The architecture of being car free...

The old gray lady has an article on a German city that has structured itself to live car free. The banishment of garages and driveways while using common parking away from homes facilitates a different type of living. What struck me most about the article is that the lack of cars increases the feeling of security. Letting one's children play out without fear.

The biggest challenge to creating car free cities is that cars are so central to the American sense of identity. If you think about, if numbers matter than this is a country of autos more than people since the population of cars exceeds the population of people. There is an experiment planned in Hayward, California. It'll be interesting to see if it takes off.

Even in cities where transit was laid down first and cities blossomed around them such as Portland, car ownership is very dominant since in the edge cities you need cars to get to transit. However, discovery is always an act of trying something new. Otherwise it wouldn't be research.