Quote:
Originally posted by sixate
A qick question, How can there be intelligent city planning to reduce total miles driven when almost all cities are already built? And what about people who choose to live 50 miles away from work... Are you saying the governmenet should make them move into a 5 mile radius from where they work? I want no part of that world.
|
I think you would be surprised what city planning can do over the long term. The government has a lot of power to influence the public with incentives of one sort or another. Over a ten-year period or more, governments can easily change living or commuting patterns with mortgage incentives, taxes, and other ways of making different areas more attractive.
On the other hand, here in california the bay area spent a lot of money building affordable housing near Caltrain stations, and they found out afterwards that most of the tenants still didn't ride Caltrain. You can't force people to do many things, but I believe you can change the behavior of people over the long run. For an opposite example of this look at GM's intentional destruction of public transit systems in many major metro areas many years ago.