The single-occupancy car itself is the original social-distancing machine. Knoflacher has likened it to a virus—a pathogen that has infiltrated its host (the city) and hijacked its molecular infrastructure to create a more welcoming environment for its own replication. “Normal human social behavior,” he writes, is transformed “into the rules of road traffic regulations in which car traffic [has] advantages in relation to all other users of public space.” We have laws to ensure sufficient parking, but no laws to ensure sufficient parks. So complete is the viral takeover that when President Donald Trump and others seek to minimize the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, they equate its number of victims with the largely preventable death toll from traffic crashes—as if losing tens of thousands of Americans in that way every year were perfectly acceptable.

Even in a place such as New York City, sidewalks, as the architect John Massengale documented, have been shrunk over the years to make more space for cars. In my own neighborhood, many stretches of sidewalk are the bare minimum of five feet wide. This, per long-standing research, accommodates two pedestrians at once, but begins to fall apart at anything beyond that: two pedestrians encountering one walking in the opposite direction; a kid on a scooter; people stopping to chat. Making matters worse are sidewalk-shrinking obstructions such as trees, light poles, or, most egregious, traffic signs. That same street meanwhile, will dedicate more than 10 feet to an active vehicle-travel lane, as well as two additional lanes of parked vehicles—each larger than the sidewalk itself.

Photos: The quiet emptiness of a world under coronavirus

The message is clear: The storage of empty vehicles is more important than the neighborhood’s fundamental mode of transport. Which is why some of the tensions that have flared during the coronavirus crisis—over runners using the sidewalk, or pedestrians using the bike lane—are particularly tragic. These confrontations are often ascribed to some personality flaw of the runner or pedestrian herself—she’s rude or entitled—rather than seen as an indictment of the misguided system that pits two people on a narrow sidewalk against each other in the first place. No one yells at a parked car, and the driver who scuttles by in the road gets a free pass, even as his driving imposes noise, pollution, and elevated climate risk upon those around him.

We often take the allocation of urban space as a given; hard concrete, we might assume, merely reinforces the normal order of things. But cities have more space available for pedestrians and cyclists and various forms of micromobility than we might think. That much becomes clear—at least in New York and other northern cities—every winter. The tire tracings one sees at intersections during snowstorms show that drivers use only a portion of the space given to them. At key points—a.k.a. “neckdowns”—vehicular lanes can be narrowed and curbs extended so that pedestrians can cross faster. (The unlovely portmanteau sneckdown describes the hemming in of car lanes by snow banks after winter storms.) Wide lanes, typically intended as a safety mechanism, simply encourage drivers to step on the gas. Unsurprisingly, the dearth of drivers in Los Angeles and New York City at the moment has led to increases in speeding. Because so few people are driving, the number of motor-vehicle crashes has dropped during the lockdown—saving California alone $40 million a day, according to one study—but it could fall still lower if drivers stopped using the pandemic as a license to step on the gas.