No, I would say that it is not. It’s not my Twitter account and I find that title a bit dramatic myself. If it were my account, I would have it only focus on Duluth examples and would give it this name: 

Car infrastructure in its many forms is a necessary component of car accessibility and as the car is the preferred mode choice for most people in Duluth, most people in Duluth support the construction and maintenance of this infrastructure but car infrastructure is incredibly space intensive, its use comes with a number of negative externalities including air and noise pollution, and the need to mitigate the inherent dangers of cars for the people inside and outside of them requires such rigid design standards that meeting the expectation that every location will be fully accessible by car without any delay during travel or parking often results in the destruction of some of the very locations that one originally desired to easily access and can make the remaining locations, and many places along the way to those locations, significantly less desirable even for the people with cars and significantly less accessible for the people without them. 

I'll have to check on Twitter's character limit for account titles.

Thanks for that concise summary of downtown development over the past century. I think it would be important to also include the impact of parking. Downtown could only accommodate a significant number of people driving by replacing stores, office and housing with parking lots and parking garages, an ongoing process that can be tracked through the countless Perfect Duluth Day posts about a building being torn down that end with “to be replaced by parking.”  While this makes access by car continuously better, the trade-off is a pedestrian environment that becomes continuously less pleasant. 

In addition to climate control and a sense of security, Miller Hill Mall provided the dense retail environment once found downtown AND easy access by car, a combination only possible by starting a new development removed from residential areas that allowed for large amounts of parking on every side. 

While the mall may have had a greater impact on downtown than the construction of car infrastructure, it is kind of hard to separate the impact of the mall from the impact of the car. The mall retail model not only facilitates the use of a car but also only really works if you have one, just like the big box stores that populate the increasingly far reaches of Miller Trunk Highway. Not having a car would limit access to so much, it’s hard to even imagine not owning one. When nearly everyone owns a car, investments gravitate to the most car accessible areas. 

With downtown having so many places in need of investment, a trade-off between a run-down building and a new parking lot doesn’t seem like much of a trade-off at all. And while giving up one old building for an additional parking lot really doesn’t make that much of an impact on the streetscape as a whole, repeating the process enough times can have an impact. Over time, it might even destroy a city.   

The attached image is from 6th Ave East and therefore just outside of downtown but I think it provides some illustration. The top image is a current aerial image and the bottom is approximately the same area in 1939. While the bottom image is a bit blurry, if you look carefully in comparing the two, you can find a few spots that indicate how isolated choices to facilitate car access can result in an overall change to the general character of a neighborhood.