Let’s stop and reevaluate. Let’s assess what’s really important in our community. Building an over-sized school on over-sized road on an over-sized parcel strikes me as irresponsible. We need to return to a neighborhood model. We need to find the locations that don’t need a Safe Routes to School grants and build there. The places we are collectively building are places that our children hate. They’re inhuman, disregard our existing neighborhoods, cost us more money and unnecessarily burden parents.
Let’s make a change.
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The most insidious result of the car-first development pattern is the constituency of car owners it creates. Once you own a car - and so mentally discount the cost of insuring, maintaining, fuelling the car - then every trip looks free. Political discussions and public investment decisions begin to assume that everybody comes with a machine; they conflate ‘driver’ with citizen, and relegate non-cyborg humans to a category of ‘other’, the ‘pedestrian’ who isn’t naturally considered first in site layout or public space design, but who must be ‘accommodated’ by so-called ‘complete’ streets and ‘extra’ features like crosswalks. Sidewalks are the original war on the car.
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