Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt Quotes

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.

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.

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

Brussels is sort of a mini London in the sense that if you think about putting a football pitch in London, people laugh at you. There is just no space.

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

People drive everywhere in L.A., so you get very little human interaction... but N.Y. and Chicago are like London... L.A. lacks the social interaction.

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.

Life's too short when you find yourself sitting in a car for four hours every day trying to get from East L.A. to West L.A. to Hollywood and then back to East L.A.

In Copenhagen, there's a long-term commitment to creating a well-functioning pedestrian city where all forms of movement - pedestrian, bicycles, cars, public transportation - are accommodated with equal priority.

America is sick and tired of spending hour upon hour sitting in their automobile trying to get to work, trying to get kids to school, trying to get to a doctor's appointment.

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

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.

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

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.

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 never knew how small L.A. was until I started to work here.

Honestly, the average American spends about 52 minutes a day in commute traffic. And as much as I love driving my car and many people like driving their car, commuting has never been fun for me.

What Paris has done right is to make it awful to get around by car and awfully easy to get around by public transportation or by bike.

For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.

From what I've heard, Paris did a little bit more prep work as far as making bike lanes and all of that stuff. They really did it properly, which New York is getting to little by little.

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.

The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita.

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.