PROLOGUE: BEDFORD AND SULLIVAN
x one the New York Times called “grandiose”: (New York Times, 1952).
xi “three worst human beings who ever lived”: (Golenbock, 1984).
CHAPTER 1: MOTORDOM
1 built in Somerset in 3807 and/or 3806 BCE: (New Scientist, 1990).
1 still used in parts of Europe: (Flaherty, 2002).
3 explicitly “providing roads for automobility”: (Norton, 2008).
3 “a radical revision of our conception of what a city street is for”: (Norton, 2008).
3 “it is impossible for all classes of modern traffic to occupy the same right of way at the same time in safety”: (Norton, 2008).
3 “Suggest that the driver of the motor-car be lynched”: (Norton, 2008).
4 “a burdensome tangle of restrictive legislation”: (Norton, 2008).
4 and the head of the National Automobile Dealers Association: (Norton, 2008).
5 1852, when Alphonse Loubat developed the familiar grooved rail set flush with the pavement: (Jackson, 1985).
5 283 miles of urban cable track carrying 373 million passengers annually: (Jackson, 1985).
7 inflation cut revenues in half and the company’s expenses doubled: (Jackson, 1985).
7 more than thirty thousand miles of track on twelve hundred different urban transit systems and interurban railways: (Lind, 2012).
7 Twenty-three other utilities defaulted on interest payments: (Lind, 2012).
8 declined from 216 in 1938 (when the Act went into effect) to 18 by 1950: (St. Clair, 1986).
11 “not to exceed 6 ounces in weight or to pass a two-inch ring”: (FHA, 2011).
11 “This is a road made for ever”: (Cobbett, 1822).
12 America’s largest special-interest group: (Stilgoe, 2001).
12 to pull the same amount of freight that had earlier required six horses: (Stilgoe, 2001).
13 Rand-McNally’s first road atlases: (Norton, 2008).
13 “and upon either side of . . . public roads and streets”: (Longhurst, 2013).
14 Vanderbilt, a racing fanatic, built the parkway: (Patton, 2008).
16 The entry for 1996 was the Interstate Highway System: (Weingroff, 2000).
16 “of prime importance in the event of war”: (Weingroff, 2000).
16 “the needs of growing peacetime traffic of longer range”: (Weingroff, 2000).
17 and seventy everywhere else: (Weingroff, 2000).
19 “probably the greatest single tool”: (Weingroff, 2000).
20 “in every house right alongside the wife—the motor car”: (Weingroff, 2000).
21 a “ferry suburb” in the early nineteenth century: (Jackson, 1985).
22 “to accelerate the transition to lower class occupancy”: (Jackson, 1985).
CHAPTER 2: FOR EVERY ACTION . . .
28 “as well as a through motor route”: (Federal Writers Project, 1995).
29 “will include . . . a change in its character”: (North Side Board of Trade, 1897).
30 and the 1964 New York World’s Fair: (Caro, 1974).
30 out of the reach of pedestrians: (Dim, 2012).
31 “an express crosstown facility . . . would be $17,000,000”: (NYCRoads, 2014).
32 “took the stuff out with a teaspoon”: (Gray, 1989).
32 “one measured in inches and tenths of inches”: (Gray, 1989).
32 “It was out of character for Moses”: (Caro, 1974).
35 “a crime that cannot be prettied up”: (Weingroff, 2006) and (Mohl, 2004).
35 de facto veto over any freeway construction within the city: (Mohl, 2004).
35 “relocation of individuals, families, and business enterprises”: (Weingroff, 2006).
36 “They exulted in them”: (Moynihan, 1960).
36 “no more white highways through black bedrooms”: (Mohl, 2004).
38 “too important to leave to the highway engineers”: (Moynihan, 1960).
39 generally worth less, than driver time: (Mokhtarian, 2001).
40 a peak average speed of fourteen miles per hour: Traffic speed from Inrix, Inc., http://scorecard.inrix.com/scorecard/worstcorridors.asp.
40 the “dead-anyway” effect: (Anderson, 2011).
41 spaced twenty-seven or more car lengths apart: (Transportation Research Board, 2000).
46 “pending engineering studies”: (Perlmutter, 1973).
46 Law of Peak-Hour Expressway Congestion: (Downs, 1962) and (Downs, 1992).
46 induced demand: (Duranton, 2009).
46 “The number of automobiles increases to fill all the space provided”: (Moynihan, 1960).
47 20 percent of the boulevard’s traffic will just disappear: (Cairns, 2002).
59 a “horse-and-buggy remnant”: (New York Times, 1948).
60 “if past trends were to continue”: (Vuchic, 1999).
60 “there is no consistent, statistically significant relationship between lane width and safety”: (Potts, 2007).
61 no room for anything other than parking lots in downtown Philly: (Vuchic, 1999).
61 In 1960, when the United States had 64.6 million full-time workers: (McGuickan and Srinivasan, 2003).
CHAPTER 3: THE MILLENNIALS
65 in a predictable and regular pattern: (Straus, 1990).
66 the “most civic-minded since the generation of the 1930s and 1940s”: (Winograd, 2008).
67 only 56 percent of Millennials did: (Twenge, 2012).
67 or the opportunity to exercise: (APTA, 2014).
68 2,400 miles a year, or 46 fewer miles a week: (Davis, 2012).
68 117 more miles annually biking, walking, or taking public transit: (Davis, 2012).
68 85 percent more than in 1970: (Dutzik, 2013).
68 driving 6 percent fewer miles than in 2004: (Davis, 2012).
69 “VMT may double in the next twenty years”: (Peters, 2004).
69 “This is denial”: (Walker, 2014).
69 the number of cars being “retired”: (Davis, 2012).
70 “22 million unwanted large-lot suburban homes”: (Doherty, 2010).
71 from $1,100 to $2,300 (in 2011 dollars): (Dutzik, 2013).
72 2,100 fewer miles than their employed same-age predecessors: (Davis, 2012).
72 “I want to protect the environment, so I drive less”: (Davis, 2012).
73 “those who wanted to get a driver’s license did so by age 20”: (Davis, 2012).
73 within a year of becoming eligible for one: (Ross, 2014).
73 In 1998, the number was 64.4 percent: (Chozick, 2012).
74 an average of more than $1,700 annually: (Reuter, 2012).
74 and 21.1 percent of the trips per household: (Cao, 2009), citing the 2004 NHTS Survey.
74 substitutes for one entire shopping trip: (Ferrell, 2004).
74 Only 18 percent of Baby Boomers answered “yes”: (KRCResearch, 2011).
75 “socializing while traveling”: (APTA, 2014).
78 Volunteer chauffeuring costs suburban families: (Litman, “Evaluating Household Chauffeuring Burdens,” 2014).
79 no more economic output than it did in 1946: (Schmitt, “The Importance of Driving,” 2014).
81 nearly 20 percent higher salaries for doing exactly the same job: (Stutzer, 2004).
81 essentially no increase in gratification: (Frank, 1999) and (Haidt, 2005).
81 the more years it goes on, the worse its effects: (Koslowsky, 1995).
82 declined by nearly 30 percent from 2007 to 2011: (Ross, 2014).
82 “techno pink” and “denim”: (Chozick, 2012).
82 equals thirty-two cars not purchased by civilians: (Rogowsky, 2014).
84 “full of economic, social, and recreational activities”: (Doherty, 2010).
84 with a mix of single-family houses: (Beldon, Russonello, & Stewart LLC, 2011).
84 an additional 14 percent said it was “essential”: (Lachman, 2011).
84 “suburban neighborhood with a mix of houses, shops, and businesses”: (TransitCenter, 2014).
85 only 6 percent of them currently do so: (Goldberg, 2014).
85 larger than at any time since the 1970s: (Ross, 2013).
85 Those in walkable neighborhoods, half that: (Doherty, 2010).
86 “The foundation of orthodox transportation planning is our certainty”: (Walker, “How Good Are We at Prediction,” 2014).
87 “a gradual accommodation”: (Pauly, 1995).
CHAPTER 4: HEALTHIER, WEALTHIER, AND WISER
90 98 percent of the energy produced by the rider: (Wilson, 2004).
94 more lower back pain: (Koslowsky, 1995).
94 less stressful to commute long distance by train than by car: (Novaco, 2009).
94 “I have two doctors: My left leg and my right”: (Trevelyan, 1928).
95 and can cut the risk of stroke by a third: (Tanasescu, 2002).
95 Walk thirty minutes a day: (Williams, 2013).
95 a 12 percent reduction in hypertension: (Hayashi, 1999).
95 more than obesity or even smoking: (Blair, 1995).
95 walking thirty minutes a day cut mortality by nearly a quarter: (Lee, 1995).
95 Walking worked at least as well: (Ratey, 2008).
96 “people feel better when they have a longer walk to work”: (Martin, 2014).
96 every animal from humans to rodents: (Erickson, 2011).
97 when it comes to the hippocampus, size matters: (Vaynman, 2004). A lot of the down-and-dirty research on BDNF has been done on rodents; exercisers perform significantly better in mazes than sluggards.
97 intelligence itself was a side-effect of bipedalism: (Akkerman, 2008). Akkerman makes a good case that an upright gait didn’t just help to free human hands to fabricate tools, but that human eyesight, situated at the highest available spot, made it possible to navigate via the fixed northern star, and to measure distance by number of steps taken.
98 the viewpoint of a pedestrian, a cyclist, or a bus rider: (Gatersleben, 2013).
98 the amount of visual information that they receive at fifteen miles per hour: (Dover, 2014).
99 “Oxytocin surges when people are shown a sign of trust”: (Zak, 2012).
99 more trust, empathy, and compassion in an entire community: (Mikolajczak, 2010).
99 reduce threats, increase happiness: (Montgomery, 2014).
99 On Appleyard’s “Heavy Street”: (Appleyard, 1981).
100 as far afield as Bristol, England: (Hart, 2008).
101 “because I can play there when ever I want”: (Appleyard, 2005).
104 a little more than 55 cents per passenger mile: (NTSB Bureau of Traffic Statistics, 2014).
104 the more mobility is constrained by tolls or congestion, the higher the GDP: (Litman, “The Mobility-Productivity Paradox,” 2014).
105 places with a lot of congestion are economically vibrant: (Dumbaugh, 2014).
105 a group of anthropologists and systems scientists: (Ortman, 2015).
106 “average journey time is at a minimum”: (Wardrop, 1952).
110 proximity is ten times more important than speed: (LeVine, 2012). In the unlikely event you’re interested in the math behind this, the researchers who came to this conclusion used a technique known as path analysis to show that the weight of the “proximity” path equaled .423, while the “speed” path weighed only .033.
110 transportation costs in San Antonio: (Jaffe, 2014).
112 college degrees were found in only about 35 percent: (Cortright, 2014).
CHAPTER 5: WALK ON BY
117 arrive at their favorite stores on foot: (Forkes, 2010).
117 walkable shopping areas in Los Angeles produced up to four times the sales: (Boarnet, 2011).
117 “Americans would like to live in places that don’t really exist”: (Vanderbilt, 2010).
118 a bump of more than $30,000: (Cortright, 2009).
119 despite a 144 percent increase in bicycle riding on the street: (Reisman, 2012).
123 as much as 70 percent: (Bunn, 2003).
123 associated with a 20 percent increase in walking: (Morrison, 2004).
124 in order, Orlando, Tampa–St. Petersburg, Jacksonville: (Smart-GrowthAmerica, 2014).
124 47 percent more likely to meet the recommended exercise guideline: (Sollis, 2009).
125 planning to narrow portions of Colorado Boulevard: (Branson-Potts, 2014).
130 especially hospitable to that kind of streetscape: (Hawthorne, 2014).
131 “big enough to have scale, and small enough to do something with it”: (Tierney, 2014).
132 higher levels of dangerous obesity than the US average: (Green, 2011).
133 afterward the number jumped to 64 percent: (Green, 2011).
135 “infrastructure like safe indoor and outdoor bicycle parking”: (NYC, 2010).
136 “required to reach stairs from the building’s main entrance”: (NYC, 2010).
136 “in the horizontal plane opposite to the direction of travel”: (Eves, 2009).
136 an average relative increase in stair use of nearly 50 percent: (Soler, 2010).
138 Cars traveling northbound through West Midtown: (NYC DOT, 2010).
139 a whopping 80 percent fewer pedestrians were now walking in the Times Square roadway: (NYC DOT, 2010).
139 nitrogen dioxide by 41 percent: (NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 2012).
139 “eighty percent of whom support the Broadway plazas”: (Bernstein, 2013).
139 put his entire city . . . on a diet: (Ruiz, 2007).
140 one of the most important factors in walkability was connectivity: (Pratt, 2012).
141 “you can’t walk anywhere!”: (Snyder, 2013).
141 “We’re creating a city”: (Snyder, 2013).
143 the way people will start a stationary conversation: (Whyte, 1988).
143 “The faster people walk, the narrower their field of peripheral vision becomes”: (Underhill, 1999).
146 a crowd of individuals is transformed into a solid mass: (Fruin, 1971).
146 commuters, for example, walk at different speeds than tourists: (Timmermans, 2009)
146 People walk faster when they’re wearing headphones: (NYC DOT, 2006).
146 societies where no one minds bumping into another: (Chattaraja, 2013).
147 According to the HCM, the proper shy distance: (NYC DOT, 2006).
147 people will start to swerve as much as seventeen feet: (Pushkarev, 1975).
150 a lot easier to cross the 1,732 points: (ICC, 2002).
150 A 2002 study: (ICC, 2002).
151 the average Japanese adult: (Bassett, 2010). As a baseline, in order to eliminate the confounding element of technological progress, the researchers also persuaded a group of old-order Amish to wear the pedometers. Their daily number of steps exceeded 18,000.
CHAPTER 6: UNLOCKING THE GRID
155 calls “continuous queues of vehicles block[ing] an entire network”: (Soanes, 2008).
158 “buying, selling and improving real estate on streets, avenues, and public squares”: (Jackson, 1985) and (McNeur, 2014).
158 “a town for the motor age”: (Marshall, 2010).
158 The pattern was given the seal of approval in 1934: (Marshall, 2010).
160 the “almost perfect grid”: (Walker, 2010).
164 a stronger attraction even at a greater distance: (Rodrigue, 2006). The “law” calculates distance the same way a crow flies—that is, without confounding elements like bodies of water, available roads, limited-access highways, and the like. Well, I said it was simple.
171 by far the largest city in the country with no rail transit at all: (Houston TranStar, 2014).
171 fifty-eight hours a year stuck in traffic: (TTI, 2012). In case you were wondering, Chicago, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles were numbers 1–3.
172 nearly three-quarters of Houston’s transit users: (Grabar, 2014).
172 the old system offered far more coverage than patronage: (Walker, 2008).
172 a lot of transit riders in places with no stops at all: (Walker, 2014). The designers of the system included Traffic Engineers, Inc., METRO itself, and Jarrett Walker.
173 “Rail used to be a negative word around this town. It’s not anymore”: (Grabar, 2014).
176 far more than in a typical American system: (Garrick, 2011).
177 “than all other public purposes combined”: (Shoup, 1997). Shoup would later collect his research in a 2005 book with the same title.
178 in Brooklyn, researchers found a whopping 45 percent: (Shoup, 2011).
178 0.5 spaces for every 1,000 square feet: (Garrick N. &., 2011).
179 the system’s algorithm uses traffic signals: (Eckerson, 2014).
CHAPTER 7: WHAT MAKES A SMART CITY?
184 the system, which had cost somewhere between $10 and $12 billion: (Sturdevant, 2007).
184 In 2010 alone, just under 110 million were sold: (Pham, 2011).
188 from the services they choose, rather than the products they own: (Botsman, 2010).
190 more than thirty just for the trains and buses of the MBTA: (Barry, 2011).
190 online ticketing, GPS location information, and Wi-Fi service on the region’s buses: (Transportation for America, 2010).
191 Automated announcements from CARTA: (Transportation for America, 2010).
191 A lot of people who tended to avoid transit: (Tang, 2011).
191 decreased their perceived wait time by an additional 13 percent: (Watkins, 2011).
194 “light rail on rubber tires”: (Transportation for America, 2010).
194 As far back as the 2002 Olympics: (Iteris, 2003).
195 One team of researchers from the University of Torino and Yahoo Labs: (Quercia, 2014).
199 the base fee was $8 plus $5 a mile and a $15 minimum: (Jackson, 2010).
200 the price of an exclusive taxi medallion fell 17 percent: (Barro, 2014).
201 less than $17 an hour before gas and tolls: (Hall, 2015).
204 to provide seating space on Manhattan streets at $25 per hour: (Schwartz, 1982).
205 anything that results in better public services: (Null, 2014).
207 The largest single component of that number: (ASCE, 2014).
209 the likelihood of getting a seat, and on which car: (ARUP, 2014).
209 The private software-and-data company INRIX: (ARUP, 2014).
CHAPTER 8: TUXEDOS ON THE SUBWAY: TRANSPORTATION ANYWHERE, ANYTIME, AND FOR EVERYBODY
212 “At the subway station, you wait fifteen minutes for a train”: (McInerney, 1984).
213 even 41 percent of riders in the largest transit systems: (Federal Transit Administration, 2002).
214 guaranteed that each state get back between 90 and 92 percent of its residents’ contribution: (Altshuler, 2010).
216 The nation’s poorest families spend more than 40 percent: (Bullard, 2003).
216 most of that 40 percent in subway turnstiles and bus fare boxes: (Bullard, 2003).
217 a parking lot that is always half empty: (Faheem, 2008).
218 On December 14, she was hit and killed: (Collison, 1996).
221 one of the most dangerous large cities in the world: (Guevara, 2013).
222 no published schedules at all: (Hutchinson, 2011).
223 the entire city, rich and poor, goes car-free: (Guevara-Stone, 2014).
224 “one in which even the rich”: (Peñalosa, 2011).
225 a Democratic lever two-thirds of the time: (Troy, 2012).
225 expected to grow by 590,000 square miles: (Seto, 2011). The actual estimate is in a range from 166,000 square miles to 4.8 million square miles. The latter is about the size of the United States and Mexico, combined.
226 overwhelmingly approved by the state’s voters: (Schmitt, “The Koch Brothers’ War on Transit,” 2014).
226 “the houses are smaller and closer to each other”: (Pew Research, 2014).
229 functionally obsolete: (ASCE, 2014).
231 “and without endangering himself or others”: (Bel Geddes, 1940).
232 an initial capital cost that would exceed $200 billion: (Kornhauser, 2013).
234 systems that can drive a car into a multistory parking structure: (Khaw, 2014).
235 “up to one hundred miles an hour”: (IEEE, 2012).
235 Navigant Research predicts that by 2035: (Navigant, 2014).
235 Columbia University’s Earth Institute calculated: (Burns, 2013).
235 The consulting and accounting firm PwC goes even further: (Price-waterhousecoopers, 2013).
236 a net addition to the American economy of more than a trillion dollars a year: (Jonas, 2014).
236 anywhere a car can already travel: (Gomes, 2014).
237 temporary portable traffic lights are moved: (Gomes, 2014).
237 after five years of taking transit: (Hoback, 2012). The study of transit use in Michigan projected a drop in obesity from 26.4 percent to 12.4 percent.
238 93 percent of the six million automobile crashes: (Silberg, 2012).
239 anywhere from 36 percent to more than 2,000 percent: (LeVine, 2014).
EPILOGUE: FLATBUSH AND ATLANTIC
248 the highest-grossing venue in the United States: (Li, 2013).