There are a bunch of people on the internet yelling about urban design and coming at it from the position that walkable, bikable neighborhoods and cities are a net good. Most of these people are also of the opinion that the last seventy to eighty years of car-centric urban design was A Bad Thing – a position I wholeheartedly agree with. So why does the internet need another person yelling about it?
Whelp, as I see it, most of the people who are engaged in this discourse are *very* urban and – while the solutions they’re recommending are great for fixing the mistakes that have happened in seven decades of destroying our urban centers – they seem to be drawing a blank when it comes to the suburban areas that were built with nothing but car-centricity in mind.
So that’s the gap that I aim to fill on this website: how do we take the tons of car-dependent suburban sprawl that we’ve generated over the last seven decades and make it into a place where cars are no longer required, but are instead optional? Oh, yeah, and to bump up the difficulty a bit, I’m going to assume that “just bulldoze it all and build a proper city from scratch” isn’t an option, and that something needs to be done to win over people who’d rather just continue doing the same stupid things they’ve always done.
All of this is caveated with the fact that I have absolutely zero professional qualifications for this sort of discourse – but that’s never stopped anyone from making sweeping statements about what should be done about a given thing, has it? I have, however, driven, cycled, walked, and taken transit in a number of different cities all around the world – and I am an unrepentant nerd who reads scholarly articles for fun, so while I might not be credentialed, I can at least call BS when I see it.
So, that being said, welcome, please be kind in the comments, and – if by some miracle you find this worthwhile – please chuck me a couple bucks whenever I add a buy-me-a-coffee to this thing.