Fritz Todt Quotes

Our engineering departments build freeways which destroy a city or a landscape, in the process.

Roads are necessary, but the fact that we don't fully recognize that when you build a road you're doing more than building a road - you're building the future development of your city. And, that's what's never dawned on people. It still doesn't, in a way.

In urbanization, you think big because you are thinking decades ahead.

We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world.

Urbanization has relied on land conversion and land financing, which is causing urban sprawl and, on occasion, ghost towns and waste.

Bankers cannot afford to be concerned with only the economic aspects of projects. There may be serious implications on the natural environment, the urban environment, on human culture.

As cities have grown rapidly across the nation, many have neglected infrastructure projects and paved over green spaces that once absorbed rainwater.

Cities offer us powerful leverage on our most stubborn, wasteful practices. Long commutes in our cars, big power bills from our energy-hogging buildings, shopping trips to buy stuff that'll spend a few short months in our homes and long centuries in our landfills.

It was almost a desecration to put a building on the Boulder Turnpike, which is now U.S.-36 and is almost backyards and even junkyards all the way up. We didn't have to put development just cheek to jowl all the way up to Boulder. There's enough room in Colorado! But we did.

Urban development in India... will be the biggest sunrise industry that any country has seen in any part of the world.

I'm completely taken and impressed by the planning authority of Singapore and its Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). It's the most cutting-edge agency in the world. They have very effective guidelines for development, and they review design as it evolves.

Fifty years ago people were talking about Sydney's sprawl, but nobody does anything about it.

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

Cities generate most of the global economy, and most of its energy use, resource demands and climate emissions. How we build cities over the next decades will largely determine whether we can deliver a bright green future.

Aside from its parks and nature areas, Singapore is intensively developed, and due to the shortage of land, is building up, down and on manmade islands and landfills.

Urban design as a discipline barely exists in most American and Canadian cities. In Singapore, there are innovative transportation strategies at work.

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

In the urban areas, we have focused on infrastructure roads, telecommunications, power.

I don't think the state of California realized there would be this many people here caught up in the freeway system.

The road system that we've come to depend on, the road system that we built our wealth on and our power on, is falling apart.

You come to Washington, there's a rail bill, there's a highway bill, there's a aviation bill. But when you go home, there's an airport, there's a highway, there's a rail, there's transit. It all has to work together.

As mayor of San Francisco, I will provide the vision and work hard to make San Francisco a beautiful, well-planned city with excellent housing and transportation options.

The government only makes restrictive rules, they don't show you what to do so you know, OK, here's where we need this many apartments, with open space, playgrounds, kindergartens.

Cities are created by and for traffic.

You have to take account of traffic, but you should not pander to traffic.