Multimodal reforms often yield only partial and localized improvements when implemented within strongly car-centric urban systems. This paper argues that the difficulty lies not only in insufficient funding or weak implementation but in the persistence of a dominant planning paradigm organized around roadway network structures, dispersed land use, and performance measures that prioritize hierarchical vehicle movement over connected multimodal access. Drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigms, the paper interprets the car-centric paradigm as a problem-solving framework whose routine tools, such as roadway widening, grade-separated intersections, parking provision, and vehicle-flow optimization, often address symptoms without resolving the structural contradictions they reproduce. Within this framing, recurrent congestion, induced demand, inequitable access, safety burdens, fiscal strain, and environmental externalities are treated as anomalies: recurring contradictions that remain difficult to resolve within the prevailing framework.
This article is a conceptual framework paper supported by structured empirical illustration. It explains how Kuhn’s ideas, including paradigm, anomaly, crisis, incommensurability, and shift, can be adapted to transportation systems and distinguishes this approach from adjacent literatures on path dependency, automobility, induced demand, and socio-technical transitions. The paper argues that Kuhn is analytically useful because he helps explain three related dynamics: how unresolved problems accumulate within the dominant planning framework, how competing mobility approaches rely on conflicting measures of success, and how these accumulated contradictions can weaken confidence in the prevailing paradigm.
To support the argument, the paper compares car-centric and accessibility-oriented mobility logics, draws on evidence from built-form differences across U.S. downtowns, and examines post-disruption recovery as a policy window that can either reinforce or reduce car-centric lock-in. The paper argues for an accessibility-based multimodal paradigm oriented toward reliable, safe, and equitable access across local and regional scales. It concludes by identifying implications for performance measurement, network design, land-use coordination, and recovery policy.
