People, Not Cars, Should Be Focus Of Community Planning

Streets Are People Places

The first step in winning back our communities is realizing that cars should not rule the roads.

I
have a favorite saying about transportation: "If you plan cities for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. If you plan for people and places, you get people and places." It sounds obvious, but when I make this point to audiences around the country, it’s a real eye-opener. They love it.

PPS is showing the way forward, helping communities realize a different vision of what transportation can be.

The power of this simple idea is that it reflects basic truths that are rarely acknowledged. One such truth is that more traffic and road capacity are not the inevitable result of growth. They are in fact the product of very deliberate choices that have been made (for us, not by us) to shape our communities around the private automobile. We as a society have the ability to make different choices–starting with the decision to design our streets as comfortable places for people.

By Fred Kent

Full Story: http://www.pps.org/info/newsletter/june2005/transportation_as_place