My town began life as a small settlement on a small river. From its centre one narrow road went north, one south, and one crossed the river. Three roads: "tri via". Where they met was the place neighbours used to pause to exchange news -- the trivia of the day.
A century later the town is fifty times bigger. City-sized. The "trivia" district has become the "deca-via" district: not three but ten roads in and out. And alongside them the town council has added multiple "transportation choices" (euphemism for "get out of private cars and into socially-correct public conveyance).
The roads which had become highways were narrowed back to single-lane, the rest of the pavement filled with bike lanes and rail tracks. Residential neighbourhoods that had grown up around the original roads were paved for infill, turned into "blended work-life community pods" of dense high-rise blocks.
Now there were jogging paths, cycling paths, skateboard and electric scooter paths, bridges for confused urban deer to cross the roads, tunnels for tortoises to get under them (those which had genetic memory of their home river), and fenced stretches for urban-tower dogs to run off-leash. There were pods within the pods, of community picnic tables and concrete "native plant" (weed) boxes wedged in the intersections of cross-roads. No trees casting shade.
It was too noisy to talk in the community spaces due to beeps of delivery trucks trying to back up where wasn't enough room, and car horns protesting at snarled traffic and ambulance sirens screaming after each rear-ender. Panhandlers stumbled down the concrete medians holding up cardboard signs saying "HUNGRY".
Traffic signs, pedestrian lights, arrows, instructions, and diagrams painted on the pavement forced drivers to pause and read for so long that they missed their light and blocked the intersections. More rear-enders, and civic officials scold drivers: see what your selfish cars DO?
Dumpsters overflowed at the community picnic spaces which no families used, only the homeless who sometimes slept inside the dumpsters. Crows shrieked and fought over the garbage they left behind. The wooden picnic tables, burnt black, rotted and turned mouldy and were replaced with plastic tables ... which turned mouldy.
Senior citizens who recalled the days when their town was small, spacious and quiet, gazed sadly from the high-rise windows. To them, the "smart city" trumpeted in the popular media was a stupid city. In turn, the media called the elders "elitist". Their concerns, the city councillors assured them, were trivial.
