Alex Steffen Quotes

L.A. is not a place where people walk.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Regardless of our political stance, we cannot afford to perpetuate the Western car-centric model.

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.

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 am all for greening tall buildings, but I'm also very keen to note that greening a building doesn't cope with the problem of the tall building in the texture of the city.

I'm using more energy than ever.

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.

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 city of London, within the walls, occupies a space of only 370 acres, and is but the hundred and fortieth part of the extent covered by the whole metropolis.

Everywhere I go, I see incredible examples of communities that have a vision for transportation and how it will impact the quality of life, mobility, economics and opportunity.

Most cities have a centre surrounded by suburbs, but London has numerous centres: it's the model of a twenty-first century metropolis.

We need to have a culture that says 'the less energy you can use to be comfortable, the better off you are and the better you should feel about yourself'.

You have got to connect your land use decisions with transportation decisions.

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 forces that are in play on climate change essentially revolve around the generation of power, the transportation of goods and services and people, and the sorts of materials that we use to fuel the whole of our civilisation.

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

The United States consumes power per land-area at a rate three times the average. Even though they are more energy efficient, densely populated industrial countries like Germany, Britain and Japan have even bigger power consumption per area.

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.