Re: A few Other Proposed Further goals

I think that paul has some great ideas.

I am not sure that we should be looking for a site
quite yet. I feel we need to have more people
involved and more direction. That being said, I don't
think it would hurt to look into potential sites and
Paul if you are interested in that, you could take
that on. In the carfree working group there were
various sites discussed. I think Joel probably has a
list of the site ideas that were proposed for study
(if not I can track them down).

My focus now is getting the word out about our project
and documenting interest in the US. That I will be
doing intensively over the next couple of months. 

We have also developed a survey to try and identify
the type of people who are interested in carfree. I
can share that with you all if you have interest. The
survey is finished but we haven't put it on the
website because a database needs to be created to log
the answers. I hope that it won't be too long down the
road that that is working.

I also liked your idea of the carfree area being able
to support a highschool... how can we find out what
population is needed to support a highschool?



david



--- "paulparma <[email protected]>"
<[email protected]> wrote:
> 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
> 
> 


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