smart growth

This post is part of a series featuring stories and research that will be presented at the Pro-Walk/Pro-Bike/Pro-Place conference September 8-11 in Pittsburgh.

"Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism" is a new book by Ben Ross, longtime president of Maryland's Action Committee for Transit and a frequent contributor to Greater Greater Washington. This excerpt is preceded by a section describing the post-war expansion into the suburbs and the surrender of public space to automobile traffic. Highways proliferated, congestion worsened, children's play was prohibited in the street and often in the sidewalk, and pedestrians were engineered out of the roadway.

eff Wood and I are back with episode 8 of the Talking Headways podcast. We talk about Los Angeles Metro's decision not to extend light rail all the way to LAX (and what they're doing instead), plus some analysis of what rail can really do in a city as spread-out as LA. Then we head east to Princeton, New Jersey, where we debunk the thesis that low sales of luxury condos somehow equates to a rejection of walkability. And finally, back west to Seattle, which finds itself with a similar problem to LA: how to bring more density to settled single-family areas?

Columbus, Ohio, is a convenient microcosm of the United States as a whole.

A study published this month in the American Journal of Preventive Health finds that children who live in walkable places -- "smart growth neighborhoods," to use the authors' phrase -- get significantly more exercise than their peers who live in suburban environments designed for driving.