In A Conversation with Peter Calthorpe, Calthorpe makes it pretty clear that he hates what the automobile has done to society. He also makes a number of interesting points, starting with this point about suburban sprawl’s origins:
Suburban sprawl came about as a result of two major subsidies from the federal government. The first was the Federal Highway Bill which began in 1956 with the interstate system, the largest public works system in the history of mankind. The second is the single-home mortgage deduction, a huge subsidy that moves people toward single-occupancy, single-family homes. We are the only industrialized country in the world that has those deductions, and it skews the marketplace in favor of sprawl.
Ah, government bureaucrats making decisions:
For example, we did a proposal at Laguna West in Sacramento where we wanted to plant trees in the parking lanes. Part of the problem was that the streets were too wide. They had two parking lanes, so the on-street parking basically got used once a year during the Christmas party and the rest of the year the street looked like you could land an airplane on it. So we said, why don’t we “park” some trees in these stalls. Then you can park cars between the trees. The public works official said, “Well, you can’t do that, the cars will run into the trees.” I said, “Well, why don’t they run into the parked cars, they are in the same spot?” And very quickly he said, “Because the cars have reflectors on the back.” We finally got the trees approved by applying reflectors to the trunks, which satisfied him. But the idea of parking a tree in a street is kind of a metaphor for the whole thing. In Sacramento, new suburbs without street trees are on average ten degrees hotter throughout the summer than the old downtown which has a beautiful tree canopy. Trees have a tremendous microclimate impact, especially in hot areas. So that is an example of passive solar design on a community scale.
This description of mass transportation in the Philippines (outside of Manila) both fascinates and frightens me:
We were able to convince them to design it according to a totally different system. It’s a wonderful, ad hoc and completely unplanned bus system where each driver fights for and gets his own space and route and time and customizes his stretched Jeeps to look absolutely gorgeous. It turns out to be one of the most efficient mass transit systems on the globe, because these guys are not on anybody’s schedule. It’s not an engineering problem — they are organically at the right place at the right time because it’s their livelihood. Everybody knows each other, and they all have their own drivers and there is a whole social dimension to it. So we said, “Look, let’s build our city around this idea. This is the culture you have.”