Urban Planners, Not Military Planners, Blamed For Looming War

"The architects of this war were not military planners but town planners....The cause of this war, and probably the one that will follow, is car dependence...The US has paved itself into a corner. Its physical and economic infrastructure is so highly car dependent that the US is pathologically addicted to oil...Cities such as Los Angeles, Dallas and Phoenix were moulded by the private passenger car into vast urban sprawls which are so widely spread that it is now almost impossible to service them economically with public transport....We must reclaim the streets, promote walking and cycling, strengthen public transport, oppose new road construction and pay the full social cost of car use. We must argue for land-use policies that reduce the need for car travel. We need "urban villages" clustered around public transport nodes, not sprawling car-dependent conurbations."