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If Only...
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Donna St. George reports for The Washington Post on the new adolescence: "Gas prices are too high for a day trip to Dewey Beach. They are too high for a quick visit to see a friend in College Park. They consume enough of 18-year-old Ashleigh Krudys's paycheck that she second-guesses her social plans."
This is going to be a critical issue for our future. If we stay on our current course, more and more folks are going to find that discretionary trips -- teens driving to hang out with friends, etc. -- are something of an unaffordable luxury. Of course you don't have that problem if you live in a walkable neighborhood with good transit links, but there are so few such neighborhoods that most families can't afford them. But if we increase density in the vicinity of our existing transit nodes, and build new nodes and new networks that are planned for dense walkable growth, that we can shift out of that equilibrium.
This is going to be a critical issue for our future. If we stay on our current course, more and more folks are going to find that discretionary trips -- teens driving to hang out with friends, etc. -- are something of an unaffordable luxury. Of course you don't have that problem if you live in a walkable neighborhood with good transit links, but there are so few such neighborhoods that most families can't afford them. But if we increase density in the vicinity of our existing transit nodes, and build new nodes and new networks that are planned for dense walkable growth, that we can shift out of that equilibrium.
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