Choke Point: Geoguessr and Navigable Cities

When you see where people live, you can see how they live, and in the internet's favourite location-guessing game, you ogle a lot of homes, shops and other spaces people spend their time. Among the common refrains of the West's socially conscious is that the US needs walkable cities. Yet, for Europeans that haven't seen the States for themselves, it's hard to imagine how direly that remains true. If you are European, you might think you know bad walkability because you've seen it at home; it is not a uniquely US problem.

In the UK, there are plenty of workplaces and big box stores you cannot visit without four wheels and an engine, and some streets have tightrope-narrow pavements. There are avenues of Mediterranean towns that are as thin as a drinking straw, even when they're meant to accommodate pedestrians and cars. Some are so steep you're practically walking on the wall. Uphill struggles on the roads aren't even just a Western plague. In parts of South Asia, the street can be a tide you push against because it's heaving with people. In Singapore and Taipei, we can find thoroughfares that are clearly made for the automobile first and pedestrians second. Yet, everything is bigger in the States, and that includes infrastructural defects.

The first time I explored a US city in Geoguessr, I sidled up alongside a highway on-ramp, but whenever I attempted to drive up it, the obtuse Street View engine kept dropping me back onto the road below. Stumbling around and across the freeway, I ended up as obstructed from my destination as many North Americans trying to navigate their cities. For most of Europe, the motorway is something that ends and begins at the city limits because who wants to live alongside a choking cloud of carbon monoxide and noise pollution? But in many US cities, the highway remains the backbone of the road grid.

I've seen US natives shocked that there's no such crime as jaywalking outside their country, and non-Americans who hadn't even considered that there could be such a crime. If you're in the second camp, jaywalking is the offence of crossing the road outside of designated crossings. Those roads being the ones you supposedly have a right to because you pay the tax dollars that build and maintain them. You can explain this criminalisation as necessary when US streets are so wide and busy that cutting across them is asking to get hurt. However, that wideness and busyness are choices.

To much of the world, the USA has built even its suburban avenues like motorways, and while the nation is screaming out for walkable cities, it may be craving walkable towns even more. Too often, roads in the suburbs don't connect people to neighbours and amenities but divide them from them.^[1][2][3] Forking off from whitewashed homefronts are long stretches of maudlin grey ribbons with gas stations and big box stores sewn to their sides. There are US towns I've visited in Geoguessr that have locations named something like "Cedar Plaza", which implies a town square, but what they really mean by "square" or "plaza" is a car park for a row of shops. All spaces are liminal, and none are communal.

As I think it's challenging for Europeans without first-hand experience to imagine the pedestrian-adversity of the US, I think Yanks without first-hand experience of European cities sometimes dismiss the benefits of walkability. They often do it because they don't know that there is an alternative to living in carbon monoxide purgatory. Compare the social deserts I just described to UK high streets. Most UK towns have pedestrianised or pedestiran-friendly main streets right next to their housing. High streets are subject to the social rot that has infected all of austerity Britain. They increasingly lack benches and public toilets while being highly surveilled.^[4][5][6] However, high streets are places where everyone in a town can intermingle and access shops while getting exercise and fresh air. This is far from the norm for the US.

To pull from another of my recent plays, Cities: Skylines II lets you zone areas of land for certain kinds of construction: residential or commercial, for example. Residential districts come in both North American and EU styles, but players may also sanction the construction of "EU Mixed Housing". The peanut butter cups of city planning, mixed housing is commercial on the ground floor and residential on the upper floors. It ensures there is always space for city dwellers to sleep, cook, and relax near the facilities to procure goods and services. But it won't have escaped you that this is labelled a European form of housing because, in the US, it's in short supply.

People need shops, and shops need customers, so you might think that the premises for both would be palmed into each other like balls of clay. Yet, this concept of exclusive residential and commercial zones prohibits mixed-use spaces.^[7][8] Districts get built like nunchucks: a block of residential buildings at one end, a block of commercial buildings at the other, and a stroad connecting them. The effect is much the same as if you placed everyones' kitchens at the top of your street and everyones' bedrooms at the bottom. What you end up with is Ballardian confinement and isolation.

When you leave your house, rather than entering a wide open space full of other people, you need to enter another building, but this time on wheels. You travel in that pod to a third building where you produce or buy products or services, and then you return home again. If you do leave home on foot, sometimes there's nowhere you can go except jogging around the block because everywhere else requires a car, and legally speaking, most of the street is blocked behind the invisible pane of jaywalking. For some Americans, open-world games are going to appeal because they are environments where you aren't blocked off at every corner. Free movement is the stuff of fantasy.

It's also that much harder to get the exercise you need when any travel has you sitting from origin to destination, and at their worse, highways have been serpents of classism and ethnic cleansing.^[1][2][3][9] Playing Cities: Skylines II, I've demolished plenty of homes to make room for wider streets that can support more traffic, and I used to think that when the game let me rev up my bulldozer, it was indulging fiction for my sake as a player. In the real world, there could only have been a handful of times people had their homes flattened to make room for cars.

Now I know that after the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, working-class neighbourhoods all across the States were razed. With the correlation between poverty and blackness, disproportionately, African-Americans were segregated or pushed out of their homes by this destruction. Urban communities were partitioned so that a white middle class could take their commutes to work and back, or with the intended goal of segregation.^[1][2][3] Even for the people adjacent to highways, their health is eaten away at by the ambient pollution of all that snaking traffic, and where there are more cars, there are more injuries.^[10][11]

It can be hard to understand why anyone would want their hometown to be built like this, but for the Americans who favour car-first design, a scary number defend it like their lives depend on it. The US citizens who are unfamiliar with walkable cities in other countries will make exceptionalist arguments for why their town cannot host the same boulevards or place vital services right outside their door. Firstly, we have the common defence that the US is simply too large for the pedestrianised streets and public transport networks that connect other countries, but the overall size of your country doesn't negate the benefits of a walkable city. It's not like the pavements in Mexico, or the bus lines in Germany go from one side of the country to the other. They mainly provide localised connections within cities and between townships, and the same is possible in the US. In 2021, most trips within the United States were less than three miles, and only 2% were more than fifty miles. Where is all the transit and walkable pavement for those trips?^[12]

It's also difficult to argue that a large country can't be served with a large rail network when you've got the example of China sitting right there. China has about the same land area as the US, but about 23,500 miles of high-speed rail, whereas the US has a measly 450.^{[13][14][15][16]} We could try to chalk this up to China's obscene wealth, but China only has about two-thirds the GDP of the US. This isn't a resource problem; this is a resource allocation problem.

Secondly, I see a lot of US motorists uneasy about the idea of the walkable city because it would sometimes mean leaving the car behind, and the car is their ticket to freedom. Taking short journeys outside the car may be impossible for bodily-disabled people. For everyone else, the dismissal of such trips is a failure to conceive of the walkable city. The car is only necessary for short-range travel because you don't have good public transit, pedestrianisation, or bike lanes, and you don't have those things because your home is built around the car. If you were waited on hand and foot by a dutiful fleet of buses and had shops a stone's throw away, the bus, your bike, or your shoes would become your vehicles of freedom.

There is one last nail in the coffin for the idea of the personal automobile as liberator. A lack of pedestrian accessibility and public transit isn't just bad for people on foot; it actually degrades the transport experience for motorists, too. Cars are a woefully inefficient use of space compared to the alternatives. To quote one paper from the Journal of Urban Design:

"The private car is the most space-intense transport mode. [...] A parked car requires at least three times more space than public transport, and ten times more than the bicycle. When a car is driven at 50 km/h [~31 mph], it requires 70 times more space than a cyclist or pedestrian."^[11]

flurfdesign has a stupendous video on this topic that you should watch, and he makes the point that Barcelona has a higher population than Atlanta despite being twenty times smaller in area. However, that Spanish city is mostly uncongested, while Atlantans often complain their city is "full". The discrepancy exists because Barcelona is walkable and Atlanta is a bunch of overlapping tarmac.

The car is an unmistakably US symbol of liberation, but if liberation means anything in the context of transport, it has to mean having more options about where you can access and not fewer. The idea that the US can never host walkable cities is ahistorical anyway. How would anyone have moved from place to place before the invention of the car if you couldn't walk or take the tram through town? The Minute Men didn't cruise around Concord in Jeep Grand Cherokees. Yet, the pavement and the streetcar were sidelined in the age of the automobile, due in no small part to the influence of the automotive industry.^[17][18][19] Is that freedom? When a bunch of automotive tycoons decide how your cities and towns are built rather than you?

The market forces that are meant to inspire innovation and meet the public's needs are once again percolating inefficiency and are out of step with what the public requires. Industries have a vested interest in maintaining long-term problems to regularly sell you short-term solutions. If citizens can't walk or take the bus to travel around their home town, fuel and automotive companies will have better luck selling them cars and petrol. And make no mistake, US governments exist in a symbiotic relationship with these entities, having taken $85m from the automotive industry and $153m from the oil and gas industry last year.

But slowly, minds are changing. There are cities like Boston and Portland that have dismantled some inner-city expressways, and as more US citizens travel the world, a greater quantity are seeing that you can take back the streets. Between the fiscal year for 2004 and FY 2024, the number of US passports in circulation increased by about a third. There's a long way to go, but that's a radical change in a tiny time period. The internet has also played a huge role in opening minds because it is a way to see the rest of the world, even when you can't leave the country; to conceive of the walkable city, even when you can't walk to your own job. One small prybar for that opening of minds is Geoguessr, and I couldn't be prouder of it for that. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. A Brief History Of How Racism Shaped Interstate Highways by Noel King (April 7, 2021), NPR.
2. Roads and Race: How the Highway System Symbolizes Racial Injustice in America by Terrance Sullivan (February 20, 2024), Amnesty International.
3. Segregation by Design by Adam Paul Susaneck (2024), Segregation by Design.
4. Removing benches, blocking cycle paths: why are police interfering in the UK’s public spaces? by Phineas Harper (May 2, 2022), The Guardian.
5. Skip to the loo? Easier said than done as Britain loses hundreds of public toilets by Chaminda Jayanetti (November 14, 2021), The Guardian.
6. Szakolczai, J.M., et al. (2023). Public Space CCTV in Scotland. Scottish Government (p. 46).
7. Lens, M.C. (2022). Zoning, Land Use, and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality. Annual Review of Sociology vol. 48 (p. 421-439).
8. The Basics of Land Use and Zoning Law by Tulane University Law School Staff (August 26, 2011), Tulane University Law School.
9. Chakrabarti, S., Shin, E.J. (2017). Automobile dependence and physical inactivity: Insights from the California Household Travel Survey. Journal of Transport & Health (p. 262-271).
10. Health Matters: air pollution by Public Health England Staff (November 14, 2018), UK Government.
11. Gössling, S. (2020). Why cities need to take road space from cars - and how this could be done. Journal of Urban Design vol. 25, no. 4 (p. 443-448).
12. FOTW #1230, March 21, 2022: More than Half of all Daily Trips Were Less than Three Miles in 2021 by Vehicle Technologies Office Staff (March 21, 2022), U.S. Department of Energy.
13. China by Albert Feuerwerker, et al. (July 11, 2025), Britannica.
14. United States by Adam Gopnik, et al. (July 12, 2025), Britannica.
15. Past, present and future: The evolution of China’s incredible high-speed rail network by Ben Jones (February 9, 2022), CNN.
16. The Northeast Corridor by Northeast Corridor Commission (Date Unknown, Accessed July 12, 2025), Northeast Corridor Commission.
17. The real story behind the demise of America’s once-mighty streetcars by Joseph Stromberg (May 7, 2015), Vox.
18. For the Highway Lobby, a Rocky Road Ahead by David E. Rosenbaum (April 2, 1972), The New York Times.
19. Federal Aid to Roads and Highways Since the 18th Century: A Legislative History by John Williamson (June 1, 2012), Library of Congress.

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.