A few Other Proposed Further goals

Sorry but time may not allow me a more formal development of these 
ideas fopr a bit.

I think regarding the more general and obvious and critical need we 
have for membership, we need to detail what mix of members and the 
numbers for each type of members.

For one we'll need architects and planners, lawyers aquinted with 
development and especially thse issues, possibly novell, that may 
confront carfree developments. 

I can certainly be a draftperson to the limit of my skills and tools; 
these will both grow to subtantiallity in time.

We'll have to pick one or two target sites soon, I think. We'll have 
to decide if these are to be dry runs or the real things, because a 
dry run may not work as the real thing later if one of the failures 
encountered in the dry run was a political local back lash. The 
possibility of a more national back lash may require ther eto be no 
dry run, or at least not a pubicized one.

We'll also need to at least point to lists and clubs that will 
represent parties that are truely ready for investing in carfree 
developments of some kind. Or at least groups whose that may see a 
point at which they would invest or rent into a particular carfree 
development type. My wife and I are in this category due to our being 
in school now. Interface with such groups would give an insight into 
both 'early adopters' and 'ramp adopters'. I think, as others have 
expressed in this young group and in my own Austin community, that a 
real market segment exists for carfree development, but interfacing, 
nurturing and maybe even cultivating such groups locally and 
nationally (talking the Us and Canada here) can help get those markets 
to the target project sites which could be thousands of miles from a 
large percentage of possible carfreeers, and such a relationship can 
help sway developers, and governmental entities. Also such 
interrelations with these 'consumer' groups would be a service 
provided to those members. And so far as I can see, that is the 
wonderful thing about his whole issue, from our side anyway. all 
activists are doing this because we think this is better for a large 
segment of people, and many of us think its better for the environment 
(my epigrams have been going something like 'tighter cities for more 
wild space" lately).

We'll need to get University graduate programs looking into things 
like, what noise reduction wall systems work best for the adjoining 
walls betweens immediately adjacent buildings. Things like Absorbtion 
and reflection values across frequency. A prominent supplier of 
noise rducing masonry blocks told me to not call back when I asked 
them if they could referr me to some technical application sources for
such a double wall application scenario. We'll need the lawyers to 
tell us what mechanism can we epect to hold up legally to limit noise, 
etc...

And then transportation modelling, and the effects of density on 
ridership....

A lot of work.... 

BTW, I really admire Kevins apparently amateur (as is miy own) but 
insightful observations. I don't think good planning or architecture 
is hard to understand, but that just shows how much power not 
experiencing simple solutions has towards killing their 
implementation. Maybe we should seed several major cities with 
carfree areas before starting bigger projects just to get people to 
wake up to the issue. Kevin, if you haven't already you should check 
out the book that Joel refers to so often, Christopher Alexander's 
Patterns. Alexander mentions the idea of architecture that most any 
one would be able to implement in both the design and building 
phases, with thousands of years of historical basis to back him.

Paul Parma