Managing Traffic in the Urban Age

From The New York Times - Science:

The human species is, at this moment, in the process of becoming a mainly urban animal after a thousand generations spent mainly in rural conditions. Many economists and sociologists see this trend as our potential salvation in a world heading toward 9 billion people, although there are some big ifs. Urban life can be productive and satisfying and is almost always much more efficient in terms of energy and land use. Families are smaller. Incomes can rise quicker. Wealth builds from the concentration of capital and enterprise. Pollution is concentrated, too, but that makes it easier to clean up once incomes grow enough to pay for municipal services. (That hasn't happened yet in many developing-country cities.) Then things can kick back. Prosperity in the 21st century almost always comes with an expectation of freedom of movement, increasingly in cars, as people abandon crowded buses or balky trains. Add that to the vast flow of goods trucked through cities and you get paralysis.

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