George Monbiot Quotes

Copenhagen has done a remarkable job creating streets that are focused on bicycles and pedestrians.

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.

Improving our transportation infrastructure reduces car trips, helps us reach our carbon emission reduction goals, is healthier for our residents, and saves lives. Too often in the past we have been slow to make these common sense improvements to our streets.

In Minneapolis, the overhead sky walks protect pedestrians from the winter cold and snow.

Bike lanes are clearly controversial. And one of the problems with bike lanes - and I'm generally a supporter of bike lanes - but one of the problems with bike lanes has been not the concept of them, which I support, but the way the Department of Transportation has implemented them without consultation with communities and community boards.

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.

If we're talking about transportation, the best thing a city can do is densify as quickly as it can. That needs to be said every time this issue comes up, because it's the only universal strategy that works.

I know well the opportunities and the challenges of maintaining and improving infrastructure and providing good transportation choices.

What happened to the tradition of walking to school? The simple answer is change. Change in traffic patterns and street planning that have made school routes less pedestrian-friendly.

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.

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.

Parallel parking is desirable for two reasons: parked cars create a physical barrier and psychological buffer that protects pedestrians on the sidewalk from moving vehicles; and a rich supply of parallel parking can eliminate the need for parking lots, which are extremely destructive of the civic fabric.

Cycling is the only way to free ourselves from the misery of the Tube, the wall-to-wall buses that line Oxford Street, the hopelessness of even thinking about driving.

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

I'd like to get rid of those streetcars, maybe phase them out. I'm not sure how we're going to do it but I'd like to slowly but surely get rid of those streetcars and maybe replace them with buses.

I don't think all the cycle lanes in London have been designed as well as they should have been.

People have to be more careful in traffic. It's hard to ride bikes in Curitiba.

As SUVs are higher and heavier, they are more likely to kill the people they hit. Driving an SUV in an urban area is an antisocial act.

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.

The essence of the conflict today, really, is cars versus people…We can have a city that is very friendly to cars, or a city that is very friendly to people. We cannot have both.

I hate cars; in terms of what they do to nature and personally I just don't like driving them. I think they're a very bad way to design a transportation system.

We are committed to delivering a safe, equitable, and reliable transportation system.

We are building a truly integrated, efficient, and modern transit network across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. Commuters deserve nothing less than the full support of our next federal government.

If we do high-speed rail, the governor has to be intelligent and invest the dollars at the 'bookends' - San Francisco and Los Angeles.

If we are to appropriate money for roads, we need statistics on how bad our roads really are and, moreover, where more roads will be beneficial - it would be irresponsible to just build them where our gut tells us to.