"But perhaps we should not be so surprised. What do you expect when you put people in cars they feel good (or at least less guilty) about driving, which are also cheap to buy and run? Naturally, they drive them more. So much more, in fact, that they obliterate energy gains made by increased fuel efficiency."
Electric vehicles are clearly the right answer to the wrong quen tion. 3. Don't spend a penny on gorgeous car barricades. If a pedestrian zone is going to be successful, it will thrive due to its location, demographics, and organization, not its streetscape. 4. The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He goes earns the money to put down to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, etc. 5. This chapter exists because of one man. He is in his mid seventies, green-eyed, gray-bearded, and often pictured riding a bicycle. He holds four degrees from Yale in engineering and economics, and teaches at UCLA, where he was chair of the Department of Urban Planning and ran the Institute of Transportation Studies. His name is Donald Shoup and, inside an admittedly small circle, he is a rock star. He is alternately hailed as the "Jane Jacobs of parking policy" and the "prophet of parking.” There is even a Facebook group caled "The Shoupistas.”
What Shoup has discovered about parking-using both an economist's cold logic and the careful, sustained observation of reality-is that every city in America handles it wrong. Rather than parking working in the service of cities, cities have been working in the service of parking, almost entirely to their detriment. He has also determined, and demonstrated, that this problem can be fixed fairly easily and with great rewards for all involved. 6. Currently, only 1.5 percent of all trips in the United States are on public transportation. In our star cities of Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco, that number is closer to 5 percent, and the New York region, unsurprisingly, tops the list at 9 percent. But what happens when you cross the border? Toronto, with a residential density roughly a third of New York's, has a 14 percent transit share. Across the Atlantic, Barcelona and Rome hit 35 percent. Tokyo tops 60 and Hong Kong, the global leader, has reached 73 percent. 7. Without much walkability on either end of the line, DART can hardly be expected to have changed people's driving habits. But nothing was going to reduce the amount of driving in Dallas. Not a transit system, not walkability, not neighborhoods: Texas drivers will continue to fill the roads they have, and if America's largest light-rail system takes sixty thousand drivers off the precincts with highway-the current total-sixty thousand more will take th place. Because in Dallas, where parking is as ubiquitous as it is it new parkir cheap, the only significant constraint to driving is the very congestion that DART hopes to relieve.
This is the part of the story that the train boosters don't want you to hear: investments in transit may be investments in mobility or investments in real estate, but they are not investments in reduced traffic. The only way to reduce traffic is to reduce roads or to increase the cost of using them, and that is a bitter pill that few pro-transit cities are ready to swallow. 8. Only 5 percent of pedestrian collisions at 30 klms per hour result in death, versus 85 percent at 60 klms.