Won't anyone think of the poor suburbanites? These walkable cities are so hostile to them, where can they park their chevy suburban megacab ultrawide edition?
Even worse, this is in WĂźrzburg, so in Germany. We don't even have suburban areas as bad as the USA. In fact, to the left of the picture is a sign for a public transport stop. Still, Germany is strongly controlled by the car lobby.
Ironically, it's always the local businesses that rabidly defend giving everything over to parking spaces. At this point I've given up on inner cities in Germany. They're dying and those idiots are speeding up their own demise because they're completely unwilling to even consider any alternative.
I grew up in a town in Ohio where the famous abolitionist John Brown (hanged in 1859 after his abortive raid on Harpers Ferry) had built a tannery in the 1840s 1835 that was still standing in 1976. To celebrate the bicentennial, the city council had it condemned and torn down, to make way for ... a parking lot. Hilariously, the council claimed it was a danger because it was about to collapse, but it took three days to demolish and they had to bring in special heavy equipment to do it after their wrecking balls failed to make a dent in it. This thing had been built with massive 40-foot long oak beams with 12"x8" cross-sections that showed no signs of rot (my dad salvaged a piece of one of these beams and set it up as a bench in our garden, and it was still in good shape in 2012 despite being outside the whole time), so it could have easily been preserved as a historical site. In fact it had been declared an official historical site by the state just days before its destruction but the town council simply ignored that.
Iâve been there. I have to admit, I was tired after our cycling and having this gigantic field of asphalt separating the house from the city center just made me feel more tired. The rest of the city is pretty nicely walkable and has trams.