Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars Audiobook (Free)

With wit and sharp insight, former Traffic Commissioner of New York City, Sam Schwartz a.k.a. “Gridlock Sam,” perhaps one of the most well known transportation technical engineers in the globe and consummate insider in NYC politics circles, uncovers how American cities became therefore beholden to cars and why the current shift from that trend will permanently alter America’s metropolitan landscapes, marking nothing at all in short supply of a revolution in how exactly we get from spot to place.

When Sam Schwartz was developing up in Bensonhurst, about Street Smart: The Rise of Towns and nov Cars Brooklyn-his block belonged to his community: the youngsters who played punchball and stickball & their parents, who’d frequently walk to the local businesses of which they also worked. He didn’t recognize it then, but Bensonhurst was already similar to a museum of the long-forgotten way-of-life when compared to a picture of America’s upcoming. Public transit journeyed over and under town streets-New York’s first subway line opened in 1904-but the roads themselves have been conquered by the inner combustion engine.

America’s dependency on the auto began using the 1908 launch of Henry Ford’s car-for-everyone, the Model T. The “fight for right-of-way” in the 1920s noticed the demise of streetcars and transformed America’s roads from a multiuse resource for socializing, business, and public mobility into exclusive arteries for personal automobiles. The next destruction of metropolitan transit systems and post WWII suburbanization of America allowed by the Interstate Highway System and the GI Costs forever changed the way Americans commuted.

But today, for the first time ever sold, and after a hundred years of stable increase, automobile traveling is in decrease. Younger Americans increasingly prefer active transportation choices like strolling or bicycling and taking community transit, ride-shares or taxis. This is not a rsulting consequence higher gas prices, or actually the economic depression, but rather a collective decision to be always a lot less reliant on cars-and if American cities want to maintain their youthful populations, they have to plan appropriately. In Street Wise, Sam Schwartz points out how.

In this clear and erudite display of the principles of clever transportation and sustainable metropolitan planning-from the simplest cobblestoned street towards the brave ” new world ” of driverless cars and trains-Sam Schwartz combines rigorous historical scholarship with the non-public and amusing recollections of a guy that has spent more than forty years working on planning intelligent transit networks in New York City. Street Smart is certainly a book for everybody who would like to learn about the who, what, when, where, and just why of human flexibility.