New York City is the greenest city in America. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use....
But this is not necessarily something people want to hear:
In a conversation with a Sierra Club representative involved in Challenge to Sprawl, I said that the organization's anti-sprawl suggestions and the modified streetscapes in the slide show shared many significant features with Manhattan-whose most salient characteristics include wide sidewalks, narrow streets, mixed uses, densely packed buildings, and an extensive network of subways and buses. The representative hesitated, then said that I was essentially correct, although he would prefer that the program not be described in such terms, since emulating New York City would not be considered an appealing goal by most of the people whom the Sierra Club is trying to persuade
posted by storybored
on Apr 6, 2008 -
61 comments
Transit in Detroit details an urban planner's initiative to cut the costs of the city's traffic congestion-relieving highway expansion by proposing a transit system combining light rail and bus-rapid-transit. [More Inside]
posted by gregb1007
on Nov 25, 2005 -
15 comments
Boom! A master planned community. Boom! A big-box mall! Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia. This article, by New York Times columnist David Brooks, takes a look at exploding suburbs and
exurban migration. This migration is nothing new, author Joel Garreau wrote extensively about it in his 1991 book
Edge Cities. The phenomonon really took off after World War II, during the period of post war prosperity, and is best represented by this
famous postwar American suburb. A veritable army of "suburban sprawl critics" has emerged over the years including
Jane Jacobs and
James Howard Knunstler plus
many others including some who are predicting the
immenent demise of suburbs because of
oil depletion. For Brooks the critics of suburbs "just regurgitate the same critiques decade after decade, regardless of the suburban reality flowering around them" but you can't dismiss what the architect Paolo Soleri says about American society that
"we have a society that is moving very rapidly to the
super-, super-, super-consumptive."
posted by thedailygrowl
on Apr 30, 2004 -
28 comments
Got Sprawl?
This story from Maine’s Portland Press Herald about a rich widow “from away” (as we say) who wants to build a high-end subdivision on her land in scenic
Falmouth against objections from the Town Council -- which is citing her property as the most valuable undeveloped tract in the town -- illustrates on a very human level (complete with affluent in-family spats) what rural towns in
New England and
the rest of the country feel is at stake in their fight against unplanned development.
(more inside)
posted by damn yankee
on Mar 9, 2003 -
34 comments
The Weekly Standard: Patio Man and the Sprawl People There he is atop the uppermost tier of his multi-level backyard patio/outdoor recreation area posed like an admiral on the deck of his destroyer. In his mind's eye he can see himself coolly flipping the garlic and pepper T-bones on the front acreage of his new grill while carefully testing the citrus-tarragon trout filets that sizzle fragrantly in the rear. On the lawn below he can see his kids, Haley and Cody, frolicking on the weedless community lawn that is mowed twice weekly by the people who run Monument Crowne Preserve, his townhome community. More inside...
posted by gen
on Aug 6, 2002 -
65 comments
Sprawl is Good Defense "It's a pretty good rule of military thumb that the greater the concentration of value, the more attractive the target... To keep things safe, you need to spread things out." The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian should begin moving their collections out of NYC and Washington,D.C. Now. Talented, intelligent people and people with irreplaceable skills should go next. Re-locate to the Great Plains.
posted by Faze
on Dec 14, 2001 -
11 comments
