Comment 67303

By Fred Street (anonymous) | Posted August 03, 2011 at 13:43:56 in reply to Comment 67180

That timeline is a reliable sticking point when it comes to the public's ability to comprehend and weigh the value of proposed improvements to transit infrastructure. As Mr. Crawford once pointed out, “Most strategic visions have a three- to five-year horizon. Shorter than that makes achieving them almost impossible. Longer than that makes achieving them unlikely, as people tend to lose interest or focus if you have a 10- or 20-year vision."

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Related to the 50-year picture, an interesting POV popped up in Sunday’s New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/opinion/sunday/the-dutch-way-bicycles-and-fresh-bread.html

EXCERPT: "For American cities to think outside the car would seem to require a mental sea change. Then again, Americans, too, are practical, no-nonsense people. And Zef Hemel, the chief planner for the city of Amsterdam, reminded me that sea changes do happen. “Back in the 1960s, we were doing the same thing as America, making cities car-friendly,” he said. Funnily enough, it was an American, Jane Jacobs, who changed the minds of European urban designers. Her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” got European planners to shift their focus from car-friendliness to overall livability."

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Success on long-term, city-altering projects (Shorto’s precis: "recrafting of the city in order to lessen — or eliminate — the need for cars to be not just grudgingly acceptable, but, yes, an expansion of my individual freedom") requires a massive shift in mindset, and doubtless benefits from "public policy [that] reinforces the egalitarianism."

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