What Is Car Culture Doing to Our Children?

 
Here is the question I am wrestling with: Do I want my children to embrace our rural life, learning how to negotiate playtime with one another and how to find fun in the woods and the garden, or on the bookshelves and in the kitchen and playroom?

Or do I want to move them to town, where they could walk to friends’ houses, to some school activities, to the movie theater and the bookstore?

NYTimes

'Car usership': Motor industry adjusts to future demands

BBC reports

Barbie Gets a Bike!

One Speed: Go!

Driving has lost its cool for young Americans

But even though the U.S. lags way behind other developed countries on public transit, American teenagers are increasingly losing interest in driving too. Long gone are the days when a car symbolized ultimate freedom and cruising Main St. was a preferred teen pastime.

Grist

MAP: Road Fatalities in USA 2001-2009

Use this site to view information about virtually every fatality that occurred on roads in the United States as a result of a collision involving a motor vehicle between between 1 January 2001 and 31 December 2009. For each incident you will be able to see the person's age, sex and the year in which the crash took place.

ITO World Ltd.

The Death of the Fringe Suburb

Drive through any number of outer-ring suburbs in America, and you’ll see boarded-up and vacant strip malls, surrounded by vast seas of empty parking spaces. These forlorn monuments to the real estate crash are not going to come back to life, even when the economy recovers. And that’s because the demand for the housing that once supported commercial activity in many exurbs isn’t coming back, either.

Christopher Leinberger - Op-Ed NYT

Silicon Valley is getting Bus Rapid Transit