How we get around influences how we live The primary factor in midcentury urban planning and subsequent flight to the suburbs involves what was then America?s biggest industrial product: the automobile. Highways shortened commutes, encouraged travel, and carved out new neighborhoods (for better or for worse), while creating traffic patterns that still exist to this day.
Now that residents are considering alternate modes of transportation?for speed, for exercise, for the environment?it's time for a judicious look at car-dependent cities. In Honolulu, local business owners see a new bike lane as a means for saving sidewalk commerce, while Phoenix struggles to adapt to walking and biking under a steadily-intensifying heat dome.

Phoenix

Written by Alissa Walker Video by Kaard Bombe
Photos by Matt Winquist

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It is 109 degrees Fahrenheit when I first step onto Phoenix?s Central Avenue. As I take in the first block of what my phone tells me should be an easy nine-minute walk, I see seemingly infinite lanes of asphalt, vast empty sidewalks, and not a sliver of shade.
A few weeks earlier, a high-pressure system that meteorologists christened a "heat dome" had parked itself over the aptly named Valley of the Sun, producing a string of record-breaking temperatures across the state. It was part of a global trend that would lead climatologists to declare 2016 the hottest year in recorded history.
Soon it will be hotter. According to ...