Street Smart Quotes

“The total average cost of driving, including depreciation, maintenance, and insurance, runs about 61 cents a mile, and since the average automobile used for commuting to work contains only 1.1 people, every commute costs a little more than 55 cents per passenger mile. This means that, if you’re an automobile commuter traveling twenty-five miles each way to work, you’re spending around $30 a day for the privilege, not including the cost, if there is one, to park. You’re also spending an hour every day for which, unless you’re a cabbie or bus driver yourself, you’re not getting paid, and during which you’re not doing anything productive at all. For the average American, that’s another $24. In transportation, time really is money.”
― Samuel I. Schwartz, Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars

“As the political prediction machine Nate Silver of 538.com tweeted in 2012, “If a place has sidewalks, it votes Democratic.”
― Samuel I. Schwartz, Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars

“Wider lanes were, obviously, safer than narrower ones. Only they’re not. This time, the problem with the cost-benefit equation wasn’t a faulty premise, but the data itself. In order to test the wider-lanes-are-safer-lanes hypothesis, I studied every crash that occurred on the bridge over a three-year period and marked each one on a map. If that notion had been true, I reasoned, more crashes would have occurred where the lanes were narrowest, that is, at the towers. Just the opposite turned out to be the case. The towers, it turned out, were the safest places on the entire bridge; my explanation is that when lanes get very narrow motorists drive more carefully. Even though every traffic engineer in the country had been taught the gospel of wider lanes, the opposite appeared to be true: “grossly substandard lanes seemed to be the safest of all.” This was the traffic engineering equivalent of saying the Earth was round when the masses knew it was flat. Still, most engineers do not accept this fact.”
― Samuel I. Schwartz, Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars

“What this means in road (and bridge, and tunnel) building is not just obvious but as well documented as anything in transportation engineering: “If you build it, they will come.” If you build more lanes on the expressway, more cars and trucks will use it. If you’re lucky, congestion remains as bad as it was before you spent $50 million trying to relieve it; if you’re not, it gets worse.”
― Samuel I. Schwartz, Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars

“Cars do their very best—with their micro-controlled climates, audios, and even scents—to seal the driver away from the rest of humanity (and from the impact they themselves have on the environment: noise, fumes, and particulates) inside an aluminum box. It’s actually a very weird development: cars offer a wholly artificial micro world. Maybe it’s to parlay the car as a mobile suburb. Once”
― Samuel I. Schwartz, Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars

“We compared modal share—that is, the percentage of people traveling by car, transit, or on foot—in London, Paris, and New York. We then compared New York to other cities in the United States. Through his eyes we saw European city centers staying vibrant while many of our center cities were dying. We learned what a mistake it had been for US cities to get rid of most of their streetcars at the same time streetcars were going strong in Continental Europe. We saw the movement to create a sense of place in towns and urban centers through good design of streets. The crowds filling European plazas were testimonials to the value of such design.”
― Samuel I. Schwartz, Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars

“quoting John Howard from MIT, “It does not belittle them to say that, just as war is too important to be left to the generals, so highways are too important to leave to the highway engineers.”
― Samuel I. Schwartz, Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars