hard · Enhanced ACT reading
The following passage is adapted from an essay on urban design:
The planners who redrew the city's downtown in the 1960s prized efficiency above all, and they measured efficiency in the speed with which a car could pass through. Wide one-way arterials were carved through old neighborhoods; sidewalks narrowed; the small irregular squares where people had once lingered were paved into turning lanes. The result was a downtown that could be crossed in minutes and inhabited by no one. What the planners failed to see is that a street is not merely a conduit but a room, and that the value of a room lies precisely in the reasons it gives a person to stop.
The author's central criticism of the 1960s planners is that they:
- underestimated the engineering difficulty of building wide arterial roads
- treated streets only as passages for movement rather than as places to dwell
- ignored the financial cost of demolishing established neighborhoods
- favored public transit at the expense of private automobile traffic
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