Thought For The Day - Don't follow the mistakes of the US
I see in a piece on the BBC News website that UK city planners look to US cities for inspiration.
God help you folks in the UK!
Most UK towns and cities, for all their faults, are a model for the rest of the world.
In US cities the car is absolute king and unless you happen to live in the dead centre of a city it is virtually impossible to manage without your own private transport. Urban sprawl continues for mile after mile. Most communities have no central gathering point. Railway stations and bus stations are invariably in the seediest parts of town.
Don't do it!!!!!
Once, as a bus driver, I had a couple of American tourists on board, and was chatting to them. They were greatly impresssed with the 'QUAINT' street scene, the old cottages, and narrowness of the roads. They thought it absolutely wonderful.
When we hit a queu of traffic, the guy asked me what the hold up was. I said that such a hold up was normal, but was only for a minute or two. He replied that if this was Stateside, they would push a six lane highway through to solve the problem. He could not understand that given the choice, we opted for the quaint scene instead of the superhighway.