Sarasota Livin'

Interesting comment by Otis White at Civic Strategies

A couple of months ago, we posed a question for smart growth advocates: How does adding large numbers of people to a neighborhood benefit those who are already there? It is, we said, the question that haunts smart growth and, if unanswered, threatens to derail the entire movement.

This is a question that our city and county have had to deal with frequently. For the city of Sarasota it comes every time a new mixed use "too tall / too many units" development is proposed and is then opposed by neighbors because of traffic issues.

This argument means that you think of transportation as "car traffic." We need a city where every trip we make is not in a car. If we can envision a time where a bigger percentage of our "trips" are walking, biking or public transit this argument goes away.

the solution requires that officials think of their cities in entirely new ways. The most important, as Hales says, is the concept that "the pedestrian is the first-class passenger." Therefore, transit and, indeed, the entire built environment (sidewalks, streets, crosswalks, parks, retail, office buildings) must be reoriented to making walking such a joy, who wouldn't want to stroll a few blocks on each end of a streetcar ride?

We are still at the chicken and egg level. Transit won't be economical without density. We need to build a consensus that public transit is worth the investment.

Check out this article on Transportation in Portland, Oregon on Wikipedia. Yes Portland is much bigger but it's still a great model.