We promote living in compact, walkable neighborhoods for environmental and social benefits. Dense communities have significantly lower per capita emissions of toxic and climate pollutants from transportation and the built environment. They also allow more efficient use of materials, energy, and water. Dense housing preserves land for agriculture, forestry, parks, and wilderness. Preserving that land protects ecosystems that provide biodiversity and natural carbon sinks; diverse ecosystems require connected, unfragmented spaces to thrive. Compact, walkable communities also reduce social isolation and provide broad access to jobs, schools, services, and social gathering spaces close to where people live. We believe small cities, towns, and suburbs can also gain these benefits by creating walkable neighborhoods that include “missing middle” housing like fourplexes and garden apartments.
We support replacing roads designed for cars with streets that favor more equitable modes of transportation. Cars do not scale as a mode of local and regional transportation; they require a large amount of land for roads and parking lots, which only increases as neighborhoods grow. We support replacing general travel lanes and parking lanes with transit-only lanes and bike lanes in order to enable buses, trains, bikes, and scooters to move quickly and safely throughout the city, and we support decongestion pricing, traffic calming, and car-restricted streets to deter private vehicles from taking up street space in the densest parts of our cities.
We support shared transportation over private vehicles in order to more efficiently serve urban environments. We support public transportation, bike share, scooter share, and other emerging shared transportation modes. We believe that in urban areas ride hailing services and autonomous vehicles should only be operated in shared fleets, which are well-regulated and zero-emission, so that the externalities of these options can be effectively managed. We support seamless integration of public transit across agencies, seamless integration of bike and scooter share across operators, and integration of both with each other.
