Pedestrian Friendly Cities

One of my pet peeves is the total non-pedestrian unfriendliness of our cities here is the U.S. And I include Juneau in that.

Our cities our totally screwed up! 100% screwed up! In the first place, things are almost always too far apart. The distances between home, work, school and commerce are such that you have to have a car. And public transportation is usually very costly, ineffective and inefficient as a result. And then people wonder why we are 'addicted to oil.'

Now I am not a Europe is always better type person. There are a lot of things Europe does that we should run, walk away from in terms emulating. But on the other hand, I like to take an interest in how other people do things.

During our brief visit to Holland, I found the Dutch to be a clever and industrious people. I was fascinated with how the Dutch deal with the fact that their country is flat and sometimes below sea-level. It's more than just the dike thing.

But that's a subject for another day. Look at the above picture. It was taken in Middleberg in southern part of the Netherlands. That is a residential street in a rather small town. How likely do you think that a child would get run over playing that street? And the markets were very close by with rural spaces beyond. From here you could walk to a train station and be in Rotterdam in about an hour, Amsterdam in two.