Daniel sent us this one after a bad afternoon trying to walk through Jerusalem's construction chaos — the noise, the diesel fumes, the sidewalks that just end and force you into traffic. His conclusion was blunt: cars simply have no place in densely populated cities. And he's asking which cities have actually done something about it — not congestion pricing, not low-emission zones, but removing cars entirely from their cores — and how they handle the hard stuff like emergency access and deliveries. He also wants to know what American cities could learn from this.
This is one of those topics where the gap between what people assume is impossible and what's already been working for decades is genuinely staggering. I've been reading through the operational details of some of these systems, and the emergency vehicle thing in particular — the data is completely counterintuitive. It's one of those rare cases where the thing everyone worries about turns out to be the thing that actually improves.
Let's be precise about what we're actually talking about here, because there's a big difference between a city that charges you to drive downtown and a city that simply doesn't let you drive there at all. London's congestion zone, Milan's Area C, even New York's congestion pricing — those are car-reduced policies. You pay a fee, you can still drive in. What we're talking about is car-free urban cores where private vehicles are banned entirely. No through traffic. No circling for parking. The street belongs to pedestrians, cyclists, and transit, full stop.
Right, and this isn't some fringe academic fantasy. There are cities that have been operating this way for nearly three decades. Pontevedra in Spain pedestrianized its entire historic center in nineteen ninety-nine — that's twenty-seven years ago — and banned cars from sixty-five percent of the urban area. Ghent in Belgium implemented what they call a circulation plan in twenty seventeen that effectively created a car-free core of thirty-five hectares. These aren't pilot projects. They're the permanent urban fabric now.
I think it's worth underlining the permanence part. These aren't weekend street festivals or summer pedestrian plazas that revert to traffic in September. These cities rewrote their zoning, rebuilt their streets, and made an irreversible commitment. Once you install retractable bollards and repave a street at a single grade from building front to building front — no curbs, no distinction between sidewalk and roadway — you're not going back. The infrastructure itself locks in the decision.
That's a crucial point. The physical design makes the policy durable. A painted bike lane can be ignored or erased. A curb-separated bike lane is harder to undo. But a street that's been physically rebuilt as a pedestrian plaza with bollards embedded in the pavement — that's a multi-million-dollar statement that cars aren't coming back. It's the urban planning equivalent of burning the boats.
The obvious objection lands immediately — what about emergencies, what about deliveries, what about people with disabilities? And those are real questions, but they're design problems, not dealbreakers. Every city that's done this has solved them.
Let's start with Pontevedra, because it's the oldest continuous example and the operational details are fascinating. The city has about eighty-three thousand people, but the principles they used scale up. Their emergency vehicle solution is a network of retractable bollards — these are PAS sixty-eight rated hydraulic bollards that can lower in eight seconds. Emergency services carry RFID tags and have override codes. When a fire truck or ambulance approaches, the bollard reads the tag and drops automatically. The central traffic management system also tracks every vehicle.
I want to pause on that eight-second figure, because someone listening might think — eight seconds, that's a delay, isn't that bad? But you have to compare it to what emergency vehicles actually deal with in a car-filled city. An ambulance stuck at a red light behind twelve cars waiting for people to figure out how to pull over — that's not eight seconds, that's minutes. Eight seconds for a bollard to drop is faster than clearing a traffic jam.
The thing that surprises people — response times actually improved.
Let's put some flesh on that. What does "improved" actually mean in numbers?
Before the pedestrianization, an ambulance trying to get through Pontevedra's narrow medieval streets would get stuck behind double-parked cars, delivery trucks, people circling for parking. Now the streets are clear. The bollards drop, the ambulance goes straight through, and there's no traffic to contend with. The city's own tracking shows response times decreased across the board after the change. We're talking about a reduction from an average of roughly eight minutes to under six in the pedestrianized zone. It's the emergency vehicle paradox — removing cars makes emergency access faster.
Which makes intuitive sense once you think about it for five seconds. An ambulance in traffic is just another vehicle in traffic. An ambulance on a car-free street has a clear path. It's like asking whether it's faster to run through an empty hallway or a crowded one. The hallway might be narrower in the car-free version, but empty beats crowded every time.
And the same logic applies to fire trucks. Pontevedra actually narrowed several streets as part of the redesign, which sounds counterproductive for large emergency vehicles, but the narrower lanes force slower speeds when cars are present, and the absence of parked cars means the fire truck can position anywhere it needs to. A fire truck that needs to set up its ladder or deploy its stabilizers isn't fighting for space with a row of parked SUVs. It can pull up diagonally, set up on the plaza, whatever the situation demands.
What about deliveries? Shops still need inventory. A café can't operate if it can't get flour and coffee beans delivered.
Pontevedra uses a time-window system. Delivery vehicles can enter the car-free zone between six and ten in the morning. After ten, they're out. For last-mile distribution, the city set up peripheral depots where larger trucks unload, and then electric cargo trikes handle the final delivery into the pedestrian zone. It's quieter, it's cleaner, and the trikes can navigate streets that a box truck would struggle with anyway. The trikes are about the width of a person with outstretched arms, so they can weave through a crowded pedestrian street without anyone feeling threatened.
The depot model is interesting because it solves a problem that delivery trucks have even in car-filled cities — the last hundred meters are always the hardest. Narrow alleys, one-way streets, nowhere to stop. The cargo trike is actually a better tool for that job than a box truck, regardless of whether cars are banned.
Right, and that's a pattern you see across all of these systems. The solutions that make a car-free zone work are often better at the task than the car-based approach they replace. The cargo trike isn't a compromise — it's a faster, cheaper, more maneuverable delivery vehicle for dense urban environments. The bollard system isn't a barrier to emergency access — it's a faster access system than fighting through traffic.
Residents with disabilities?
Registered residents with disabilities get a permit that allows vehicle access at walking speed — ten kilometers per hour maximum. The bollard system recognizes their plates. They can drive right to their door, park, and the speed limit means the street remains safe for everyone else. It's granular. The system doesn't say no cars ever — it says no cars by default, with specific, managed exceptions.
That's the key distinction, isn't it? It's not a blanket ban. It's a default of no cars, with a permit layer on top for the cases that need them. Most car trips in dense urban cores aren't emergencies or deliveries or disabled access — they're single-occupant commuters and people circling for parking. In most city centers, something like eighty to ninety percent of car trips fall into that discretionary category. So you're not banning the essential trips. You're filtering out the noise so the essential trips can actually function.
The outcomes in Pontevedra are hard to argue with. CO2 emissions dropped seventy percent in the car-free zone. Traffic accidents fell from thirty per year to zero — and stayed at zero for over a decade. But here's the figure that really matters: population grew from seventy-four thousand in nineteen ninety-nine to eighty-three thousand in twenty twenty-four. Families moved back from the suburbs. The surrounding car-dependent suburbs actually lost population during the same period.
People voted with their feet. Or with their moving vans.
With their wallets. A twenty thirteen study by the University of Vigo found a fifty percent increase in retail revenue in Pontevedra's pedestrian zone, compared to a twenty percent decline in nearby car-accessible shopping areas. The assumption that customers need to park in front of a store to shop there is empirically false. Foot traffic is higher, people stay longer, they spend more.
I want to dig into that retail finding because it's the thing that business owners are always most skeptical about. The mental model most shopkeepers have is that a customer drives to their store, parks, walks in, buys something, and leaves. And they imagine that if the parking disappears, the customer disappears. But what actually happens — and the Pontevedra data shows this clearly — is that the drive-to customer is replaced by multiple walk-past customers. The car driver might have a higher conversion rate — maybe they came specifically to buy something — but there's only one of them per parking space per hour. The foot traffic generates dozens of potential customers in that same hour, and even if the conversion rate is lower, the volume more than compensates.
The mechanism is straightforward, and there's a nice analogy here. Think of a shopping mall. Nobody drives to a specific store in a mall. You park once, then you walk. The mall is designed as a pedestrian environment, and stores pay a premium to be in the pedestrian flow. A car-free city center is just a mall without a roof. Same logic, same economics, but for some reason we accept it indoors and resist it outdoors.
I can already hear the objection — Pontevedra is a small Spanish city with a medieval street layout, it doesn't apply to Jerusalem or anywhere in America. And there's some truth to the scale question. But Jerusalem's Old City and neighborhoods like Nachlaot or the Mahane Yehuda area are comparable in density and street width to Pontevedra's historic center. The topography is different, the stone is different, but the fundamental geometry of narrow streets and dense population is the same problem.
That brings us to Ghent, which answers the scale objection more directly. Ghent is two hundred sixty thousand people — that's a proper city. In twenty seventeen, they implemented what they call a circulation plan. The city center was divided into six sectors. Cars cannot cross between sectors. If you want to go from one sector to another, you have to go out to the ring road and come back in. The effect is that through-traffic disappears from the core entirely. Private cars can still access any individual sector, but they can't use the city center as a shortcut.
It's not a ban on cars entering — it's a ban on cars transiting. If you live in sector three and you need to drive home, you can. You just can't drive through sector three to get to sector four. It's like a cellular structure. Each cell is permeable to its own traffic but impermeable to everyone else's.
And the result is effectively a car-free core of thirty-five hectares, because the only cars in any given sector are the ones that have a destination there. No through traffic, no commuter shortcuts, no circling. And the sectors are designed so that the ring road handles all the cross-city movement. The ring road got some upgrades to handle the increased load, but the core got quieter, cleaner, and safer.
How did they actually implement it? You don't just redraw a city's traffic patterns overnight without chaos.
They kind of did, actually — but with two years of preparation first. Ghent spent two years on public consultation. They installed two thousand five hundred new bike parking spaces. They expanded the tram network. They built twelve park-and-ride facilities on the periphery with six thousand total spaces, each connected by tram or bus lines running every seven minutes during peak hours. They subsidized fifty percent of the cost of cargo bikes for residents. And then, in one weekend, they flipped the switch — four hundred temporary signs, two hundred traffic marshals, and the circulation plan went live.
That's either incredibly brave or incredibly reckless, and I'm not sure which. What was the mood like that weekend?
Chaotic, by all accounts. People woke up on Monday morning and their commute had been completely reorganized. Some drivers didn't know about the changes and tried to take their usual routes, only to be redirected by marshals. There were traffic jams on the ring road for the first few weeks. But the city had a rapid-response team that adjusted signal timing and signage in real time based on the bottlenecks they were seeing. Within about six weeks, the system had stabilized.
The mayor nearly lost reelection over it. The backlash was intense. There were protests. Local businesses panicked. One restaurant owner famously predicted he'd be out of business in three months. He's still open, and his revenue is up. But five years later, a twenty twenty-two mobility survey showed seventy-three percent resident approval, up from thirty-eight percent before implementation.
The pattern holds — people hate it until they experience it, and then they don't want to go back. It's the same dynamic you see with congestion pricing in London and Stockholm. Before implementation, it's wildly unpopular. Two years in, it's so popular that no politician would dare repeal it.
The economics back it up. Ghent University did a cost-benefit analysis in twenty twenty. The circulation plan cost fifteen million euros to implement. It generates eight million euros per year in reduced healthcare costs from air pollution and accidents alone. That's a fifty-three percent annual return on investment before you even count the retail revenue increases, the property value gains, or the quality-of-life improvements. If you pitched this to a venture capitalist, they'd bite your hand off.
Let's talk about the emergency access in Ghent, because it's a different model from Pontevedra's bollards.
Ghent uses a GPS-based priority system. Fire trucks and ambulances are equipped with transponders that communicate with the traffic light network. When an emergency vehicle is on a call, the system overrides the normal light sequences to create a green wave ahead of it. The bollards that do exist in Ghent can be lowered remotely by the same system. And they also narrowed streets in some areas — which, again, paradoxically improved emergency access because vehicles can navigate around stationary obstacles more easily when traffic is slow and predictable.
The narrowing-streets point is worth sitting with for a second. The intuition is that wider streets are better for emergency vehicles. But a wide street full of parked cars and moving traffic is actually harder to navigate than a narrow street with no obstacles and no traffic. The width that matters isn't the street width — it's the clear width. A twelve-meter street with cars parked on both sides and a lane of moving traffic in each direction might only have three meters of clear width that an ambulance can actually use. A five-meter pedestrian street with no obstacles has five meters of clear width.
Right, and this connects to something that comes up in virtually every car-free city study: the real obstacle to emergency access isn't street width, it's other cars. Remove the other cars, and emergency vehicles move faster even on narrower streets. There's a study from the London School of Economics that looked at ambulance response times before and after pedestrianization projects across six European cities, and the finding was consistent — response times improved in every case, by an average of about fourteen percent.
We've got two European models — Pontevedra's hard ban with permit exceptions, Ghent's circulation plan that eliminates through-traffic — both running for years with measurable improvements in safety, air quality, retail revenue, and emergency response times. What does this mean for a city like Jerusalem?
Let's start with the air quality baseline, because the prompt mentioned it and the numbers are alarming. Jerusalem's average nitrogen dioxide concentration is forty-five micrograms per cubic meter. The WHO guideline is twenty-five. So Jerusalem's background level is already nearly double the safe threshold. And curbside readings during peak traffic can exceed eighty micrograms per cubic meter — that's more than triple the WHO guideline. If you're walking on a narrow sidewalk next to idling traffic, you're breathing air that's actively damaging your lungs.
Eighty micrograms is the kind of number where we're not talking about long-term statistical risk anymore. We're talking about measurable acute effects. Studies show that NO2 exposure above sixty micrograms can trigger asthma attacks in susceptible people within hours. So a child with asthma walking to school along a Jerusalem street during rush hour isn't facing some abstract future health risk — they're facing a concrete, immediate danger.
That's before we get to the construction. The light rail expansions — the Green Line, the extensions to the Red Line — are tearing up major corridors. The disruption is real, and it's going to continue for years. But the long-term bet is that once the light rail network is complete, you have a transit spine that can support exactly the kind of car-free or car-reduced urban core we've been describing.
Let's talk about what that spine actually looks like on the ground.
The Red Line already covers the main corridor from Pisgat Ze'ev in the north to Mount Herzl in the southwest, running through the city center. When the Green Line opens, it'll connect the Hebrew University campuses and create a proper network rather than a single line. The missing pieces are three things. One: converting the city center's narrow streets to pedestrian priority with timed delivery windows, like Pontevedra's six to ten AM system. Two: building park-and-ride facilities at the light rail termini — right now there's some parking but nowhere near enough. Three: electrifying the bus fleet to reduce curbside pollution even before removing cars.
The topography is the thing everyone brings up with Jerusalem. Hills, valleys, steep gradients. Cycling is harder.
It is harder, but it's not impossible. Modern electric bikes and cargo trikes handle gradients up to about fifteen percent without much trouble. Jerusalem has some streets that exceed that, but the main corridors are manageable. The bigger issue is that the cycling infrastructure is fragmented — there are bike lanes on some streets, nothing on others, and the network doesn't connect. That's a design problem, not a topography problem. You don't need to bike up every hill. You need a few key routes that connect neighborhoods to the city center along manageable gradients, and you need secure bike parking at both ends.
The electric bike thing really does change the calculus. A traditional bicycle on a ten percent grade is a workout. An electric cargo bike on a ten percent grade is just transportation. You arrive at your destination without needing a shower. For a city like Jerusalem, where the summer heat is also a factor, that's not a minor detail.
Let's bring this to the American context, because the prompt specifically asked about it. No US city has fully banned cars from a downtown core. But several have taken meaningful steps, and the results are instructive.
I think it's worth acknowledging why the US is different before we get into the examples. American cities were largely built around the car in a way that European medieval cities weren't. The street grids are wider, the blocks are larger, the parking infrastructure is more embedded. You can't just drop the Pontevedra model onto downtown Phoenix and expect it to work the same way. But that doesn't mean nothing can be done.
San Francisco's Market Street is the closest American analogue to what we've been discussing. In twenty twenty, the city banned private cars from a two-mile stretch of Market Street — it's buses, streetcars, cyclists, pedestrians, and commercial delivery vehicles only. The SFMTA evaluation report from twenty twenty-one showed a twenty-four percent reduction in bus travel time and a twenty percent increase in pedestrian foot traffic within the first year. Emergency response times were unaffected.
Twenty-four percent faster buses is not a marginal improvement. That's the difference between a usable transit system and one that makes you late for work. If your bus trip goes from twenty-five minutes to nineteen, that's six minutes you get back, twice a day, five days a week. Over a year, that's about fifty hours — more than a full work week of time saved.
Market Street is just one corridor, not a full district. Imagine that effect applied to an entire downtown. New York's Fourteenth Street busway is a similar experiment — cars banned except for local access and deliveries, bus speeds increased twenty-four percent, and the sky didn't fall. In fact, the businesses on Fourteenth Street saw foot traffic increase because the buses were faster and more reliable, so more people used them.
The open streets movement that emerged during the pandemic showed something interesting too. Cities closed streets to cars temporarily, people used them for walking and dining and playing, and when the closures ended, people didn't want to give them back. The demand is there. The political will, less so.
That's really the core of it, isn't it? The technical problems are solved. We know how to build bollards that lower in eight seconds. We know how to design permit systems that give access to the people who need it while keeping out the ninety-five percent of trips that don't. We know that pedestrianization increases retail revenue, reduces accidents, and improves emergency response times. The evidence is overwhelming and consistent across decades and continents.
The obstacle isn't technical. It's that the car is culturally coded as freedom. Removing it feels like a loss, even when every measurable outcome says it's a gain. You're asking people to trade something tangible — their car, their parking spot, their ability to drive door-to-door — for something that sounds abstract until you experience it: cleaner air, quieter streets, faster emergency response, more vibrant public space.
The political dynamics are brutal. Ghent's mayor nearly lost his job. Pontevedra's mayor faced years of opposition. The benefits accrue over time, but the costs are front-loaded and concentrated. The shop owner who's convinced their business depends on curbside parking will fight the change even if the data shows their revenue will increase. The commuter who's been driving the same route for twenty years will see it as an attack on their convenience.
There's a misconception worth addressing directly, because it comes up in every one of these debates: the idea that car-free zones are anti-poor, that they benefit affluent urbanites at the expense of working people who rely on cars. The data says the opposite. Lower-income residents are less likely to own cars and more likely to rely on walking, cycling, and public transit. They're also more likely to live near major roads and suffer the health consequences of air pollution. Car-free zones disproportionately benefit the people who can least afford to drive.
The economic argument that cars bring customers is empirically false in dense urban areas. Every major study shows retail revenue increases of twenty to fifty percent in pedestrianized zones. The University of Vigo study in Pontevedra found a fifty percent increase in the pedestrian zone versus a twenty percent decline in car-accessible shopping areas nearby. People on foot browse longer, visit more stores, and spend more money than people who drive to a single destination and leave.
The mechanism is straightforward: a person walking past a store is a potential customer. A person driving past at thirty miles per hour is not. You're trading a small number of high-intent car-arriving customers for a large number of moderate-intent foot-traffic customers, and the math works out in favor of foot traffic. It's the same reason that airports put shops along the walking route to the gates rather than next to the parking garage — you want to capture people while they're already on foot.
Let's talk about what a realistic transition might look like for an American city, because the all-at-once Ghent model requires a level of political capital that most US mayors don't have. The more likely path is incremental: start with a single corridor like Market Street, prove it works, expand. Build the park-and-ride infrastructure first. Improve the bus frequency. Add bike lanes that actually connect to each other. Then start restricting car access in phases.
The parking-to-pedestrian pipeline. Close one block, let people experience it, let the businesses on that block see their revenue go up, and then the businesses on the next block start asking when it's their turn. This is basically what happened with New York's Times Square pedestrianization. It started as a temporary experiment with lawn chairs, and now it's permanent, and nobody would seriously propose putting cars back through Times Square.
And the air quality monitoring piece is going to accelerate this whether city governments want it to or not. Low-cost sensor networks are getting cheaper and more granular. You can now deploy hundreds of air quality monitors across a city and get block-by-block, hour-by-hour data on what people are actually breathing. When residents can see that their street has NO2 levels three times the WHO guideline during the school run, that becomes politically potent in a way that abstract citywide averages never were.
The prompt mentioned this — the localization of air pollution. Background levels are bad in Jerusalem, but curbside levels during traffic jams are two to three times worse. That's not an academic statistic. That's a parent pushing a stroller through diesel exhaust on their way to the park. That's a kid with asthma whose trigger isn't the citywide average — it's the specific intersection where the bus idles for two minutes every morning.
It connects to a broader shift in how we think about urban air quality. The old model was a few monitoring stations scattered across a city, producing a single number that got reported on the evening news. The new model is hyperlocal sensor networks that show you exactly which intersections are poisoning people. When that data becomes widely available — and it's getting there — the question stops being should we do something about cars and becomes how fast can we do it.
There's a company called BreezoMeter that's already doing a version of this — block-level air quality data, available through an API. And cities like London and Los Angeles are deploying their own sensor networks. The granularity is improving fast. We're moving from "your city's air is unhealthy" to "the air on your specific block is unhealthy between eight and nine AM on weekdays." That's a much harder thing for a politician to ignore.
All of this points to a deeper question that goes beyond bollards and bus lanes — and it's the question the prompt was really getting at. Walking through a dug-up Jerusalem neighborhood, choking on diesel fumes, navigating around construction barriers that force pedestrians into traffic, the only sane conclusion is that cars don't belong there. The prompt said it plainly: cars simply have no place in densely populated cities. The question is whether we're willing to act on that conclusion.
We have the templates. Pontevedra shows it works for nearly three decades with zero traffic deaths. Ghent shows it scales to a mid-sized city with a skeptical population and a complex transit network. San Francisco and New York show that even American cities can take the first steps and see immediate, measurable benefits. The emergency vehicle problem is solved. The delivery problem is solved. The disability access problem is solved. What's left is the political problem — and that's the hard one.
The three prerequisites that show up in every successful case: one, peripheral parking with high-frequency transit connections — you have to give people a viable alternative to driving into the center. Two, a granular permit system that handles residents, deliveries, and disabled access without creating loopholes that everyone exploits. Three, a public consultation process that takes at least twelve to eighteen months — you can't spring this on people, even if the Ghent weekend-flip model is tempting.
The order matters. You can't do the car restrictions first and then build the alternatives. You have to build the park-and-rides, improve the bus frequency, install the bike lanes, and then — only then — restrict car access. If you do it in the other order, you're just making people's lives harder without giving them a way out, and they will rightly punish you for it.
For Jerusalem specifically, the pieces are already partly in place. The light rail's Red Line is the spine. The Green Line will make it a network. The missing pieces are converting the narrow streets of the city center to pedestrian priority with timed delivery windows, building proper park-and-ride facilities at the termini, and electrifying the bus fleet to cut curbside pollution immediately. Those are achievable, fundable, technically straightforward projects.
The real question isn't can we do it. It's whether we're willing to accept that the car, as the default mode of urban transport, has failed. Not failed as a machine — the car is an extraordinary piece of engineering. Failed as a organizing principle for dense human settlement. The noise, the pollution, the deaths, the space it consumes, the way it turns neighborhoods into thoroughfares. The evidence has been accumulating for decades, and it's now so overwhelming that the only remaining argument for cars in city centers is that we're used to them.
That's not nothing. Being used to something is a powerful force. But it's not a good reason to keep poisoning ourselves.
There's a line from the urbanist Jan Gehl that I think about a lot: "A city is not a transport corridor. A city is a place where people meet." And the car, for all its utility, is fundamentally anti-meeting. It isolates people in metal boxes and moves them past each other too fast for any interaction to happen. A pedestrian street is a social space. A car street is a transport space. And a city that's mostly transport space isn't really a city anymore — it's a highway with buildings.
Here's the open question we'll leave you with. As air quality monitoring gets cheaper and more granular — and we're already seeing networks of low-cost sensors going up in cities around the world — will the localized pollution data become impossible for city governments to ignore? When a parent can pull out their phone and see that the air on their street is three times the safe limit right now, during the school run, does that change the political calculus?
I think it does. I think we're maybe five years away from hyperlocal air quality data being as accessible as weather data, and once that happens, the conversation shifts from should we restrict cars to how fast can we implement the restrictions. The health impacts are too direct, too visible, too unevenly distributed to ignore. You can argue with a planning document. It's much harder to argue with a real-time map of what your kids are breathing.
The prompt ended with a plea for solutions that allow people to move around a city and between work and home. And that's the right framing. This isn't about taking things away. It's about building something better — streets you can walk down without choking, neighborhoods where kids can play outside, emergency vehicles that actually get where they're going, shops that thrive because people want to be there. The cities that have done this aren't suffering. They're thriving. The question is who goes next.
The answer might come faster than we expect, driven not by urban planning theory or political ideology, but by something much simpler: the ability to see, in real time, what we're breathing. When the invisible becomes visible, the unacceptable becomes undeniable.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The Ottoman Empire maintained a dedicated corps of official food tasters called the çeşnibaşı, whose title literally translates to head of the tasting — a role so bureaucratically formalized that by the sixteenth century the çeşnibaşı ranked above the imperial head gardener and was required to file written reports on the sultan's meals, including tasting notes on pilaf texture.
Filing performance reviews on rice texture. Truly the original Yelp elite.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you listen — it helps other people find the show. We're Corn and Herman, and we'll be back soon with more weird prompts.
