The best sentences I read this week: Vol. 14
“To me, a well-designed and successful transit system equals freedom and flexibility. The car used to be associated with freedom, but not anymore. High gas prices that will just keep going up, traffic congestion, struggles to find parking–increasingly, the car just means a hassle.”
–I LOVE TRANSIT: AN INTERVIEW WITH BRENT TODERIAN
“Hiding the cost of parking in the cost of housing makes owning a vehicle seem less expensive than it actually is. It also means that the city forces people who can’t afford cars, or who just don’t drive, to pay for parking they neither want nor need. Those who own vehicles carry some of the costs, in their rent, for those who do.”
–Want cheaper housing? Stop requiring parking
“No matter where the green light goes, it is always there, and something sad and gleaming shines through.”
” ‘We’re a sleep deprived society,’ Feinsilver said.”
–How Sleep Deprivation Decays the Mind and Body
“Cultures must evolve. And if a city and its community do not evolve, they decay. Complete Streets is an affordable evolution for our cities and our region. It is a considered, humanistic approach to urban living. ”
–‘Complete Streets’ is an affordable evolution
“It’s not the likelihood of the risk that matters but the ease of imagining it.”
–THE PROBLEM WITH KNOWING HOW MUCH YOUR HEALTH CARE COSTS
“Eleanor Catton’s favourite novels are the ones she can never return to. ‘I like novels that, after I finish reading them, I feel a kind of a sense of longing, like I want to go back there but then I also know that if I did, it would play out in the same way,’ she says. ‘It’s kind of like remembering an earlier part of your life that you loved…but also knowing, obviously, that you can never go back there.’ She describes the feeling as sad, but not tragic. ‘It’s kind of meditative, sort of melancholy and even joyful.'”