permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

A cliche-breaking book that I read a while back, "Sprawl: a compact 
history" by Robert Bruegmann, shows that there are a lot of 
misconceptions about the nature of sprawl and its causes and cures. 
Breugmann points out that the northeastern US is denser than most of 
Europe (Germany is 598 people/sq mi, France is half that, versus 
Connecticut at 723 or New Jersey at 1183. New York State is much denser 
than France. US big cities and suburbs are denser than the average in 
the world. Europe's sprawl is at least as bad as the US's--look at 
London and Paris. One fact that amazed me was that the greater Los 
Angeles area, stereotyped as the essence of sprawl, is now denser than 
the greater New York area. There is no reason, other than cheap gasoline 
and an anti-transit attitude, that the US couldn't have superb transit 
in its metropolitan areas if we wished it.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com

> "Guyton Durnin" <gwdurnin@hotmail.com> wrote:
> <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
> The US will never look like Europe.  We are way to spread out to be able to
> have a similar mass transit system.  Sprawl is a condition that is most
> common in the US; few other countries experience it.  Instead, they just
> have gridlock.
>   
>
>
>
>