David Riesman Quotes

I moved to Cardiff when I was 17 and never needed a car. When I came to L.A. for my first job there, I needed a car, so I had to pass my driving test.

In Bogotá, our goal was to make a city for all the children. The measure of a good city is one where a child on a tricycle or bicycle can safely go anywhere. If a city is good for children, it will be good for everybody else. Over the last 80 years we have been making cities much more for cars' mobility than for children’s happiness.

In Australia’s biggest cities, public transport is generally slow, expensive, not especially reliable and still hideous drain on the public purse. Part of the problem is inefficient, overmanned, union-dominated government run train and bus systems. Mostly though, …there just aren’t enough people wanting to go from a particular place to a particular destination at a particular time to justify any vehicle larger than a car, and cars need roads.

If we’re going to talk about transport, I would say that the great city is not the one that has highways, but one where a child on a tricycle or bicycle can go safely everywhere.

An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.

One of the first things a British visitor to Southern California discovers is that he must have a car. Freeways. Bad public transport. I took driving lessons.

I can't drive, so I can only live in New York, which is fine with me.

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.

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.

Suburban sprawl leads to social atomisation and fragmentation and is environmentally disastrous, as carbon-intensive car journeys displace local shops and replace public transport.

We talk a lot about infrastructure in cities, and it's talking about highways and it's talking about trains, but I think more important to people who are low income is, how do I get from here to there? How do I become part of the affluence that's surrounding me?

I would get parts and not be able to take them because my mother didn't have a car.

I want to have a family and I'd like to live in a lovely big house, with a massive driveway and gates and loads of kids.

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.

New York is hard for me. I grew up in Texas. I can't do without my car, and you can't have a car in New York.

Heaven is not built of country seats / But little queer suburban streets;, .d. cities;, .d. heaven;, Heaven is not built of country seats But little queer suburban streets.

...the concentration of human beings in towns...is contrary to nature, and...this abnormal existence is bound to issue in suffering, deterioration, and gradual destruction to the mass of the population...countless thousands of our fellow-men, and still a larger number of children...are starved of air and space and sunshine. ...This view of city life, which is gradually coming home to the heart and understanding and the conscience of our people, is so terrible that it cannot be put away. What is all our wealth and learning and the fine flower of our civilization and our Constitution and our political theories – what are all these but dust and ashes, if the men and women, on whose labour the whole social fabric is maintained, are doomed to live and die in darkness and misery in the recesses of our great cities? We may undertake expeditions on behalf of oppressed tribes and races, we may conduct foreign missions, we may sympathize with the cause of unfortunate nationalities; but it is our own people, surely, who have the first claim upon us...the air must be purified...the sunshine must be allowed to stream in, the water and the food must be kept pure and unadulterated, the streets light and clean...the measure of your success in bringing these things to pass will be the measure of the arresting of the terrible powers of race degeneration which is going on in the countless sunless streets.

We could live in a much better society if there was less personal car ownership.

Even before you get to self-driving vehicles, there's just a huge amount of positive things that happen to cities when you do ridesharing.

We didn't build the modern country to be bike-friendly - our initial round of infrastructure was not designed to think about how to get around if you're not in a car. So we've got to be targeting resources, both nationally and locally, to how people are going to get around in the new world.

I'm of that subset of native New Yorkers who can't drive.

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

I love walking everywhere I go and following City Mapper.

The problem of getting from home to the metro, BRT or bus stop makes many people take their cars to work. Why not start a fleet of electric buses that just circle through neighbourhoods connecting them to the various public transport hubs?

It makes no sense to make people drive cars.