touche

Doug - Thanks for the comment. What you’re asking has a very long answer. Books have been written about moving Americans away from the car and there's a whole transit advocacy community out there doing fantastic work on that very subject. Streetsblog.net is one nexus, as is MarketUrbanism.com. StreetFilms is good if you read on a computer enough already and want to watch some short films. I've got a blog, theGreaterMarin.wordpress.com, which is a Marin-centric look at these issues.

I fear I cannot give a proper answer is so short a space, but it boils down to the pedestrian environment. The principal issue of transit, in my mind, is the last bit of travel between your station and your destination. If that’s a pleasant and short journey, the groundwork is already laid for transit. But auto infrastructure – freeways, parking lots, etc. – are anathema to a healthy pedestrian infrastructure and even a healthy city. Moving towards transit must mean moving away from designing our cities around the car. I think SMART will become the nucleus for that shift.

I could go on but I don’t want to crowd this small space. It’s why I started my blog, actually. I think about this a lot and I wanted to get the concepts of livability and transit-oriented living out into the broader conversation.