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Not in my backyard? Lisa Margonelli at the 2010 TEDx Oil Spill conference

When birds wash ashore

Alexis Pancrazi, Blueprint America

Blueprint North Carolina

North Carolina is embarking on an exciting smart growth project; seven locations across the state are developing conservation-based affordable housing. The name essentially gives it away but the idea is that homeowners don’t need to be saddled with the choice between fiscal responsibility and environmental conservation, traditionally thought to be at odds.

Location site of one of North Carolina's conservation based affordable housing development plans

Could this be the wave of the future in North Carolina? Possibly. No idea was off the table this past June during the North Carolina Communities Summit, “Re-Think, Re-Design and Re-build.”

200 people trekked out to Charlotte, NC for this summit spanning the course of two days. The event had an array of big name sponsors: U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, NeighborWorks America and the NC Triangle Chapter, US Green Building Council and the North Carolina Association of Community Development Corporations.

Aside from pros and cons of conservation based subdivisions, the summit also touched upon alternative community arrangements such as eco-villages and work-based cooperative housing. Which is not to say more traditional sustainable development techniques were neglected–also discussed were the possibilities for recycling underused real-estate sites through rezoning and transforming brownfields.

Keep a look out in UNC-TV for highlights from the summit in upcoming local Blueprint America specials.

Blueprint Indiana

In Indiana, the infrastructure buzz word this year is… water.

A new local documentary produced by Indiana local PBS WFYI’s Gary Harris, “Drop By Drop: Protecting Indiana’s Water Supply,” examines the state of Indiana’s water system, with disheartening results.

The documentary is a panoramic picture of the imperfections and deterioration of Indiana’s water system, and disasters loom as raw sewage bubbles out of the ground in one town and decaying septic tanks threaten to poison groundwater. Not only are we wasting gallons of water every day, but the infrastructure that cleans, recycles, and delivers our water is being strangled by its own poor planning and decay.

Watertower in Francesville, Indiana

For most of us, water is commonplace, spilling easily from our tap in the background of our daily lives. In its ubiquity, it’s easy to forget just how precious it is. By putting Indiana’s state water system under the spotlight, this documentary reminds us that we need to be more careful with our resources, and smarter about how we protect them.

Not only are people talking about water in Indiana, they’re also social networking about it! Or they will be… In October of this year WFYI held its first ever Public Media camp to talk about how to use it to their advantage to bring sustainability and green issues into the public eye. Thirty local citizens attended, including the owner/operators of two public community radio stations nearby, staff from WOSU, and others in the sustainability and media communities.

Blueprint Illinois

With the Climate Reduction Act of 2008, East Peoria, IL pledged to become a “cool city,” and set up a Green Team to push forward a sustainable development agenda. Their strategy has been to make incremental but significant tweaks throughout the community to lower energy output and increase the use of renewable technology.

For example, the city installed solar trickle chargers, which utilize energy from the sun to keep batteries at full charge, in cop cars thereby reducing the amount of times batteries need to be replaced over the cruisers’ life spans. WTVP outlined some more of these projects in the following video:

But the burden is not solely on the city’s shoulders to pave the way for greener future. With that in mind, the Green Team also encourages citizens to measure their own energy output in their homes to enable them to recognize their carbon footprint. The necessary equipment is made available to borrow for no cost at the local library.

Along those same lines, WTVP has produced this video of practical advice for committing yourself to a sustainable lifestyle through the power of your purse:

WTVP has been steadily working on several sustainable projects and videos over the summer. Their first opportunity to showcase their work was at the Central Illinois Green Expo on September 10^th and 11^th. Keep your eye out for the Green Team on upcoming WTVP Blueprint America stories!

Steve Price, of Portsmouth, VA, last year won a design contest for the blog GOOD in which he created the ideal streetscape. Price beat out  armchair planners from around the country as contestants were asked to take a photograph of a poorly planned intersection in their community, apply photoshop, and transform it into a “livable” street. Price put in bike lanes, a light rail, and even demonstrated the possibility of urban infill — a lot of potential for one intersection, even in the city of Portsmouth.

Rethink, reuse, and rebuild, that’s what the Obama Administration has been saying since their recent proclamation that America needs to invest in retooling its infrastructure. Now, billions more in local grants are on the horizon with the Livable Communities Act, which will coordinate housing, transportation, and economic development policies in big cities, suburban centers, and small towns across the country. There is no doubt that Washington is trying to make inroads on a national program to increase main street USA livability, an agenda to make the Portsmouth, VA, redesign, for example, a reality.

But while we wait for the final wording to be ironed out and the dotted lines to be signed on the Livability Act, some communities are taking it upon themselves to revisit their roads with an eye towards the future.

Last Tuesday, Portsmouth, a port town with approximately 100,000 residents, launched the Healthy Portsmouth City-wide Health and Wellness Initiative, a multifaceted approach that tackles issues like unhealthy cafeteria food in the schools, decreasing public smoking areas and promoting active lifestyles.

They began the process this summer with a bit of discussion and research. The

“Healthy Portsmouth” meeting || Photo: WHRO -- PBS

local PBS station WHRO held a forum entitled “Healthy Portsmouth” to encourage community involvement on these issues. In attendance were 75 members of the community, who put forth ideas on how to realize the mission’s goals, including expanding public transit, transforming waterways to accommodate kayaking, and bringing in more fresh, affordable produce to underserved areas of the city.

In late July, a little over a dozen people convened to take a “windshield tour” of

Portsmouth community leaders take a tour to assess the city's walkability || Photo: WHRO -- PBS

the city of Portsmouth to assess walkability throughout the city and identify examples of what’s working and what’s not. Among those on the tour were Susan Wilson, Manager of Transportation/Maritime Planner, Department of Planning, City of Portsmouth, and Sergeant Rusty Venters, Portsmouth Police Department.

The ride around town enabled the planners to recognize some key areas where improvement was needed; parks were insufficiently lit, streets did not have enough sidewalks, and many roads lacked adequate routes for pedestrians to safely cross traffic.

The event gave the leadership team for the “Healthy Portsmouth” initiative an overview of the walkability/bikeabilty of the city and helped to identify some areas of concern that will be spotlighted in their local Blueprint America productions. For now, check out the WHRO “Livable Futures: Local Solutions” video, designed to promote dialogue on these issues.

After making headlines for weeks, yesterday New Jersey Governor Chris Christie made it official: He’s killing the commuter rail tunnel between Manhattan and New Jersey. The project is too expensive, he says, and his state doesn’t have the money to cover its share of the costs. The demise of the largest public works project in decades illustrates the stark political choice many voters will make next week: either spend our way out of the recession with big projects like high-speed trains and tunnels or save our way out with good old fashioned belt-tightening.

Christie made his choice clear last week with a childhood story: “In our house, when I used to go to my mother and say, ‘I’d like something new, I’d like to buy something.’ My mother would look at me and say, ‘Well, of course, Christopher, you can have that, just go in the back yard and take the money off the money tree. You know where that is, right?’”

The New Jersey governor is only in his first year of office and not up for reelection, yet he has been crisscrossing the country this election season endorsing Republican candidates and preaching his wildly popular brand of fiscal conservatism.

In closing the story of Christopher and the money tree, he made a connection to the unchecked spending he sees today: “There is no money tree in Washington, D.C. … To me it is a moral imperative to say no to these things.”

Does Chris Christie have his finger on the country’s pulse?

Nearly two years after an economic stimulus steeped in infrastructure building promises and $787 billion in government spending, Americans by and large have had enough. In a September 2010 Rassmusen poll, 61 percent of U.S. voters said cutting government spending and deficits would do more to create jobs than President Obama’s call last month for $50 billion more in infrastructure spending, what’s being dubbed”stimulus part two.”

And while Christie isn’t the first politician to take a stand against Washington, he certainly turned down an awful lot of money: $6 billion in combined federal, regional and stimulus funds for a new and needed (even Christie thought it was a good idea) commuter rail tunnel. In fact, for saying no, New Jersey could owe the feds some $600 million it has already spent on the project.

NJ Governor Chris Christie holds a Town Hall Meeting on his Reform Agenda for the state in Moorestown, NJ. Photo: NJ Governor's Office/Tim Larsen

It’s not every day a governor turns down billions in infrastructure spending. It was estimated that the project would have created 6,000 new jobs, greatly lessened commute times and increased property values for state residents. But that isn’t exactly the deal Christie walked away from. The tunnel would have left the same residents on the hook for $6 billion in projected cost overruns on top of the $3 billion the state was already obligated to pay.

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, a former Republican Congressman, took an impromptu trip to the New Jersey capitol last week to convince Christie to change his mind. But, in the end, the feds were unable to calm the governor’s fears that cost overruns would trash New Jersey’s budget. Later, the DOT chief only had this to say by way of Twitter, “Is it just me, or is it hard to argue against writing the next chapter in American innovation?”

No train

Apparently, it is getting easier to argue against the next chapter of American innovation, especially if it’s being proposed by the Obama administration. If elected, Republican gubernatorial candidates from Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida and California are promising to say “no” to federal dollars for high-speed rail. Being against massive government investment in high-speed rail isn’t hurting their chances either. The anti-rail candidates are in command in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida; and California is a tossup. And it’s no coincidence that Christie has campaigned in all of these states.

High-speed rail is one of President Obama’s signature initiatives. In his State of the Union address this year, the president backed up his national rail vision by announcing that $8 billion in stimulus money would be distributed to various states, including Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida and California, to get the country’s next generation of transportation moving.

“The bottom line is that high-speed rail is a national program that will connect the country, spur economic development and bring manufacturing jobs to the U.S.,” said Secretary LaHood in a statement. “It will also transform transportation in America, much like the Interstate highway system did under President Eisenhower. It’s hard to imagine what would have happened to states like Ohio and Wisconsin if their leaders had decided they didn’t want to be connected to the rest of the country back then.”

Wisconsin

More than $810 million in federal stimulus money is going to build a high-speed train line between Milwaukee and Madison. Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker has made that issue central to his campaign, even holding a “Stop the Train” rally over the summer. Walker argues that taking the money will forever obligate the state to spend $7 million to $10 million a year. High-speed rail will not be self-supporting, he says. His website, NoTrain.com, runs an advertisement in which he calls the rail project a boondoggle. “I’m Scott Walker,” he says in the video, “and if I’m elected as your next governor, we’ll stop this train.”

Ohio

Republican candidate for governor John Kasich has promised to kill a $400 million federal stimulus project to connect Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati by high-speed rail. In a recent debate, Gov. Ted Strickland, a Democrat seeking re-election, was dumbfounded his opponent would return that much money, “Your position, quite frankly, really puzzles me,” Strickland said.

Florida

Rick Scott, the Republican candidate for governor, has flip-flopped on the high-speed rail line from Orlando to Tampa. In a CNN debate Monday night, Scott said he’d pull the plug on the project if the state had to pay for any portion. The next day, Scott softened, “I would go through first and wait until we can see the feasibility study and see what it’s going to cost taxpayers. Then I would make the decision,” he said.

All told, after an initial $1.25 billion in stimulus earlier this year and another $800 million just this week from the feds, Florida only has to pay for 20 percent of the project.

California

After an investment of $2.3 billion in federal stimulus, Republican candidate for governor Meg Whitman has maintained that the time for the $45 billion high-speed rail plan, connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles, is not now. “In the face of the state’s current fiscal crisis, Meg doesn’t believe we can afford the costs associated with new high-speed rail at this time,” said Tucker Bounds, a campaign spokesman, to The New York Times.

However, as the California High Speed Rail Blog points out, the costs for the project are not associated with the state’s budget, and any delays could only jeopardize the stimulus money.

And just this week, the feds announced that another $902 million is on the way for high speed rail development in the state.

A 21st 20th century infrastructure

It remains to be seen how much power fiscal conservatives will have in saying “no” to high-speed rail and other big infrastructure investments. These deficit hawks, demanding to know where Chris Christie’s proverbial money tree is, could stand in the way of the Obama administration’s goal of bringing America’s infrastructure into the 21st century.

Producer Fae Moore, editor David Kreger and special correspondent John Larson for Blueprint America

JOHN LARSON:
Laura Grosso lives with her husband Tony and their two sons in Queen Creek, Arizona, a suburb on the outer fringes of Phoenix. They bought this three bedroom in 2006. Even though it was far from work and family, it was just what they were looking for

LAURA GROSSO:
We wanted Dominic and Franco to be happy here, and to have a nice childhood, like how we grew up. Because we grew up in the mid-west, where it was open and everyone had grass. So, this is kind of a little piece of how we wanted it to be for them.

JOHN LARSON:
Like millions of other young American families who bought during the last housing boom, the Grossos decided to trade more time behind the wheel for an opportunity to live their American dream.

LAURE GROSSO:
We understood that it was really far out, but we thought, well, this is– we can afford this house, it’s big enough for us. And, here we go, we like the area.

JOHN LARSON:
You might think this is a story about how the Grossos are coping with a looming foreclosure. But it’s not.

It’s about how families hit hard by the housing crisis are also getting slammed by rising transportation costs.

When they signed on the dotted line, the Grossos never thought about what they would spend for gas, insurance and car payments …but last spring, when the transmission on their second car died, the cost became all too clear. They had already taken paycuts and they could not afford a new car.

With no mass transit, the only option for both Grossos to get to work? They go together.

They rouse the babies and they’re out the door before sun up.

First stop: 25 minutes to Mesa, to unload the boys at grandma’s house

20 minutes later, they reach Scottsdale, where Laura lets Tony off in time for his six AM shift as a security guard in a hospital.

It’s another 15 minutes to Tempe, where Laura works in administration at Arizona State University. After a full day’s work, they’ll do the whole thing in reverse in the afternoon…round trip that’s about 120 miles a day.

And how many hours you figure?

TONY GROSSO:
Well, it’s at least about two and a half, two hours. Depending on traffic and stuff.

JOHN LARSON:
It sounds exhausting.

TONY GROSSO:
We don’t think about it. We do it.

JOHN LARSON:
There’s no question driving is a way of life for most of the 4 million people who call metro Phoenix home.

It’s hard to grasp just how spread out the region is. Phoenix and the surrounding valley cover over 2,000 square miles.

The population grew by more than 1 million people in the past decade alone. A sea of new homes went up almost overnight. When gas prices spiked between 2007 and 2008, people were suddenly paying twice as much to get around…..and that’s exactly when foreclosures peaked in neighborhoods like Queen Creek.

LAURA GROSSO:
It was a ghost town. The streets as you go down the street, it was just for sale signs, the houses were vacant…

JOHN LARSON:
Studies show this pattern – the farther out, the more foreclosures– held true in most major American sprawl towns…

As they post-mortem the housing crisis, policy makers are increasingly putting transportation costs under the microscope. Shaun Donovan is the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

SHAUN DONOVAN:
In some ways the foreclosure crisis has been a wakeup call on that front. What it said to folks is, “Hey, wait a second. Look at the houses that are on the periphery of these metropolitan areas. Those are the ones that have actually lost the most value.

The places that have retained the most value, where prices have dropped the least, are places that have access to transportation.”

JOHN LARSON:
It wasn’t just the marketplace that created sprawl, says Donovan.

ARCHIVAL FILM NARRATION:
This is the American dream of freedom on wheels….

JOHN LARSON:
The federal government has been in the business of promoting car dependent development for a long time… ever since President Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act back in 1956.

Over the decades Washington spent trillions building highways, and subsidizing the suburban housing industry. As long as gas was cheap and there was room to grow it seemed to work. But today the American dream is gridlocked, literally. Clogged roads pollute the air, gas prices are high, and many people are spending more time on the road than with their families.

SHAUN DONOVAN:
The average family in America today spends 52 percent of their income on housing and transportation combined. The single largest costs in the average American family’s budget.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:
We can no longer afford to sit still. What we need is a smart system of infrastructure equal to the needs of the 21st century…

JOHN LARSON:
The Obama Administration is trying to sell Congress and the public on a new blueprint. One that changes the way we design communities and get around in them.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:
A system that cuts congestion and ups productivity.

DONOVAN
What we’re trying to do is provide more choice. And by the way, that’s what I hear when I’m out in communities every day – we want more choices. “Look, I’m not going to get rid of my car,” is what I hear. “It’s not that I’m going to not have a car. It’s that I don’t want always have to get in my car. I want to be able to get on my bicycle sometimes. I want to be able to walk. I want to have transportation choices.”

JOHN LARSON:
Providing more affordable choices means first and foremost promoting public transportation, something car loving Arizonans have historically resisted.

Until the Phoenix light rail. The controversial 1.4 billion dollar light rail opened in 2008 after a narrow margin of local voters approved a half cent sales tax and Washington agreed to pay for 40 percent of the construction costs.

So far ridership has more than exceeded expectations. About 33,000 people a day, many of them students, ride the 20 mile rail which connects downtown to the university neighborhoods of Tempe and Mesa.

Right now the rail only reaches a small portion of the region, but there are plans to extend it 57 miles out into the valley.

Emily Talen is a professor of urban planning at Arizona State.

EMILY TALEN
The light rail has a certain sexiness to it that can really get people excited and energized.

It’s got to be seen as one step in an evolution of turning this ship around, this sprawling, unsustainable, place into a different kind of community.

JOHN LARSON:
The outlines of this community are starting to emerge. In the past five years developers have poured $5 billion worth of private investment into residential and commercial construction along the light rail

Most local and state politicians support plans to expand the system, but with the economy on life support few are willing to raise taxes to do so. Which means new trains will not be heading to the outskirts any time soon.

And for some developers on the outskirts, that’s just fine.

DENNIS WEBB:
They can get this 4,000 square foot house for $236,000.

JOHN LARSON:
Dennis Webb is the vice president of operations for Fulton Homes, one of Arizona’s largest home builders. Just a few miles down the road from where thousands of foreclosed houses sit empty, Fulton Homes is building brand new ones. Once the economy comes back, he says, so will the market for the exurban lifestyle that he’s selling.

DENNIS WEBB:
People want to live in a safe, family environment, where they can have their kids right nearby, have a pool, have a backyard and barbecue and things like that. That’s the way they want to live.

JOHN LARSON:
I took a little drive around the development and I was looking for the light rail station. Now where–

DENNIS WEBB:
Keep looking!

JOHN LARSON:
Webb doesn’t see people giving up their cars any time soon. And government efforts to fight sprawl rub him the wrong way.

DENNIS WEBB:
It’s the West, it’s the frontier. I think the government has very little– should have very little voice in dictating where people want to live.

JOHN LARSON:
Meanwhile, the Grossos just keep on driving. They aren’t expecting trains to help them out of their financial difficulties any time soon….they’re just trying to hold onto what they’ve got.

JOHN LARSON:
What would be the worst possible thing that could happen now.

TONY GROSSO:
Well, the car thing, I think, I mean, that’s… that car is our lifeline right now. So, everything we do revolves around that car. So, if that goes, we do.

Much has been made of the similarities between today’s economic downturn and The Great Depression. Pundits have, for example, labeled the current era “The Great Recession.” And the facts seem to bear that out. Fifty-five percent of Americans in the workforce have lost their jobs, suffered a pay cut or seen their hours reduced since 2007. By comparison, unemployment alone reached 25 percent in the 1930s. There is, no doubt, a relationship between the two. TIME magazine illustrated that relationship when, just after the 2008 election, the publication put Barack Obama on its cover in a classic Franklin Delano Roosevelt pose, right down to the cigarette holder. The title crystallized the message: “The New New Deal: What Barack Obama can learn from FDR, and what Democrats need to do.”

There are other similarities, too. The hard-luck stories from then and now are more or less the same. And the pictures tell the story.

Then: The Great Depression

Roy Swinford, a worker for the Works Progress Administration in Chicago, laid down 45,000 bricks a day. He kept a crew of 20 men busy at top speed to supply him with bricks. (Source: New Deal Network)

Now: The Great Recession

Kevin Light, a project superintendent with the Washington State Department of Transportation, supervised the City of Washougal’s SR-14 Pedestrian Tunnel stimulus project. In an interview with his employer, Light said, “this project enabled us to continue working and bring employees back to work.” Light’s grandchildren, as he put it, will one day be able to look at the tunnel and say that he built it. (Source: Washington State Department of Transportation)

Then: The Great Depression

Bridge builders working on a Public Works Administration project in Chicago. (Source: New Deal Network)

Now: The Great Recession

Bridge builders working on a stimulus project in Seattle. (Source: Washington State Department of Transportation)

Now: The New New Deal

Of course, Congress and the Obama administration implemented a type of modern New Deal in the form of the 2009 Recovery Act, a $787 billion government stimulus program. While much of the money was in tax breaks, some $150 billion went to infrastructure programs like those in Washington State (see the state department of transportation’s Flickr page for more “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”-like documentation of their state’s stimulus dollars at work). Those projects were, as the president has said, intended to put Americans back to work.

As the midterm elections approach, many will ask: Did the stimulus work? Considering that the jury is still out even on the New Deal, it’s hard to tell.

Then again, an announcement just weeks ago from President Obama may be telling. Obama said that another $50 billion in stimulus-like government spending on infrastructure projects will likely be needed as this “Great Recession” continues. Just don’t call it “Stimulus Part Two” — the president has been careful to avoid using that rhetoric again.

In this week’s news of, ‘That sounds crazy… are you sure that’s a good idea, Canada? What the hell, do it anyways,’ CTV reports, “A 3-D image of a young girl chasing a ball into the street is the newest effort to prevent pedestrian accidents in West Vancouver.”

You might be thinking, ‘3-D — sounds bad-ass.’ And so was I.

CTV even went as far to title the article, “Hologram of girl warns B.C. drivers to be alert.”

Hologram. No way. Awesome.

However, the following line gave me some pause, “The $15,000 illusion, paid for by Preventable.ca, will be installed for a week…”

Maybe 15,000 in future space credits can fund a hologram for a week, but $15,000 — even Canadian dollars — is not putting a hologram on a West Vancouver street for even 30 seconds. Nice try CTV.

Take a look at the supposed hologram (credit: Handout/Preventable.ca)

Apparently, the ‘hologram’ is just a painting of a child on pavement. It will appear to be three dimensional when cars get within 100 feet (with the intention of simulating a potential pedestrian accident scenario).

In all seriousness, and according to Preventable.ca, most child pedestrian-related injuries occur in the fall at the start of each school year. Every week, the group says, two children die from being hit by a car in British Columbia alone.

Still, the campaign is just another example of that good old fashioned Canadian out of the box (extreme) thinking. For instance, a few years ago a similar Canadian group, Prevent-it.ca, produced the following public service announcements for on the job safety. A tradition continued of scaring you safe.

You can “Take the ‘A’ train” in New York City, but in Denver, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., Des Moines and a handful of other communities, you can hop on the ‘B’… for bicycle (note: the ‘B’ remains a viable subway line in New York, but a bike-share program is in the works there, too).

Bike-share is the most recent form of mass transit — funded with both private and public dollars. It offers commuters the option of renting a bike at point A and dropping it off at point B, C, D, or back at A. Minneapolis, with 1,000 bikes, currently has the largest program in the U.S., but Denver’s expanding program could soon overtake it. Then again, if you’re an American city with bike sharing, it’s not hard to be in the running for the top spot — few cities have a program, but that’s slowly starting to change.

Bike-shares are exploding in Europe: 10,000 bikes in Paris, 1,500 in Barcelona, 2,000 and an additional 3,000 to come in Copenhagen.

While some might welcome the emulation of the European model here in the U.S., Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes has warned voters that Denver’s B-Cycle program is, in reality, a U.N. plot. In the spirit of fairness to the fringes, some on the left might also find reason to cry conspiracy, since the often maligned Clear Channel Inc. administers the D.C. program and launched bike-sharing programs in Rennes and Barcelona, among others. At the very least, bikers are on board.

Here’s a short video from our partners at Rocky Mountain PBS about Denver’s B-Cycle program:

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

Producers Fae Moore and Tom McNamara, editor David Kreger and special correspondent John Larson for Blueprint America

JOHN LARSON:
27-year-old Nimia Larcia lives in a suburban housing complex just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. She moved here from Honduras six years ago in search of a better life.

Suburban America used to be synonymous with good living, not the least of which was because its streets were so much safer than those in the city. Not anymore.

Every morning when Nimia walks from her apartment to her minimum-wage job at a jewelry store, she has to cross one of the most dangerous roads in Georgia: Buford Highway. People in cars race back and forth, many if not most exceeding the 45 mile per hour speed limit.

For people on foot, it is seven lanes of fear.

NIMIA LARCIA:
Sometimes I am scared, but I have to do.

JOHN LARSON:
Nimia Larcia and suburban America represent what is more and more becoming a great American mismatch. Communities like hers were built for people with cars.

The problem is many here can’t afford cars. And so these areas by design have become lethal for far too many people.

REPORTER 1:
…a five year old girl killed. Her older sister seriously injured.

REPORTER 2:
Police say a man was hit at Buford highway and Dresden around 2 o’clock this morning. His body was then dragged nearly two miles to Buford and Afton lane…

REPORTER 3:
The number of injuries and fatalities along Buford Highway is three times higher than any other road in the state.

JOHN LARSON:
Technically this person, by law, is supposed to stop, right?

MICHAEL ORTA:
Yeah, this guy’s supposed to stop. But he’s not.

JOHN LARSON:
Michael Orta works for PEDS, an organization that’s trying to improve pedestrian safety in and around Atlanta.

MICHAEL ORTA:
Buford Highway is just a posterchild for this issue. There are tons of roadways out there just like this.

JOHN LARSON:
The state acknowledges that fully eight of Buford Highway’s 30 miles are hazardous for pedestrians. And roads just like it can be found in nearly every state in the country.

According to a recent report, by two national transportation groups, about 43 thousand pedestrians were killed in the U.S. in the last decade; “the equivalent of a jumbo jet going down roughly every month.”

Nearly 30 of them died right here on Buford Highway. At least 250 more were injured.

MICHAEL ORTA:
This is a typical Buford Highway bus stop here. It’s just a pole in the dirt right next to the roadway, just a few feet away. I wouldn’t want to have my kids here. A lot of people wait up here, they’re got little rocks so they can sit up on the hill.

JOHN LARSON:
So that’s like the bus stop up here?

MICHAEL ORTA:
Yeah, kind of. People sit up here on the hill.

JOHN LARSON:
Demand for transportation is so high here that taxis, freelance car services and private buses race down these roads competing for customers with the public transit system, often using the very same stops.

People rushing to and from buses account for one in four of the accidents here.

MICHAEL ORTA:
This girl just got off at the stop like anyone else would, and she needs to get across the street. Of course, she’s going to do what most people do which is wait for a gap in traffic this way, stop in the middle suicide lane. And then wait for a gap in the other half of the road.

JOHN LARSON:
Plus, it’s right behind a hill.

MICHAEL ORTA:
It’s really bad visibility. I mean, drivers can really see folks here.

JOHN LARSON:
Orta says long stretches of the road don’t have enough crosswalks or stoplights for pedestrians. In some places they’re spaced a mile apart.

Could you say to these people, “Listen, we know the crosswalk is a long way down the road, but your life is in danger here, so walk to the crosswalk, you know, go the extra half mile. Whatever it is.”

MICHAEL ORTA:
Forget it. You can’t tell people to walk a half mile to a crosswalk. You wouldn’t do it. The police officers wouldn’t do it. Nobody does that.

JOHN LARSON:
Ellen Dunham-Jones is a Professor of urban design at Georgia Tech, and co-author of a book called “Retrofitting Suburbia.”

Dunham-Jones says suburban communities across the nation need a major re-think.

ELLEN DUNHAM-JONES:
The stereotypes that we’ve held about who is in the cities and who is in the suburbs have started to change. And change really quite dramatically.

JOHN LARSON:
Immigration, the recession, and other economic realities have all contributed to a remarkable trend. For the first time in history there are more people living in poverty in the suburbs than in the cities. In Atlanta, 85 percent of low income people now live in places like this. But the suburban mismatch is not just about the poor.

ELLEN DUNHAM-JONES:
Basically, the baby boomers are the generation who really built most of the suburbs. But they’ve built an environment that is not going to allow them to age in place very gracefully.

JOHN LARSON:
Demographers are warning that millions of older Americans living in car dependent communities could be left isolated, unable even to get to the grocery store. Dunham-Jones is hoping the country will design its way out of these problems. Even Buford Highway, she says, could be transformed with medians, trees and buildings set closer to the road. Changes that are known to slow traffic. But outside of the ivory tower, change does not come easily. Or quickly.

Last year Georgia spent more than two billion dollars on transportation, but only a tiny fraction, less than 1 percent, went specifically to pedestrian safety.

JOHN KING:
Look at this. This right here is just– this is what makes me cringe as Police Chief. “Senora, por favor tenga cuidado!”

JOHN LARSON:
Doraville Police Chief John King has spent nearly a decade asking the state highway department for help.

JOHN KING:
We’ve been at this for years now. Every chief of police almost in this country is a type-A personality. We see a problem, we want to fix a problem.

JOHN LARSON:
King and his allies got some action back in 2007, when the state installed four sets of crosswalks and pedestrian-activated lights on a one-mile stretch of Buford Highway.

The problem was they didn’t always work.

REPORTER 4:
We tested the cross walks… Pushed button after button after button –

JOHN LARSON:
Recently new lights were installed to replace the broken ones. But as of today, they still haven’t been turned on.

While we were in town part of Buford Highway buckled in a heat wave.

REPORTER 5:
Driver after driver was forced to turn around after a 42-foot section of Buford Highway bubbled up two feet.

FEMALE DRIVER:
That’s nuts!

JOHN LARSON
State crews fixed that problem over night. But there are no overnight fixes for pedestrians, says Kathy Zahul, Traffic Engineer for Georgia’s Transportation Department. Reconfiguring an infrastructure built for cars, she says, means untangling decades of bureaucracy. So much so, that even a simple question turns out not to be.

Why don’t you just lower the speed on Buford Highway?

KATHY ZAHUL:
Nationally, it’s accepted that the appropriate speed limit for any route is around 80– where 85 percent of the population is comfortable driving.

JOHN LARSON:
So basically it says the people driving the cars set the speed limit. I mean I know that’s not exactly right, but that’s what you’re saying?

KATHY ZAHUL:
Well, they set the operating speed.

JOHN LARSON:
In this type of situation where the issues really have become pedestrian oriented, couldn’t that be rethought?

KATHY ZAHUL:
Well, by law, um, Georgia Department of Transportation is required to set the speed limit on all routes in the state at the maximum reasonable and safe speed.

JOHN LARSON:
It’s a catch-22 that drives pedestrian advocates nuts.

MICHAEL ORTA:
It’s horrible. It’s horrible. They can’t just lower the speed limit. They have to go out and make design changes to the road that would force people to drive slower and then be able to justify that they’re lowering the speed limit because these design changes made people drive slower.

JOHN LARSON:
Zahul showed us plans for some design changes that are in the works. But the transportation department says construction won’t start until 2012.

So, according to the plans on the books at least, eventually the rest of Buford Highway will have sidewalks?

KATHY ZAHUL:
Yes.

JOHN LARSON:
And eventually there’ll be more crossing, safe crossing areas?

KATHY ZAHUL:
Absolutely.

JOHN LARSON:
And the only question really is, is how long is eventually?

KATHY ZAHUL:
Correct.