These inspiring leaders have authored 10 great and recent books on how to design and build walk-bike-transit-people-friendly cities and show us the strategies and tactics for making the places we call home more prosperous, green, healthy and happy as a result. Read them and join the revolution.
People and businesses want to be in vibrant, mixed-use, walkable, bike-friendly, transit-accessible, people oriented places. It is well documented that across North America Millennials and Boomers are moving to these kinds of places in droves. Business journals document companies abandoning car-centric office parks, that just 25 years ago were the wave of the future, to move back to these centers too. But not everyone can get in. Real estate experts and economists tell us the prices in these walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods are sky-high and pricing people out because there aren’t enough of them.
That’s because the traffic engineers and DOTs that control our streets (from 25 to 50% of a city’s land area) still use out-dated manuals to design streets for car convenience and speed. Planners are using land-use and zoning codes from an era that forces segregation of uses, abhors density and requires too much car parking. The result? Car-dependent, dispersed and disconnected places. These places, the ones we’ve been building for the last 75 years, make us less healthy, both physically and mentally. They degrade our environment. They cost more to maintain and put a strain on our resources. And they make us less happy too.
See the full list here.
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