Kay, Jane Holtz.
Jane Holtz Kay is also the author of Lost Boston and Preserving New England. She is the architect and planning writer for The Nation and has contributed articles to the New York Times, the Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Technology Review and other publications. She lives in Boston.
Sales of cellular phones record both busy, car-bound lives and the nighttime fears of drivers on the lonely roads of an asphalt nation. Asphalt Nation, 1997.
An asphalt nation suffocates regional ecologies. Ibid.
The nation is in "lifelock" to the automobile as the dominant means of transportation. Ibid.
According to the highway administration study one-third of the miles we travel go to consumption and family chores. A bottle of milk, a tube of toothpaste, a Little League game, taking grandma to the hospital or junior for eyeglasses spin the miles. Ibid.
The ministuff of life clogs the nation's roads. Another third falls under the "social and recreational" category. Ibid.
Why can't we step back and see the servant become master? Ibid.
. . . where else do we accept 120 deaths a day so offhandedly? Ibid.
The car remains the single greatest killer of young people. In fact, the car deaths of adolescent males in the suburbs equal the gunshot deaths in the city. Ibid.
Look past the romance of the road and we will see that mobility has vanished completely for the third of the nation that cannot legally drive - those 80 million Americans who do not operate automobiles because they are too old, too young, or too poor. Ibid.
A population immobilized by the car culture hurts the urban poor the most where they live - in the inner city. Ibid.
"A car that makes you wish the whole world was paved with concrete," a Chevy Camaro advertisement declares. Ibid.
In the wilderness we lay 370,000 miles of roads on just the Forest Service's 300,000 square miles, more than a mile of road per square mile of wooded wilderness. Ibid.
Every year, we hand out $6,000 to own and operate a two-year-old vehicle, to pay for its gas, parking, tires, depreciation, maintenance, and insurance, plus tolls for the administering, building, repairing, and operating of roads. Ibid
.William Manchester used the title The Glory and the Dream to define the postwar exodus to the 40 million homes serviced by these multiplying supermarkets, drive-in eateries, drive-in motels, - drive-in everything. Ibid.
We need to reverse the destructive zoning that insists on two cars for every unit of housing and focus on the transit and walking fix that makes urban and historic communities workable. Ibid.
A walking community and transit are intertwined: to secure transit service, you need community; to secure community, you need transit within walking distance. Ibid.
Bus and rail are complementary, not competitive . . . Ibid.
Portland, Oregon, is everyone's case study for adroitness and conviction in the blending of myriad options to form new land use patterns that promote mass transit and curb the car. Ibid.