In this excellent Ted Talk, Mikael Colville-Andersen explains how the city street was fundamentally changed 100 years ago when it became the domain of the car.

Colville-Andersen, founder of Copenhagenize, starts by citing some frightening numbers: 50 million people a year are injured in car accidents; 1.2 million are killed by cars; and in both the EU and the US 35,000 people are killed every year by cars .  He then goes on to explain how the city street used to be before the car and how we can return to that place by properly designing (and not engineering) our most important and ubiquitous public space.