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The pandemic has caused us to make lightning-fast changes to the human environment in response to the serious threat to our health. Climate change is a slow-moving pandemic for the natural environment, so our tendency has been to put off making major changes to address it, even though it has the potential to be far more devastating to the future of life on Earth than the coronavirus. Recent scientific studies continue to reinforce that point.

One of the changes that is imperative in creating a more just, healthy and sustainable environment is to redevelop cities with well-designed, higher-density communities around high-capacity transit. But this seems to go against one of the lessons of the current health crisis, which is that density is bad. And indeed some dense living environments can make spread of the virus easier, especially those that make it difficult to avoid very close interaction with others. However, there are many examples of high-density communities where physical 鈥渄istancing鈥� is no more difficult than in a typical suburb.聽 There are any number of planning and design solutions that allow people to be in safe and healthy urban environments that also enhance their mental and social well-being.

As for the corollary point that cars may be more important now than ever, that seems to bring us back to where we鈥檝e been headed for the last 70 years, with an increasingly expensive, congested and unhealthy street system. When presented over the last month with nearly empty streets, many of us are beginning to envision much more creative ways to use those movement corridors than with single-occupancy automobiles.

The bottom line is that we cannot make the mistake of 鈥渨asting a good crisis鈥� by turning back to old solutions.