Land Use — Physical Internet®

The Same Scale

One freeway interchange. One historic city center.

These two images are the same scale. A single Los Angeles interchange covers as much ground as the historic core of Florence. One moves cars. The other holds a city.

A Los Angeles freeway interchange beside the historic core of Florence, Italy, at the same scale

2,642

sq ft of road and parking
per US car

$723B

a year in land,
at $1 per sq ft

868

sq ft per mile of JPods,
station included

Road: 8,765,578 lane-miles × 12 ft ÷ 273.6 million cars = 2,030 sq ft per car. Parking: 3.4 spaces per car (NRDC) = 612 sq ft. JPods: 32-inch piers about every 100 ft plus one 10 × 40 ft station per mile. Detail: library.jpods.com/landuse.

We Paved the Neighborhoods

Urban freeways were routed through the densest, poorest and often Black neighborhoods, the places where people lived, worked and shopped on foot. The Bragdon Committee (1957–1959) warned against it and recommended a moratorium on urban Interstates. The warning was ignored.

**Cincinnati, West End, 1949 and 2023.** Homes and businesses for 26,000 people, paved over.

**Milwaukee, 1942 and 2022.** Churches, a park and a dense neighborhood became a freeway trench.Image: @cars.destroyed.our.cities

**New Orleans, Claiborne Avenue.** An oak-lined median, the heart of a Black business district, replaced by elevated I-10.

**Dallas, Deep Ellum, 1930 and 2023.** A busy business district became parking under an elevated freeway.

**Brooklyn, Hamilton Ave. and Hicks St., 1940 and 2022.** The lost building is outlined in red under the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway.Image: @segregation_by_design

Parking Ate Downtown

Every car needs a space at home, at work and at every store. Parking minimums wrote that into law. Downtowns that once paid the city's bills became lots that pay almost nothing.

**Atlanta, Garnett Street.** Dense blocks of business became surface parking. One building survives, highlighted in both views.Image: @ATLURBANIST

**Tulsa, 1950s and 2022.** The same downtown tower, surrounded by parking lots where buildings stood.1950s photo: Tulsa Historical Society

**Downtown Phoenix: 48% place, 52% non-place.** More than half of downtown is space between destinations: roads and parking.Illustration: Andrew A. Price, Strong Towns

**What parking minimums do to a parcel.** As required spaces rise from none to 1 per 100 sq ft, the building shrinks and the lot takes over.

**Eindhoven station: about 70 cars or about 1,000 bikes.** Side by side, in a similar amount of space.Image: LAB of Thought

What that costs a city in tax revenue, per acre, is on the Metrics page.

Space to Move People

The problem is not the fuel. It is the packet size: a 2-ton vehicle carrying one person. Electric, hydrogen and self-driving cars all take the same road and the same parking. A JPods pod carries up to 500 kg overhead, and the street below stays open.

**Space to move 69 people.** Walking, bus, bicycle, then car, e-car, hydrogen car, connected car and autonomous car. Every kind of car takes the same space.Canberra; adapted from Cycling Promotion Fund; LAB of Thought

**200 people in 177 cars.** The same people without cars, on bikes and on 3 buses. You are not stuck in traffic; you are the traffic.Seattle photo demonstration

**Changing the fuel does not change the city.** A jam of gasoline cars and a jam of electric cars take the same land. Walking, biking and transit change the city.Illustration: Antonio Huerta

Traffic Breaks Neighborhoods

8× the traffic. 70% fewer friends.

Donald Appleyard studied three San Francisco streets. Residents of a street with 2,000 vehicles a day had 3.0 friends on the street. Residents of a street with 16,000 vehicles a day had 0.9. Heavy traffic cuts a neighborhood in half and people stop knowing each other.

Donald Appleyard, Livable Streets (University of California Press, 1981).

Illustration of Appleyard's study: light, medium and heavy traffic streets and residents' friendships across each — Illustration: Knowledge Towns, after Appleyard.

“We can’t.” They did.

Each pair below turns “we can’t” into “they did.”

Squares, streets and waterfronts taken by cars have been taken back, in years, not generations. The land is still there under the asphalt.

**Groningen, Vismarkt, 1974 and 2021.** A square full of parked cars became a square full of café tables.Photos: Groningen Archief (1974); Dagblad van het Noorden (2021)

**Amsterdam didn’t look like Amsterdam either.** Seven streets, car-choked in the 1970s and 80s, walkable and bikeable today.Image: LAB of Thought

**Madrid, Plaza de España, 2019 and 2022.** A four-lane road became a tree-lined promenade in three years.Photos: Google Street View (2019); schlijper.nl (2022)

**Seoul, Cheonggyecheon.** An elevated highway came down; a stream and a walkway replaced it.

**Seattle waterfront, 2016 and 2025.** The Alaskan Way Viaduct came down and the waterfront went back to people.

**Toronto, 1970 and 2021.** Surface parking lots became Berczy Park and housing.Image: Geopizza

**Jersey City, Newark Avenue, 2012 and 2022.** A car street became a pedestrian plaza with outdoor dining.Photo: Barkha Patel; Strong Towns

Mesh, Not Hub

Taking land back from cars only works if people can still get where they are going. A hub-and-spoke system forces trips through the center. A mesh connects every station to its neighbors, so the last mile shrinks to a short walk or bike ride.

The Washington DC Metro drawn as hub-and-spoke beside the same stations connected as a mesh — The same DC Metro stations as a hub-and-spoke system and as a mesh.

Network value increases exponentially as the number of interconnected nodes increases and the packet size is driven toward one.

— The Prime Law of Networks, V ∝ n² / p

We paved our cities for cars. We can get them back.