Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Sprawl

Obama’s National Transportation Plan Includes Bicycling & Walking

By Damien Newton | | 12 Comments
Democratic front runner Barack Obama just released a campaign "Fact Sheet" entitled, "Strengthening America’s Transportation Infrastructure" (download it). While Hillary Clinton has put forward some outstanding and heavily transit-oriented plans of her own, Obama appears to be the first major party presidential candidate to outline a national transportation platform that explicitly seeks to "create policies […]

The Definition of Automobile Dependence

By Aaron Naparstek | | 8 Comments
Working for a failing automaker to make enough money to keep your beat-up, failing mini van rolling through your sprawled-out, failing city. From today’s New York Times story on escalating gasoline prices. For ordinary Americans like Phyllis Berry, a 31-year-old factory worker for General Motors in Cleveland, gasoline costs are starting to hurt. “I used […]

Making the Case for Compact Development

By Sarah Goodyear | | 8 Comments
From the people at Smart Growth America comes word of a new book, Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change, just out from the Urban Land Institute. In the book, researchers argue that more compact development (such as Atlantic Station, a mixed-use complex in Atlanta built on reclaimed industrial land, shown at […]

World Cities Adding One Million People Every Week

By Jason Varone | | 2 Comments
Syndicated columnist Neal Peirce asks whether our planet will be able to absorb the population "mega-surge" currently underway in Africa, Asia and Latin America. From Common Dreams: The problem is that the global population base has increased so radically that even seemingly modest birthrates can have momentous consequences. Joel Cohen (head of the Laboratory of […]

The Suburbanist Paradox

By Jason Varone | | 13 Comments
The Atlantic Monthly’s Matthew Yglesias argues that high-density living is a key strategy to fight climate change. Yglesias takes issue with fellow Atlantic Online blogger Ross Douthat and author Joel Kotkin, who defend suburban sprawl — what James Kunstler has famously called "the most destructive development pattern the world has ever seen, and perhaps the […]

How Americans Get to Work

By Jason Varone | | 5 Comments
According to a new U.S. Census Bureau analysis of data from the American Community Survey, most Americans drive to work — alone, and public transportation commuters are concentrated in a handful of large cities. From the Bureau’s press release: Despite rising fuel costs, commuters continued to drive their cars in 2005. The survey, gathered over […]
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