But I’m not convinced the bans will work, particularly among young people. Why? Because texting is rapidly becoming their default means of connecting with one another, on a constant, pinging basis. From 2003 to 2008, the number of texts sent monthly by Americans surged from 2 billion to 110 billion. The urge to connect is primal, and even if you ban texting in the car, teens will try to get away with it.

So what can we do? We should change our focus to the other side of the equation and curtail not the texting but the driving. This may sound a bit facetious, but I’m serious. When we worry about driving and texting, we assume that the most important thing the person is doing is piloting the car. But what if the most important thing they’re doing is texting? How do we free them up so they can text without needing to worry about driving?

At some point, we will have to face the facts and realize that we’ve been making a huge mistake for the past 70 years by building for cars first and humans second.

See also: Young Americans Less Interested in Driving

Robert Krulwich for NPR:

Until cars became the dominant mode of personal transport, there was no architectural reason to take your hat off between home and office. With Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate highway system came cars, and cars made hats inconvenient, and for the first time men, crunched by the low ceilings in their automobiles, experimented with hat-removal, and got to like it.

This week, CityBeat published a bizarre editorial about how hard it is to drive and park downtown. It appears the author was unaware that Taste of Cincinnati—an event attended by approximately 500,000 people every year— was going on, and was shocked to find that Fifth Street was closed and all the parking garages were full or expensive.

Brian Griffin of Cincinnati Blog writes:

Get out the big box of tissues! CityBeat’s Maija Zummo is upset about the Pony she got. Her pony, in this case, is the vibrant Downtown/OTR we had last weekend, with about a thousand things to do. She had two things she wanted to do and didn’t seem to be aware of the other 998 things going on, and therefore is pissed that traffic and parking were problems for her.

As downtown Cincinnati starts accumulating more things to do, parking is going to keep getting harder. This is especially a problem for older cities like Cincinnati that were planned before cars existed and simply don’t have enough room for every resident and visitor to park a car. The answer, of course, is that we need quality transit to move people around quicker and easier.

CityBeat was sold to new owners in March, and they’ve already made some staff changes. It’s possible that the new owners are intentionally trying to focus less on downtown and cater more toward suburban readers. That would be terrible timing, since even the most extreme anti-city media outlets are finally admitting the success of downtown.

Still, a part of me thinks this article was a work of satire.

Stone Librande, lead designer of SimCity:

When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.