From Good Magazine. Actually streets like this exist in some places and will soon in others.

Click here to check it out.

Reading the latest issue of Planning magazine I found a little piece about www.onthecommons.org, a new website dedicated to sharing and protecting community, social, and natural resources. The post below caught my eye, as being so closely related to other things I have posted here on our blog.

Perhaps we are on the right track and poised to make a shift from auto-dominated transportation systems?

Is the End of Auto-cracy in Sight?

Our car-dominated transportation system may soon make more room for biking, walking, transit and trains.

Posted on 1 Dec 2008 / Jay Walljasper

Topics Filed Under: Community Life

Tags: biking; public spaces; transit; transportation; urban planning; walkability

One of the biggest factors undermining a commons-based society during the 20th Century was the automobile. Untold billions of dollars of public money was spent to enshrine the private car as essential to modern life, first in the U.S. and then throughout the world.

From Flickr by Lynac, creative commons license, non-commercial.

The commons was sacrificed to achieve this manufactured dream of speed, privacy and convenience. The air was polluted, the climate altered, landscapes paved over, urban neighborhoods ripped apart, and the very nature of our social connections turned upside down. Streets, once public spaces used by everyone, became the exclusive domain of vehicles. Our public life declined, as people began to move about town isolated behind their windshields.

Problems caused by a transportation system dominated by automobiles have been apparent for decades, but little happened to change the situation. It was considered an impossible dream that we would embrace any other way of travel.

But there are growing signs that people now understand —even in auto-dominated America—that we must broaden our transportation system by giving significant funding to bikes, transit, trains and walking. The fate or our environment, economy and communities depend upon it.

In the November election, voters around the U.S. approved billions in new spending for transit including a California high-speed intercity rail system and a $17.8 billion tax increase in Seattle for expanded light rail and bus service. Even citizens in Jonesboro, Arkansas, voted 86-14 percent to continue their local transit system, established in 2005.

Transportation for America —a new coalition of civic, community, environmental and social justice groups—has drafted the Build for America aganda, an ambitious five-point plan to strengthen the U.S. economy by creating a 21st Century transportation system based upon:

1) Modernizing and expanding intercity rail and urban transit systems comparable to those in Europe and China.

2) Investing in green transportation technology—not just cleaner cars and buses, but also expanding opportunities for people to walk, bike and take transit.

3) Restoring our decaying roads, bridges and transit systems before building any new roads.

4) Cutting back on unnecessary transportation spending by reevaluating all planned projects in light of our need to cut back on oil dependence.

5) Saving American families money by providing more affordable housing options within easy walking and biking distance or transit connections to jobs and commercial districts.

Not only would this boost our economic prospects, it would reinvigorate a sense of community in our towns and cities, which is the chief prerequisite for a commons-based society.

My good pal and surfing buddy, Bill Cross of Palm Beach County’s Zoning Division, sent me a link to a preview for the University of Miami School of Architecture’s online course on New Urbanism.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

This unit introduces the crisis of place that is the result of sixty years of sprawl and urban disinvestment and the alternative presented by the New Urbanism. It is a crisis that has generated searing critiques from urbanists beginning with Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs and William Whyte in the 1950s, environmentalists such as Ian McHarg and Rachel Carson since the 1960s, and an endless stream of research by social scientists since the Costs of Sprawl study was published by the Real Estate Research Corporation in 1974.

The whole preview can be found here: http://nuonline.arc.miami.edu/preview/index.html

And you can register for the course here: http://nuonline.arc.miami.edu/register.html 

The bottom line? “Friends don’t let friends sprawl” (stolen from a 1000 Friends of Florida bumper sticker sitting here next to my computer) or, gated communities and cul-de-sacs must end.

So he’s a little foul-mouthed, maybe a little bitter too, but hits the nail on the head. James Howard Kunstler talks about planning, public space, and the American experience here http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/121

Make sure the kids are not in the room