From Wired Magazine’s Autopia blog:
Los Angeles and countless other cities – Phoenix, Houston and Atlanta come to mind – are far more friendly to cars than people, having been built according to land use policies that all but put people behind the wheel. It’s an unsustainable model, and it must change.
That was the message transportation planner Timothy Papandreou brought to “Expanding the Vision of Sustainable Mobility,” a symposium sponsored by the Art Center College of Design. The school could be called the Harvard of transportation design, and two-day conference drew experts in fields as varied as urban planning and aerospace engineering to discuss where the future of mobility lies.
Papandreou called for an end to “state, federal, and local land use policies that are literally forcing people to have to drive” and told Wired.com we’re on the cusp of an inevitable “mode shift” away from individual car ownership toward a greater reliance on mass transit and sustainable transport.
Read more about this at the Wired Autopia blog…
On the same topic, you might be interested in MAD Architects’ City of the Future, a Chinese utopian city.
It is indeed Mad. But some of the designs are appealing, like the open pits construction by Mass Studies, that looks interesting. Thanks Sophie!
I lived in LA for a few months, and moved into the Bunker Hill area so that I could walk to my job in downtown LA. It was only about 5 blocks, but daunting! I had to climb up stairs to go through roof gardens, down stairs to go through subterranean malls, as well as down sidewalks. But the sidewalks were blocked in many places, so you couldn’t actually cross the street – hence all the stairs. It pretty much doubled the length of the walk.
I recently moved within SF. I am happy to say that I now live where I can WALK to the grocery, the bank, the hardware store, the drugstore and more than 20 restaurants. And I’m one block from MUNI.
I want to be able to age in place, and that in part means not being auto-dependent.
I think that a lot of people fail to even think about auto-dependence with regard to housing choices…
My father is in the same situation. He’s in his late 80′s and he’s still is very active, despite being legally blind. (He has Macular Degeneration.) Trouble is that he lives out in the boonies of Coeur d’Alene Idaho in a suburb that’s about a 10 minute drive to the nearest supermarket.
Does that stop him? No, he’ll ride his bike or his new electric scooter (a scooter-scooter, not one of those electric wheelchair things) to the store. Both me and his girlfriend are scared that one day he’ll be in an accident. If he lived in a walkable community, he’d be much safer.
So Nicolette, your worries about aging in place are quite valid in this car-centric society of ours.