Customer Reviews

The Car and the City: 24 Steps to Safe Streets and Healthy Communities (New Report)

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This exceptional book makes it enjoyable and quick to understand what's wrong with how we currently design our towns and cities: making them easier to drive through, rather than making them better to actually be in! Durning provides clear examples and suggests concrete steps for making things better, all the while keeping it simple and human, not dry and technical. A must for citizens and local officials interested in addressing traffic problems and building more livable communities. (See also The Geography of Nowhere, by J. H. Kunstler.)

By far the best indictment of cities built for cars, this pithy, straight-shooting, quick read is full of logical solutions to car addiction. Bristling with facts about the actual cost of cars and car infrastructure, moved along by the success story of Vancouver, B.C.'s West End, suggestions for improving cities livability run the gamut from city planning solutions, to innovative ideas for auto insurance. This book is an indisputable must for city planners, developers, politicians and citizens concerned about the livability of their cities. It's themes are applicable well outside of the Northwest.

First recommendation of Alan Durning: read the book in a bus. Last recomendation: give the book to the person next to you in the same bus. He has reflexion not only about transportation but also for urban planning, and how to avoid policies that in a middle term affect your transportation.