I think that there’s a fair point that a lot of the road layout in a lot of cities was designed before cars. There are properties without setbacks, with doors that open right onto the street. Blind corners. No sidewalks. Unless one is expensively going to raze a huge amount of property, one can’t rebuild that road network any time soon. And if people drive on that kind of infrastructure at optimal-for-cars speeds on it, it creates costs.

But I also think that there’s a fair point that people need to get around, and that slow transport imposes a lot of costs on society.

I think that if one is to slow traffic in an area, it should be coupled with efforts to build out higher speed alternate routes, like bypasses that route through traffic around villages, rather than straight through their old city center.