meets Amazon for finding your place to live in the city. In the meantime, I have an idea to consider.

What if we removed half of all the roads and sidewalks from a city?

Imagine what you could do with that space — millions of square feet — considering all the places that roads currently exist in the city: everywhere. Following the High Line example, we would have ample room for more trees and parks and gardens, and also basketball courts and soccer fields and playgrounds, performing arts and works of art, public learning centers and retreats, temples, and even Steve’s exotic cocktail bar nestled in a little forest in SoHo with zen statues. Really, whatever you can imagine would almost certainly and immediately substantially increase the real value of the space currently occupied by dead concrete and obnoxious machines. By pursuing this vision in some form, sooner or later we could help ignite a revolution in sustainable urban development.

So what’s the tradeoff here? What’s to lose in taking away half the roads and sidewalks? In the simplest (and probably not the smartest) case, imagine you removed every other road and all the sidewalks that go with them. The idea is that even without doing anything interesting, travel time won’t really be lost in walking at most a few more blocks at the start and end of a commute. It’s true that there will be less roads for cars to hog up, but I suspect that can also be significantly mitigated by dynamic traffic routing systems like what Google Maps provides.

Is it feasible? Here’s an idea of how it could look in my neighborhood: