Paul R. Ehrlich Quotes

In Copenhagen, there's a long-term commitment to creating a well-functioning pedestrian city where all forms of movement - pedestrian, bicycles, cars, public transportation - are accommodated with equal priority.

Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.

I like a walking culture; I need to be in a city where you can walk everywhere.

We identify New York with the great bridges and tunnels and roadways and subway system and so forth.

What Paris has done right is to make it awful to get around by car and awfully easy to get around by public transportation or by bike.

I'm very bullish on the streetcar.

The federal government shouldn't be drawing lines on a map in terms of what transit infrastructure are needed; we should be there to be a partner with the cities, with the provinces, that need that.

The essence of the conflict today, really, is cars versus people…We can have a city that is very friendly to cars, or a city that is very friendly to people. We cannot have both.

The failure to invest in our public transportation and public life, I think, is a scandal and a shame, and it should be a national embarrassment.

And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today's big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much.

London was not designed for cars. Come to that, it wasn't designed for people. It just sort of happened. This created problems, and the solutions that were implemented became the next problems, five or ten or a hundred years down the line.

What if we fail to stop the erosion of cities by automobiles? ... In that case America will hardly need to ponder a mystery that has troubled men for millennia. What is the purpose of life? For us, the answer will be clear, established and for all practical purposes indisputable. The purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles.

If you design communities for automobiles, you get more automobiles. If you design them for people, you get walkable, livable communities.

So here's my advice to city planners. Make your city runnable. Runners are the first wave of troops bringing human activity back to the urban core of any city. Where we go, others will follow. The connection between runnability and livability is so clear (at least to me), that it's surprising that new developments consistently leave pathways out of the plans.

We must do all we can to reduce congestion in our urban areas and increase access and mobility in our rural areas, and this extra funding will help us get there.

In the same way we have a long-term plan for building roads, we have to have a long term plan to build transit.

As you move away from mass transit you become more dependent on the automobile, so you have to spread the housing out more to accommodate the cars.

All it takes is an understanding that humans, not buildings come first when designing a city.

From the late 1940s, into and through the '50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.

Cities, too, are embracing digitization. Barcelona has installed in-ground parking sensors and launched connected public transportation as part of its Smart City strategy.

I've been working to make sure that we've got adequate transportation. I've been working to make sure that we can afford energy within our villages and in our communities.

We didn't build the modern country to be bike-friendly - our initial round of infrastructure was not designed to think about how to get around if you're not in a car. So we've got to be targeting resources, both nationally and locally, to how people are going to get around in the new world.

People want subways, folks... subways, subways. They don't want these damn streetcars blocking up our city!

We want transportation as reliable as running water.

Environment, homelessness, infrastructure and immigration - I'm very focused on all four, which are critical to the success of Los Angeles.