Transportation planner Jarrett Walker looks at the top 50 cities of over 100k people and the percentage of people who don't own a car. Do the cities that made the list shed some light on how planners can discourage car use?
Walker proposes that there are three main factors shared between the successful ones: age of the city (older cities have a higher percentage of carless), and dominant universities.
Walker writes, "Most cities on this list display two or more of these factors, but a few are models for just one of them. San Francisco on the list because of age -- a rare western city largely laid out before the car-dominated era, and thus by far the densest big city in the west. Berkeley is there because it's small city dominated by a big university. And many cities are there because of relative poverty, including most of the cities that would be on everyone's list of America's toughest urban reinvention challenges."
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