We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars

It feels nearly impossible to imagine what that might look like, but what we shouldn’t do is feel paralysed by FOBO (fear of better options). An emphasis on the local, on smaller, walkable neighbourhoods and more central job and amenity centres is a good place to start. It’s not just tiny villages that can reap the benefits of this spatial reconsid... See more

For decades, the automobile provided a pathway to economic opportunity and upward mobility. But now the negative consequences — including a reliance on fossil fuels and increased emissions of greenhouse gases; a dramatic increase in the rate of deaths caused by cars[x]; the disconnection of local community and weakening of local economies; the rise... See more

When the effort to travel to transit seems daunting because of distance or fear of danger, people will default to the easier decision to drive. The physical environment goes hand in hand with people’s perceptions of the difficulty of tasks. Research shows people are more willing to walk and use transit when streets are more connected, block lengths

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Transportation equity is not a discrete problem. It poses a barrier to accessing everything that constitutes a good quality of life; healthcare, fresh food, public Wi-Fi, friends, education, jobs, and voting. If everything is brought within a 15 minute radius, not only does car ownership become widely unnecessary, prompting the provision of a criti... See more

Cities across the country are now thinking about different ways to make walking safer in cities and more attractive for routine daily trips. Vision Zero, a larger pedestrian safety plan with the goal of zero traffic fatalities, is underway. As pedestrian deaths are largely the result of being struck by an automobile, efforts to promote and enforce

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Over the past decade, there has been a series of studies that attribute obesity and its related illnesses directly to the automotive lifestyle and, better yet, to the automotive landscape.● One effort found that for every additional five minutes Atlanta-area residents drove each day, they were 3 percent more likely to be obese.13 Another showed tha

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