What if we didn’t need cars? Janette Sadik-Khan, former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, helped revolutionize some of New York’s most famous streets into navigable, car-free areas. She joins the show this week to paint a picture of cities that put people first. How has the purpose of the city changed over time? Is it really possible—and preferable—to remove cars from cities altogether? And what does the future of cities really look like? Janette also responds to speculation about the future of transportation via GPT-4’s stories of how people might traverse Istanbul and Vietnam decades from now. It turns out, we might need a lot less new technology than we think to create the people-first cities of the future. Read the AI-generated stories for this episode here. Read the transcript of this episode here. Topics: 4:15 - Hellos and intros 5:06 - How do we deal with city highways? 8:21 - When and how the city became all about the car 11:37 - What people-first cities look like
