Enrique Penalosa Quotes

I'm very bullish on the streetcar.

One important role for the city is to conduct studies to document areas of greatest need, and to facilitate coordination between our public and private transportation options to weave it into a dense tapestry of accessible and reliable transportation.

Mixed use is what cities are all about. If you don't have mixed use, you don't have cities.

A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.

The energy crisis has given new urgency to the need to improve public transportation, not only in our cities but in rural areas as well…. Mass transit is an essential element of the improvement of life in our cities and towns.

We need to improve our public transportation and invest in physical infrastructure changes so that people can safely choose alternatives to driving like walking, riding a bike or even, yes, electric scooters.

I believe building new subways must be a top priority.

In March 2005, I was appointed to the board of the Santa Barbara metro transit district. I was incredibly optimistic about how public transportation can be the solution to help people live in the city and not need a car.

Transit builds a city that people choose to live in.

This is critical to the region. Every other major city has public transportation going downtown. We have a world-class airport now, and this could be an important additional piece to the airport development. This is a significant investment and one that should be seen as a significant long-term commitment to making this a reality.

A protected bicycle lane in the city in a developing country is a powerful symbol, showing that a citizen on the $30 bicycle is as important as one in a $30,000 car

Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building.

In Australia’s biggest cities, public transport is generally slow, expensive, not especially reliable and still hideous drain on the public purse. Part of the problem is inefficient, overmanned, union-dominated government run train and bus systems. Mostly though, …there just aren’t enough people wanting to go from a particular place to a particular destination at a particular time to justify any vehicle larger than a car, and cars need roads.

I don't have a motorcar, so I've got to know and be fairly fond of the buses.

The U.S. has not been big in new coaches - the U.S. is really behind Europe. It's the great passenger car and airplane that dominate American travel, and trains and buses have been much more secondary.

How we fund transportation in this country is broken. You all pay a gasoline tax, right? Well, cars go farther, we get electric cars, and so on. And then we do more with the money than just build roads. We do bike lanes and mass transit.

I don't even possess a car. I ride in auto-rickshaws because I like to be a part of the masses. I don't want to single myself out as someone up and above.

Growing up in New York City, my car culture is minimal. I rode on the train, the bus. I walked; I rode my bike, and when I was younger, I rode my skateboard.

We talk a lot about infrastructure in cities, and it's talking about highways and it's talking about trains, but I think more important to people who are low income is, how do I get from here to there? How do I become part of the affluence that's surrounding me?

Whether you live in a city or a small town, and whether you drive a car, take the bus or ride a train, at some point in the day, everyone is a pedestrian.

I've not stopped going on public transport. I love going on it.

In the same way we have a long-term plan for building roads, we have to have a long term plan to build transit.

We could live in a much better society if there was less personal car ownership.

If you could take a subway from the suburbs in Boston, where I live, to downtown in 10 minutes, that improves your life over sitting in a traffic jam. People should see that.

We need a first-class transportation system.