Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [123]
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“Cheap gasoline forever, whatever,” is how The Economist describes the American approach to transportation planning, adding: “Hence the paradox that the freest market in the world eschews the price mechanism and applies command-and-control regulation to a central portion of its economy” (“Living with the Car,” 7).
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As The Boston Globe’s David Nyhan notes, “If that result were an election, we’d call it a landslide … Conclusion: the people are way out in front of the politicians again” (Nyhan, “For the Planet’s Sake, Hike the Gas Tax,” A27).
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Philip Langdon, A Better Place to Live, 119. In 1989, the Gallup Organization asked people whether they preferred to live in a city, suburb, small town, or farm: 34 percent chose a small town, compared to 24 percent who chose a suburb; 22 percent chose a farm; and 19 percent chose a city (Dirk Johnson, “Population Decline in Rural America,” A20).
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Created by Anton Nelessen, a professor at Rutgers University, the Visual Preference Survey has become the tool of choice for municipalities fighting sprawl to demonstrate a public desire for traditional development, and to generate political will for revised development standards.
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One venerable and powerful source of real estate market information is the Urban Land Institute, or ULI. Long considered an advocate of the development industry, fortifying the hegemony of conventional building practice—and, for that reason, fondly referred to as the United Lemmings Institute—the ULI has recently begun to advocate traditional town planning, albeit as one of several development alternatives worth considering. Interestingly, the ULI was founded in 1936 by J. C. Nichols, the developer of Kansas City’s wonderful Country Club District, a series of neighborhoods that exemplify most of the principles advocated here.
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The ability of new traditional neighborhoods to handle higher densities attractively is often due to the presence of the rear lane, which allows row houses and apartments to be parked from the back. Row houses are often only about twenty feet wide, such that a two-car garage eclipses the entire façade if no alley is provided. Apartment houses typically require large parking lots, which are a visual blight unless hidden behind the buildings.
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In 1988, 14.8 million accidents involving motor vehicles led to 47,000 deaths and almost 5 million injuries (MacKenzie, Dower, Chen, 19). Taken out of context, the amount of carnage on America’s highways is absolutely shocking, as is the degree to which we have come to accept it as a fact of life. Jane Holtz Kay asks, “Where else do we accept some 120 deaths a day so offhandedly? Imagine a plane crash each afternoon … An engineer recorded it in military terms: during the same forty days of the Persian Gulf War in which 146 men and women were lost fighting to keep the world safe for petroleum, 4,900 died with equal violence on our country’s highways” (Kay, Asphalt Nation, 103). By 1994, car crashes had killed over three million Americans in total (Andrew Kimbrell, “Steering Toward Ecological Disaster,” The Green Lifestyle Handbook, 35). Internationally, car crashes cause an estimated 250,000 deaths and 3,000,000 injuries annually (Wolfgang Zuckermann, The End of the Road, 64).
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James Gerstenzang, “Cars Make Suburbs Riskier Than Cities, Study Says,” A20. A study of the Pacific Northwest by Alan Thein Durning found that 1.6 percent of city residents were likely to be killed or injured by traffic accidents or crime, versus 1.9 percent of suburban residents. “Tragically, people often flee crime-ridden cities for the perceived safety of the suburbs—only to increase the risks they expose themselves to,” Mr. Durning notes.
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Tri-State Transportation Campaign conference, “Beyond the Open Road,” at New York University. In addition, the cost of operating and maintaining the United States’ primary highway system has been estimated at $500,000