or 10 years ago are now having their kids and they're demanding a lot of things that it's pretty hard for the neighborhood to provide. (SOUNDBITE OF HORN HONKING) SPECK: Here you have our U Street Metro stop. (SOUNDBITE OF METRO ARRIVING IN STATION) SPECK: Metrorail, of course, was at first destructive to this neighborhood. Almost every store closed when they were building the Metrorail because the streets were torn up for close to a decade. But, of course, for the long run it's had a tremendously positive impact. SIMON: Surveyor and planner Jeff Speck giving us a quick tour of his neighborhood in Washington, D.C., and he joins us now in the studio. Thanks so much for being with us. SPECK: Hello, Scott. It's a real pleasure to be here. SIMON: The sub-title of your book, of course, is "How Downtown Can Save American One Step at a Time." How do you see that happening? SPECK: The interesting thing for me as a planner was to have focused on this issue from the design perspective for so many years, and actually to kind of be shouting into the wind about why from how these places looked and how they felt and the kind of social environments that they created cities were superior to sprawl. But what happened in the last decade is that these other groups who get a lot more attention - doctors, economists, scientists - have begun to realize that the traditional neighborhood, and particularly urban neighborhoods,