Urban planning

After the tour of the ugly side of Brussels yesterday, I was browsing sites on urban planning and came across this interesting graph. It is a little old, but very informative, plotting the population density by the car use for various cities in Europe, North America and Australia. Not surprisingly, European cities are more dense and have lower car use, but I was interested to see that while Australian and American cities were equally low-density, US cities had much greater car use. This might be due to cheaper petrol prices, or it might be an effect of the Lewis-Mogridge position - the more roads that are built, the more traffic there is to fill the roads (the flip side is that closing down roads, such as 42nd Street in New York City in 1990, can actually reduce traffic). For me the best measure of quality life is how little you need a car - if you need a car that means bad city design - the shops, cafes and workplaces are not near where you live.