Parking Places and Moving Spaces

Driving a car has become a joyless, inefficient and expensive way to get around. Cars predictably kill on average 3,500 people and injure 200,000 people in the U.S. every month. At the current rate, CO2 from cars is the largest source of end-use sector emissions and has already or will soon push global warming over the tipping point and trigger runaway climate change. In just a decade or two, space to drive and park the car in the big cities will run out and the problem of gridlock will surpass the question of what type of energy should power the car.

Cars kill more than 40,000 and injure more than ten million people every year in the U.S. alone • CO2 emission from cars is also killing our planet • Oil dependence is endangering national security • Importing oil makes America poorer • Some of our oil dollars finance terrorist whose attacks drag the U.S. into wars and whose threat is diverting National wealth to the military and to Homeland Security impoverishing America.

The overriding concern of our car-dependence is that the massive amounts of metal, plastic and other materials used to build automobiles amounts to a rate of consumption that is unsustainable. No matter how “green” the manufacturing and fueling process is, such levels of production-consumption associated with personal transportation our planet cannot sustain. Another reason the car-dependent way of life will come to an end, if not for the lack of energy, is the lack of space to drive and park the car in cities.

There is an urgent question we have to answer: Will the transition from car-dependent to car-free living be orderly or disruptive? Holigent.org can assist city planners and community redevelopers in drawing up plans and garnering public support for an orderly and sustainable transition.