During our vacation to Peru last fall, we spent a few days in Cusco, the closest large city to Machu Picchu. The first thing a regular person would notice is the elevation and the shortness of breath it induces (of course, we did notice this). But one of the first things I noticed was the cars.

Not just the old cars, though definitely those!

These Beetles are not vintage cars, by and large—in the South American market the more or less original Beetle design was manufactured into the early 2000s. Still, the newest ones are roughly 20 years old. I have no idea how much internal work these cars have had, but they’re overall surprisingly intact-looking for their age. And given the aggressiveness of Peruvian driving, at least as it appeared to me, they’re surprisingly not all dinged up.

They’re also generally very compact cars: cars of a size, as I’ve written about before, that isn’t really offered in the U.S. market anymore, though it used to be. These are basically what the Europeans call “city cars.”

City cars are useful for urban driving because they’re small and compact. They fit into tight spaces, like little parking spots (compared to big open parking lots). They pose less danger to pedestrians because of their low height and reduced mass. But they unlock elements of mobility that aren’t always served by walking, biking, or taking transit.

However, one of the things I noticed walking around Cusco is not that the small cars fit in well, as much as that this tightly built pre-car city almost magnified the space cars took up. Take a look at these pictures:

Not every street is this narrow, but a lot of them are. And these are not fun streets to walk on, exactly. Partly because they aren’t designed for cars. Basically, what occurred to me is that accommodating cars in pre-car cities like this can actually feel worse for pedestrians than just building places with cars as the primary mode of transportation.

At least in a modern American city, or even a lot of suburbs, there is a place to walk. In cities without sidewalks—because in some ways, the sidewalks themselves are car infrastructure, i.e. are a little carve-out for the people—the cars dominate the whole street, even if there are relatively few of them, as is the case here.

What I started thinking is that there are, maybe, two different kinds of “car dominance” or “car centricity.” One is the one urbanists talk about the most, probably: where the car is the default means of getting around, and everything else is an afterthought. But the other is what I was experiencing in Cusco’s narrow old streets: the phenomenon where cars are so restricted by the surrounding space that they end up physically dominating it.

Yes, nobody is likely to die in a collision at these speeds, and the built environment is still plenty accommodating for people outside cars. There can be something charming about dodging a scooter or little car or baby truck. But it is frustrating to realize how few people overall, in cars, can make it impossible or unpleasant to walk for more than 10 or 20 seconds. On these narrow streets you have to keep pressing yourself against buildings as cars rattle by a few inches from your face.

My point isn’t really that cars shouldn’t be allowed in urban cores. It may be the least-bad option to just kind of fit them into a built environment that wasn’t designed for them. But that doesn’t make them less intrusive—it can make them more intrusive.

This makes me think of a point I come back to sometimes, and which I find really ironic. Suburbia is designed around car travel and driving, and yet it’s easier to get away from cars in suburbia than it is in a city. We design quiet cul-de-sacs so that homes don’t get thru-traffic. We have malls and huge big-box stores as large as entire small downtowns that function as big car-free shopping districts. Meanwhile, a commercial street in a city, where you pop in and out of little shops, requires you to spend much more time around cars, and their noise and exhaust. Higher density housing is often along major roads.

You can explain these things, but I don’t explaining them quite resolves that unfortunate irony.

Related Reading:

What I Mean By “The Car”

Car-Free Cities Don’t Feel “Radical”

Car-Centric Design Is A Real Thing

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