Obvious and desirable
Why do we always try to shame people into eating their vegetables and exercising more? Why don’t we make it obvious and desirable - beginning with the way we plan and design our communities?
Obvious and desirable
Jan Gehl once remarked that Copenhagen never tried to shame people into riding bikes, or tell them it was more economical or ecological or equitable. They just made cycling obvious and desirable. Similarly, we need to focus on building places where transit, walking and cycling is obvious and desirable. This means that places have to be near each other, relatively dense, organized around transit, and near nature.
Herein lies a few rubs. A) We accumulate generational wealth in our property-based, capitalistic system via zoning. Challenging zoning threatens the family nest egg. B) Because everyone drives everywhere all the time, density compounds traffic. C) Development has been equated to gentrification, which has been used as a NIMBY cudgel.
I have a solution:
Relax zoning so that property owners can realize higher returns via density.
Relax parking requirements so that the development is spatially smaller.
Organic development is not gentrification, it is investment.
The diagram below illustrates a transit-greenway-road hierarchy. The most important element is the transit station. This centers the community (or series of communities) and connects them to other places. It should be walkable and protected - there should be no through vehicle traffic. Second is the greenway, which provides unhindered mobility for people walking and cycling. It allows long distance as well as local travel, and access to nature. Third is the road system. The highway is kept at bay. Vehicles are allowed in, but they must exit from whence they came. This de-induces traffic while transit, walking and cycling are obvious and desirable.
Transit-greenway-road hierarchy