“Giving people more viable alternatives to driving means more people will choose not to drive, so there will be fewer cars on the road, reducing traffic for drivers.”
Concise, easy to understand, and accurate. I have used it at least a dozen times and it is remarkable how well it works.
Also—
“A bus is about twice as long as a car so it only needs to have four to six passengers on board to be more efficient than two cars.”
Suburban streets are literally designed around firetrucks. We make them design around allowing firetrucks to reach all houses without having to back out of the neighborhood. That’s why cul-de-sacs exist 90% of the time. They’re firetruck turnarounds.
The developers don’t*why to do this. They want 16ft roads with people folding their mirrors to pass each other so they can cram in more 1500 square foot houses they sell for a million dollars.
They also want zero green space, but we require impervious cover. Specifically, we limit IC to 25% because we’re in a recharge area for an aquifer. We also require water quality treatment of that 25%.
That’s generally what’s under a lot of the roads here. They do rooftop rainwater collection and storm drains that are piped to underground storage that discharges slowly to a retention pond through a jellyfish filtration system.
We allow the grass to treat water naturally where we can and put the storage under the pavement.