Reason: Such as?
Jacobs: Parking is one of them. No parking lot was built for the big baseball stadium here in Toronto, the one with the retractable roof, because it was figured that there were enough parking places for workers that weren't being used while the games were on. So why build more parking places?
Reason: You would agree that that is a smart way to do it?
Jacobs: Yes. The same thing applies to eating places. People who want to eat out in the evening can use the same places as working people who eat at lunchtime.
Reason: People complain that suburbanites are too dependent on cars. Yet the newest suburbs -- the car suburbs, not the trolley suburbs -- are so heavily zoned and so carefully laid out. The uses are segregated so much -- you live here, you work there, you shop here, you play there, you go to school over here. If you didn't have a car, you couldn't possibly live in the suburbs -- because of the way they're laid out.
Jacobs: That's right. Your children couldn't get to school. And they couldn't get to their dancing lessons or whatever else they do. You're absolutely dependent on a car. It's very expensive for people, especially if they need a couple of cars. It's a terrific burden. It costs about -- somebody figured it out fairly recently -- it costs about $7,000 a year for one car. That's a lot of money, you know.
Reason: I'm a five-minute drive from all the shopping I need, but I couldn't walk it.
Jacobs: Sure, you want to defend the car in those cases. It's a lifeline. It's as important as your water tap.
Reason: You aren't anti-car, are you?
Jacobs: No. I do think that we need to have a lot more public transit. But you can't have public transit in the situation you're talking about.
Reason: You don't literally mean publicly owned transit?
Jacobs: No. All forms of transit. It can be taxis, privately run jitneys, whatever. Things that people don't have to own themselves and can pay a fare for.
Reason: You're not an enemy of free-market transportation.
Jacobs: No. I wish we had more of it. I wish we didn't have the notion that you had to have monopoly franchise transit. I wish it were competitive -- in the kinds of vehicles that it uses, in the fares that it charges, in the routes that it goes, in the times of day that it goes. I've seen this on poor little Caribbean islands. They have good jitney service, because it's dictated by the users.
I wish we could do more of that. But we have so much history against it, and so many institutional things already in place against it. The idea that you have to use great big behemoths of vehicles, when the service actually would be better in station-wagon size. It shows how unnatural and foolish monopolies are. The only thing that saves the situation is when illegal things begin to break the monopoly.
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I mean, er, awesome thoughts, Liz - I need some time to think about this!
RalfLippold|10.31.10 @ 6:23AM|#
So glad that I saw on Better Management an interview with RichardFlorida. He told in that interview that JaneJacobs had been his most inspiring mentor. With a little bit of my natural curiousity, I found out more and that not only Richard's work resonated with my own attitudes of seeing and action within the current world, JaneJacobs' also connects fully.
Even though her thoughts are a few years old, they are timeless, especially in fast changing times as these.
Joined action across the globe working collectively on what makes the planet a better place is my dream :-)
Who has a similar one?
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