While I've got nothing against Germany, it appears Mayor
Dave has jumped aboard the Deutsche Bahn like Senator Obama.
If a lone committee member’s recent suggestion that Madison consider restricting new drive-through venues was enough to cause a national stink, just wait till Rush Limbaugh finds out about Dave Cieslewicz’s interest in "car-light" neighborhoods.
"It’s like traffic calming on steroids," jokes the mayor, who recently toured two such neighborhoods in Madison’s sister city of Freiburg, Germany. "People drive to the periphery, park in parking structures, walk in or ride a tram," he says approvingly. Residents can drop things off but "you can’t actually park there."
Are our elected officials running for office in America, or Germany?
Besides a reduced reliance on cars, Cieslewicz says the Freiburg neighborhoods are designed for "maximum energy efficiency and use of solar." One has a 16-building solar village that generates all of its own electric power and even sells excess energy back to the grid. And the streets are platted to maximize their potential for passive solar.
Cieslewicz knows these are bold concepts. (He actually uses the term "radical changes," but we don’t want Limbaugh knowing that.) He suggests they could be incorporated into just a small part of the new northeast neighborhood, which could have one or two stops on a commuter rail line.
"I’ve asked city planning to take a look at some of these concepts," says Cieslewicz. He met with staff early this week and plans to powwow with potential developers. The mayor hopes a green neighborhood would be a draw and maybe even merit national attention.
How many more tax dollars can we waste for some "national attention"?
In contrast, says Cieslewicz, many modern American neighborhoods are "absolutely car-dependent. You don’t have more freedom, you have less."
Whatever, Dave. I think keys are pretty freeing, rather than having to stop to park before you even get a mile from your house.
1 comment:
I don't know the specifics, but I think it would be much less than a mile to get to any residence in the proposed car-light neighborhood. It doesn't sound like it will be that big. I would be surprised if any walk was more than 1/3 mile.
And I don't know that a development like this would cost taxpayers any more than the building of a non-car-light neighborhood (although a light rail may be a different story). We won't know until the proposal comes out and we can compare it to the taxpayer burden of similar, non-car-light neighborhoods.
I have some issues with the idea (working with what we have, where we are, might be a better idea than building something new on the outskirts of the city).
But all in all, I just don't know enough about the proposal to know what I think of it.
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