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This interview doesn't get to any meat. He says engineers focus on the wrong thing and vaguely points yonder that the right thing is to not do what they are doing but does not provide any comprehensive solution to people's needs (get to and from places in a timely fashion, in the way they can or the way they want to).

But he did mention the thing about trees and how "alamedas" improve road safety --France removed many of their Napoleonic "alamedas" due to people wrapping their cars around them.

So the nice thing about people wrapping their car around a tree is that the out of control car stops. Often street trees form a boundary between the road and the sidewalk or between directions of a divided highway. Advances in vehicle safety mean car vs tree is a lot more survivable than it was 30 years ago, at least for the occupants of the car.

I agree that there's not a lot of meat, but sounds like one thing he doesn't like is wide roads (or lanes) in places where you want people to travel slowly. Sounds like some focus on communal transit vs individual transportation and a need to accomidate multiple modes of transportation including pedestrians. None of this seems very new or groundbreaking; we've been hearing a lot of it from many sources.

I'm strongly in favor of individual cars, but some of this stuff clearly needs to change in better ways; highway standard roads with 25 mph speed limits don't make sense and it's hard for a driver to follow. Give me a narrow lane, and I'll naturally go slower. Make communal transit work for me, and I'll use it when I can; but it takes a large, consistent investment in capital and operations to be useful and a lot of municipalities don't have the ability to plan for that; dilapidated roads remain useful at lower levels of maintenance in a way that dilapidated transit that only runs infrequently for limited hours and limited days doesn't.

I'd like more data on the bit about edge lines (we call them fog lines around here) and how that affects safety, especially since around here roads with edge lines tend to be those with higher speed limits, more traffic, and much greater trips per day. Edge lines are present because the road surface is wider than the lanes, and the road surface is wider than the lanes so that there's more likely to be room for two way traffic while there's an obstruction.