James Gray Quotes

I grew up in L.A., and it's one of those cities designed around cars instead of the people that live there. I spent hours every day stuck in traffic, having the experience of looking around and seeing one person in every car.

I spent a disproportionate amount of my time in a car in L.A. I'm 35 years old. If you add up the hours spent in cars, it would be years.

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

In Brussels, you are able to have a lot of appointments in a day. In Paris, you can have one, two, maybe three, but you spend all your time on the road, in the car or in the suburbs. In Brussels, everything is easy. It's not a very big city, and the people are very quiet and warm.

They say that no one walks in L.A., and it's definitely true, and I'm embracing that.

I grew up in a small town that was absolutely a perfect embodiment of new urbanism.

Our engineering departments build freeways which destroy a city or a landscape, in the process.

I think it's evident that expensive neighborhoods in Seattle are surrounded by natural beauty. That elevates city life. So if we can make cities more attractive in the long run, we can be smarter about issues like development, zoning and economics.

New York grew up before the automobile. And even though it's full of cars, its shape and form didn't get created around the automobile.

In an urbanizing world there is an inherent conflict between the automobile and the city. After a point, as their numbers multiply, automobiles provide not mobility but immobility.

We have stopped making communities in which people want to live and are making communities where people drive through.

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

In L.A., it's the sort of city where you have to have a car to get around.

L.A. is not a place where people walk.

Our streets are very important for social cohesion, for feelings of safety, and we just surrendered all this to the car. But it doesn't have to be that way.

In the U.S. or in the West, mobility means owning your own car. Cities are designed around spread-out suburbs, societal customs are that kids get a car after a certain age, and car ownership is very high.

London was not designed for cars. Come to that, it wasn't designed for people. It just sort of happened. This created problems, and the solutions that were implemented became the next problems, five or ten or a hundred years down the line.

I didn't realize Boston was so easy to get around. In my head, I imagined Boston being this really sprawling city.

Stockholm is surely an urban planner's dream. Everything works. Everything looks good.

I don't like L.A. It's just not fun. I don't know why, but I just don't get it. You have to drive to get everywhere, and when it rains everybody freaks out.

Sprawl is the American ideal way to develop. I believe that what we're developing in Denver is in no appreciable way different than what we're doing in Los Angeles - did in Los Angeles and are still doing. But I think we have developed the Los Angeles model of city-building, and I think it is unfortunate.

One of the first things a British visitor to Southern California discovers is that he must have a car. Freeways. Bad public transport. I took driving lessons.

I have a lot of land. I bought it because I had a very strong feeling. I was in my early twenties, and I had grown up in Los Angeles and had seen that city slide off into the sea from the city I knew as a little kid. It lost its identity - suddenly there was cement everywhere and the green was gone and the air was bad - and I wanted out.

In L.A., I don't really want to go out because traffic sucks so bad. I'm sorry, I'm not going to spend five hours a day in my car, so you have to choose where you live very carefully.

Fifty years ago people were talking about Sydney's sprawl, but nobody does anything about it.