It's Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Something happened to our cities during the pandemic.

Street spaces, which were dominated by cars, became people spaces where we dined outdoors or moved around on foot or bike.

In his talk from TEDx Mile High in 2021, environmental designer Kevin Chrysick shares an alternative

vision for the future of cities, one that is better for the planet and the people.

When you think of most cities in the U.S., images like this come to mind.

Little green space, lots of fast-moving cars, bumper-to-bumper traffic, and humans waiting at curbs and crosswalks, clearly outranked by the automobile.

Since the dawn of car culture, urban transportation planning has been fixated on moving automobiles quickly.

Now, one-third of all the land in cities is set up for cars.

We add lanes to six-lane highways.

We cut down trees to widen two-lane residential roads.

We pave over scarce open space for surface parking.

Many car owners effectively pay double to reserve up space at home and work.

Providing for cars was a massive investment and has provided us a measurable

flexibility in how we travel. But our dependence on them, the costs, the noise, the pollution,

have taken a toll on us. We can now do better, and here's how. I've been studying transportation and environmental design for 25 years.

I've encouraged designers, engineers, decision makers, and the public

to look beyond our current car as king model.

But widespread change has been slow to come.

And then COVID-19 hit, and we went into lockdown. Conventional rules that

kept the auto at the top of the heap were ditched almost overnight. We opened up our streets

for people walking in the middle of them. We opened them up for outdoor dining and those emerging

techie modes of getting around town. This meant

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