Ralphie May 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.

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.

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.

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.

The denser places get, the lower the amount of energy people use to get around it.

You can spend an entire day walking around in New York, whereas in L.A., it always ends at some point because you have to find a way to get home.

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.

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

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

I like a walking culture; I need to be in a city where you can walk everywhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To me, Los Angeles was the invention of the suburb. They figured it out and perfected it and created a city that was dependent on the automobile.

The thing you gotta understand about L.A. is that everything is suburbia. Los Angeles isn't set up like San Francisco or New York.

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.

The thing about New York is you can leave your house without a plan and find the day. You can't do that in Los Angeles. You need to get in your car, all this, you can't just drive around like a lunatic. In New York, you can literally walk outside, and wind up anywhere.

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.

Los Angeles is an amazing city to live in, but the traffic is unbelievable. It's overwhelming at times. It's the source of a lot of frustration.

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.

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.

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

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.

As you move away from mass transit you become more dependent on the automobile, so you have to spread the housing out more to accommodate the cars.