The Car and the City also contains inspirational accounts of attempts to take back the cities for people. It begins with a vignette about life in West Vancouver, where a ramshackle warehouse district has been converted into a pleasant, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood. Vancouver's higher density means that more people use mass transit, allowing the city to recover half of the cost of bus service through fares, compared to less than a quarter in Seattle and Portland. Portland's popular MAX light rail system created a magnet for high density housing. Washington's Commute Trip Reduction Law, which requires many businesses to encourage carpooling and transit use, reduces auto traffic by 120,000 cars each day.
Successful projects illustrate that quality of life and density are compatible.
The Car and the City deftly lays out needed changes and provides ideas to help make them happen. Two local public interest groups that monitor the Hanford Nuclear Reservation released new information last month proving that nuclear waste from waste tanks on the site is leaking into ground water underneath the tanks. The 177 tanks at the site contain 56 million gallons of high-level nuclear waste. Gerald Pollet, executive director of Heart of America Northwest, and Tom Carpenter, director of the Government Accountability Project Seattle office, presented evidence from one of DOE s own contractors that extremely high levels of Cesium-137 have been found beneath the Hanford tank farms. Instead, DOE s study claims it will take 140 years for tank wastes to reach the water table and and the study proposes a number of 'alternatives' for handling the waste, including one which would leave 75 percent of the waste behind.