Nobody cares

This seems to be totally oriented to cars. I find American cities incredibly dark by night. Walking around feels too dark and unpleasant.

But, responding to this particular example is missing the point of the article. Let me, for a moment, agree with you, and say that the ramp is within acceptable parameters: still, the author complains about a more general phenomenon, a lot of aspects of this phenomenon are very relatable. And it doesn't have to manifest itself uniformly and similarly everywhere in every detail.

For example, suburban houses in the Netherlands really show people care about the neighborhood. The want things to be nice. Windowsills are always decorated, have some art displayed in the windows, just for the passerby to enjoy. People mostly care to pick up after their dogs and to generally not litter. People even invest into community playgrounds, community garden patches etc. Life is good, at least in this respect.

But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light. It's a convention of sorts, that people understand without saying anything out loud. Do the absolute minimum, waste a lot of time doing nothing of value, don't rock the boat. And it is, as the author says, demoralizing. It makes my blood boil when defects discovered in our product, and instead of being fixed they get documented in a bottomless pit of our multi-thousands pages PDF manual, and the product is shipped regardless. A lot of these defects resulted not from honest mistakes, but from a desire to do as little work as possible, and to do only the "pleasant" part of the work: programmers prefer writing new code to fixing existing code. Testing is for wimps. Adding more stuff without fixing existing problems results in simply having more problems.

* * *

Now, how to make people care?--I don't know. I know of some things that worked, but they have bad side-effects (religion works, but sometimes it detracts into killing a lot of people, communism works, as in kibbutzim, but then it loses momentum, and is very prone to be exploited by external forces also, doesn't work on a large scale.)

I don't think you have thought this through. People are generally not asked about every bylaw individually. Maybe they bought the house because it was close to work. Or maybe they bought the house to get the kids into a good school. Maybe they bought the house because they just loved the garden. Or maybe they bought it because that was the only one they could afford after a long search and they were exhausted and just wanted to live somewhere.

Even if they read the rules maybe they cared about 80% of them and couldn't give a hoot about that specific one. (Maybe they like that their neighbour can't turn their front yard into a mechanic shop, but they don't care what colour their door is. That sort of thing.)

They might have agreed to it in a legalistic sense. As in they signed a piece of paper which referred to an other piece of paper which had this rule in it among many others. But you can't pretend that that means they "agreed" to it in the common sense meaning.

> Clearly it exists for a reason

That is not always clear. No.

> if no one enforced it then it’s completely pointless

Some rules are completely pointless. Weather or not they are enforced is a different point. But either way enforcing it doesn't make it have a point if it had none to begin with.