Reply #69: And yet, there is one pedestrian walkway now. Where there's a will, there's a way.

[Gormy Cuss]

What's lacking in this country is the will to reform our urban areas into areas conducive to commuting by means other than individual cars. Redding doesn't have 100 degree days every day. Most of the year your climate is perfect for walking or bicycling but people need to be able to choose those modes. That requires bike lanes, sidewalks, crosswalks, etc. Better mass transit is important.

We're probably never going to have the Euro mix of commuting modes but we could reduce auto trips significantly if we rethought transportation planning. After all, older cities in the East weren't built with cars in mind and yet they were adapted for that mode. The same adaption could be done with cities designed for cars. One of the usual criticisms is that people have long commutes between residential centers and job centers. Part of the reason for that is exclusionary zoning which created miles of residential housing with no commercial zones. Similarly, suburban office parks are islands of single use separated from residences. Zoning can be changed to encourage more natural pairing of places to live and places to work and shop and go to school. That said, it would take several decades to accomplish such a transformation.