What we are finding is the original streets, the original cores of our cities, pre-auto, were dynamite. It was the right pattern. When you go to Europe, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, that’s the way it is: A grid pattern, a village design, really is the wave of the future. People say increasing density adds more traffic. It doesn’t. It gives more people the ability to live without a car, by enabling services and stores to locate so close to them that most of the time they don’t need a car. (…)
Everybody believes that if you add a lot of people to a place you add a lot of car trips. But there’s good and bad density. If you just build a bunch of tower buildings and you don’t build a village and you don’t have the services there, then sure, everybody in that tower is going to have to get in their car and drive somewhere else. That’s bad density.
If instead you build a true village and you get a really good, pleasant assembly of buildings at the street, you can walk down the block and have a choice of eight or ten restaurants. You go more than two or three block and you will bump into a grocery store. You’re going to bump into a druggist. In a really well laid-out town you’ll find the hardware store, beauticians. Whatever you need is within five or ten blocks.
[Extrait d’une entrevue avec Dan Burden, directeur et fondateur de l’organisme Walkable Communities]
