Lester R. Brown Quotes

A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.

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.

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

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.

Cities are 2% of the earth's crust, but they are 50% of the world's population.

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.

Traffic is only one of the side effects of growth.

The automobile, both a cause and an effect of this decentralization, is ideally suited for our vast landscape and our generally confused and contrary commuting patterns.

If all the cars in the United States were placed end to end, it would probably be Labor Day Weekend.

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

Cities are created by and for traffic.

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.

With increased growth in the U.S. population, especially in urban areas, transport bottlenecks will only become more frequent and severe.

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.

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.

The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture.

Because I'm one of five people in Los Angeles who doesn't drive, I walk a lot.

Today, 65 percent of America's population live in metropolitan areas - and 95 percent of all the transit miles traveled are traveled there. Metropolitan regions are the engines of our economy.

At least in Phoenix, you can get off the main highways and take side streets to where you want to go. In L.A., you can't. You're stuck.

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.

We're all proud of the communities that we've built and are a part of, but we shouldn't accept lost time and unnecessary stress when traveling in them.

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.

I live up Laurel Canyon, and if I want to walk with my son, I have to drive to the park, which is so insane to me.

Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day.