Bill Bryson Quotes

The modern suburb is the product of the car, the five-day week, and the "bankers' hours" of the masses.

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.

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.

People can't stay out of their cars. I do think we have a real problem staying out of our automobiles. We have a real dependency on them, and it may be for more than just transportation.

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.

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.

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.

In 1970, Los Angeles became the first place where the total acreage used for roads and parking exceeded the amount of space given over to habitation.

If we were redesigning around people instead of around automobiles, which I think the market is more or less going to do, although too slowly, than I'd be a lot cheerier.

Between a quarter and a third of Los Angeless land area is now monopolized by the automobile and its needs-by freeways, highways, garages, gas stations, car lots, parking lots. And all of it is blanketed with anonymity and foul air.

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.

Every new development, highway, railroad, steamship line, building operation, whether it be a drainage project in old Greece or a new water system in Peru, means an added use of the automobile.

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.

There's no way we could take cars off the planet and not have our society fall apart. So they're a necessary evil, in that sense.

In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way.

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.

There's a lot of downtime where you're filling your car up with gas, you're driving to work, you're stuck in traffic - it's Los Angeles, and so much of it is a car lifestyle.

Not having to own a car has made me realize what a waste of time the automobile is.

American cities are not scaled to the energy diet of the future. They have become too large. They're over-scaled.

Our overbuilt cities with their congestion, their trend to high office buildings and apartments, their complete indifference to the most elementary principles of civilian defense, their slums representing past neglect and greed, can to a considerable extent be rebuilt on better principles if we are smart enough to look the facts in the eye and brush off the Babbitts who hold that wherever the dirt flies there is progress. On the other hand, cities can not be revolutionized and turned into garden villages or green belts. In the suburbs and near-by country, however, we still have a chance to do the right thing without stultifying compromises....

The suburbs of yesterday do not look at all like the suburbs of today.

The whole of the 20th century has always put the car at the center. So by putting the pedestrian first, you create these livable places, I think, with more attraction and interest and character.

From the late 1940s, into and through the '50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.

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

Australia was a very different world and culture from the one I left in Europe. Life was much more spread out. People drove everywhere. They built higher fences. Neighbours didn't interact so much.