New York has beautiful architecture, but we often choose to obscure it with the vehicles that litter our streets. Take the Guggenheim museum. It is one of the most iconic pieces of architecture in the world but we allow its beauty to be obscured with vans.

Here is what the Guggenheim museum would look like we got ride of those vans and tacky food stands.

Or take 79th street below, which has the most astonishing architecture.

Without cars, it might look something like this:

Many European cities restrict car parking more than New York and it both beautifies the City and allows for a better flow of traffic. Take Paris. It only has 120,000 on-street parking spaces compared to three million in New York City. As a result, many avenues in Paris look like this:

If this Avenue were in New York, it would look like this:

Notice how the parked and double parked cars make the street more crowded and chaotic. It’s also true that there are more vehicles, but that could be addressed by setting up a system of autonomous minibuses like this:

The three minibuses pictured hear could hold 30 passengers, as many as every car in the previous picture if those cars carried two passengers each.

But whatever system of transportation we have, we should get rid of most parked cars in New York City. In fact, it wasn’t legal to park a car overnight on our City’s streets until 1954. Here is what Park Avenue used to look like:

Because there were no parked cars, there was much less congestion. Vehicles didn’t have to double park to let off passengers or deliver packages because curb space was always available.