Transit-Oriented Development Quotes

In Australia’s biggest cities, public transport is generally slow, expensive, not especially reliable and still hideous drain on the public purse. Part of the problem is inefficient, overmanned, union-dominated government run train and bus systems. Mostly though, …there just aren’t enough people wanting to go from a particular place to a particular destination at a particular time to justify any vehicle larger than a car, and cars need roads.

The biggest thing growing cities need to do is minimize barriers to development so that as long as someone is doing good urbanism, they can get permitted quickly and get building quickly.

We need a first-class transportation system.

In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way.

I don't think of the New Urbanism as an economic or political train wreck. I think of it as one of these great generational upheavals that's coming.

It is important to give commuters greater, more reliable mass transit options and... great potential to get cars off of I-80 and eliminate other daily traffic jams in northern New Jersey.

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

We are not opposed to public transportation. We are opposed to wasteful boondoggles.

We're building the infrastructure we need, whether it be the Melbourne Rail Link, the airport rail link which Melburnians have so wanted for over 40 years, upgrading the Pakenham-Cranbourne railway line, or building the East-West Link.

We need to create planned communities: whole new towns with the infrastructure and amenities they need, communities where people genuinely want to live, and built where demand is high.

I think we can save a lot of money if we do smart growth, where we build the homes and all of this closer into towns.

Any urbanist has to appreciate New York City and the way it works. The public transit is astonishing.

The two elements of the suburban pattern that cause the greatest problems are the extreme separation of uses and the vast distances between things

There's been a big spur in downtown development with new business, restaurants and a lot of loft buying. The buses run, and there's a subway that runs through downtown.

We talk a lot about infrastructure in cities, and it's talking about highways and it's talking about trains, but I think more important to people who are low income is, how do I get from here to there? How do I become part of the affluence that's surrounding me?

Any friend of fossil is a friend of mine... We’ve got to do everything we can to get people out of their automobiles and into mass transit.

We need to reform our land use policies to build more housing in urban centers and near transit.

I think water transport will see a revival. However, we're not going to replay the 20th century. The industrial city of that era will not be revived. Our cities are going to contract. Many of them will contract as a whole but densify at their core.

Our building practices for the past century have been plain stupid - especially the glorification of the single-family house in a subdivision, at the expense of all other typologies and arrangements.

I think that part of the growing popularity of the New Urbanism is not simply because it is so rational, and not simply because people care so much about community or even understand it, or the relation of sprawl to the ruination of the natural world. But they just don't like what is around. And they will be ruthless with it.