Among the most visible changes in the built environment from the pandemic are reimagined streets. During lockdowns, cities all over the world turned residential and commercial corridors into slow (or no) vehicle zones for pedestrians, cyclists, cafe seating, parklets and play. Even the World Health Organization took note in a recent blog post: “As we embark on building back better from the Covid-19 pandemic, the time has come to return urban streets to people.”
But for all the reclamation going on, it puzzled Adam Millard-Ball that people rarely questioned just how much space streets take up in the first place, especially in the U.S., where streets are much wider than in other parts of the world. A professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, Millard-Ball uses maps and datasets to understand city growth patterns at a large scale; his previous research has tracked the spread of urban sprawl around the globe.
