hard · 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:

1. underestimated the engineering difficulty of building wide arterial roads
2. treated streets only as passages for movement rather than as places to dwell
3. ignored the financial cost of demolishing established neighborhoods
4. favored public transit at the expense of private automobile traffic

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