In this video from Rock Center last night, Janette Sadik-Khan talks about changing streets in NYC back to places for people to enjoy rather than to just drive through.

Two articles came out in the past week about transportation problems, and both present radically different analyses of the problem and the solution. The first is by Bill Ford, the great-grandson of Henry Ford. For Ford, gridlock can be solved by technological innovation – by getting cars to "talk to each" other (because that's the problem with cars these days, they're introverts) and by building smart roads. The other article, by Elisabeth Rosenthal, describes explicitly car-reducing changes to planning in cities like Zurich and Munich. This vision of the transportation problem focuses on the social aspects of mobility. I easily side with the approach described by cities in Rosenthal's article and I hope that someday U.S. cities will wake up and start building cities we can live in instead of building infrastructure to drive through. 

Here are excerpts and the links to the original articles.

Why the world faces a massive traffic jam
by Bill Ford
"We need smart cars and smart infrastructure that communicate with each other while using real-time data to maximize their efficiency. We also need to tie in innovative and unique solutions that in their own way address global gridlock."

Across Europe, Irking Drivers Is Urban Policy
by Elisabeth Rosenthal
"Around Löwenplatz, one of Zurich’s busiest squares, cars are now banned on many blocks. Where permitted, their speed is limited to a snail’s pace so that crosswalks and crossing signs can be removed entirely, giving people on foot the right to cross anywhere they like at any time."