City centres across the UK were ripped out and destroyed to make way for the car far more comprehensively than the Luftwaffe

Imagine, by way of contrast, an Italian transport minister suggesting that the historic centres of Italy’s towns and cities be pulled down in order to make space for the growing number of Cinquecentos. They would be ridiculed and laughed out of office, and yet city centres across the UK were ripped out and destroyed to make way for the car far more comprehensively than the Luftwaffe (which had, in places such as Coventry, started the process) had ever achieved.

C. Wolmar, Are trams socialist? (2016), Kindle loc 382