Ivan Illich, the multinational intellectual who in 1973 wrote the smartest thing that I have yet to read about transportation: “Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few.”

This point was pounded home in a recent EPA study, “Location Efficiency and Building Type—Boiling It Down to BTUs,”11 that compared four factors: drivable versus walkable location; conventional construction versus green building; single-family versus multifamily housing; and conventional versus hybrid automobiles. The study made it clear that, whil

Which leads us to Shoup’s second key recommendation, that on-street parking be priced at a level that results in an 85 percent occupancy rate at all times.44 This number may seem a bit low, but it corresponds with roughly one empty space per block face, just the right amount to ensure Daddy Warbucks a spot near the furrier. Because it is precisely

What’s most interesting—and perhaps a bit frustrating—about this solution is that it does not address the parking supply directly. Every one of these cities still has a downtown parking requirement, some quite high.35 But instead of providing parking, businesses are only required to pay for it, which allows the parking to be located in the right pl

It would seem that only one thing is more destructive to the health of our downtowns than welcoming cars unconditionally and that is getting rid of them entirely. The proper response to obesity is not to stop eating, and most stores need car traffic to survive. With autos reintroduced, most failed pedestrian malls, like Monroe Place in Grand Rapids

At midcentury, Los Angeles was served by more than a thousand electric trolleys a day.6 These were torn out in a vast criminal conspiracy that is as well documented● as it was inevitable. It’s easy to get mad at General Motors and forget that, at the time, most cities and citizens delighted over the change from old-fashioned streetcars to streamlin

2009 article in Newsweek, hardly an esoteric publication: “Demand from drivers tends to quickly overwhelm the new supply; today engineers acknowledge that building new roads usually makes traffic worse.”

Happily, there is no evidence that granny flats lower property values and it’s easy to see why. First, they are almost invisible. Second, they provide the homeowners with an income stream that allows them to live in their own home more comfortably. Third, they are of course carefully regulated to avoid the tenement-style use contemplated by my Ange

The most comprehensive effort remains the one completed in 1998 by the Surface Transportation Policy Project, which looked at fully seventy different metropolitan areas over fifteen years. This study, which based its findings on data from the annual reports of the conservative Texas Transportation Institute, concluded as follows: Metro areas that i