Carfree Cities JH Crawford has written a delightful book which proposes a different way of building cities.  The book itself is compact and handsome, with many illustration and photographs to enhance his themes.  One really good example of the amount of careful detail that Crawford put into his book is the illustration on page 130.  This illustration shows an example of what a carfree city might look like, when viewed from up above. Crawford's first stab is at Los Angeles.  He ruthlessly compares LA to Venice.  I think it is perhaps a bit unfair (LA has +3,000,000 people, Venice doesn't even have 1/10 that), but I compared San Antonio to Wiesbaden so who's worrying?  Anyway, Crawford's comparison is ruthlessly honest.  The pictures he uses to show LA look like much the urban landscape in the USA. Crawford then goes through a brief history of urban development in the USA.  I consider this strange, as the book seems to be primarily geared to a European audience.  The building heights are American (a four story building in the USA is a three story building elsewhere), but the book as a whole is metric (though there are square-footage measurements, too), and Crawford refers to Trams, what we refer to as Light Rail. This shouldn't deter from the overall reading, and we should have a vague notion of what a meter is anyway.  After all, Crawford is thorough in his writing.  He devotes chapters to the overall topography, the nature of the districts, blocks, buildings, passenger and freight transport of his planned carfree city.  I had no trouble sorting through the complex information, as Crawford slowly zooms in on the carfree city, but the freight transport aspect left me skeptical.  I would be excited to see a working example of it in America. Crawford then suggests how to convert existing cities into carfree ones.  That part gets kind of dry, but it is essential nonetheless.  This portion of the book is heavily geared to Americans, with examples of how new cities could be built in the USA.  He also describes methods on how four cities could be converted - Lyon, France, Amsterdam, New York City, and Los Angeles.  It doesn't take much to guess what city would take the longest and most strenuous effort to alter.  Here is what he says, "The most important and time-consuming task will be the construction of the passenger transport and metro-freight systems, and work on these projects should receive full priority.  The passenger transport system must be operational before redevelopment can begin, because cars will have to be removed in order to permit the required street-narrowing and density increases" (275). Crawford ends his book with (not counting the appendix) "Making Magic".  I think that cities serve that purpose.  They also serve as places for trade, education, and most of all, I think, so we can live.  I think I stopped living when I moved to San Antonio.  Life is not experienced through a windshield.  Life experienced for real, close-up. For all the weirdness of New York City, it is only place in the USA where Millennials can cheer on their current pop lord.  It is the one of the few places - Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco - where people can come together and celebrate a year's passing.  Maybe if we brought that vitality, interest, and vigor to our cities, each with our own respective city's uniqueness, then maybe we will be a stronger country, and maybe six year olds can walk to school. Many sections of Crawford's book can be perused on his excellent web site: http://www.carfree.com.  His web site also provides book and web resources for those with continued interest.  A discussions forum is also linked, where you can view and participate in the ongoing conversation.