I bike or walk to work year-round. I primarily use the car to go to Broad Ripple or the north side and that is only a couple of times a month, or drive to the airport for work travel (and I could take a cab, bus, or Carey for that). If I didn’t have a car, I could rent one from one of the downtown car rental locations.

So we’re obviously not conducive to doing it, but it can be done in the downtown core.

Living without a car in Indy? If an employer would pledge to hire the next employee car-free, that would be one person in town living without a car. That employee would be required not to have a driver’s license as a condition of employment. Got a driver’s license? No job for you. Start small with one employee. If that works make the next hire car-free.

Sometimes I get a little frustrated because of Indy’s culture. Rather than play catch-up I wish we could play leap-frog instead.

I agree with you that it is not now possible, practical, or safe to live carless except in very limited areas, and that there is much to do to improve mass transit here.

In the winter, one will freeze in the winter while suffer greatly in the summer from the relentless sun and very bad air. When is the last time you walked across any big asphalt parking or even down West Street in the middle of July or February? Depending on the weather, walking in Indianapolis can be utter hell.

A majority of the streets are not safe for pedestrians. Not to mention, the lack of bus shelters or the many bus stops located on a patch of dirt or grass due to the lack of sidewalks. Plus the bus routes are inane. Cannot compare Indianapolis to DC or NYC or even Atlanta.

Riding a bike is very dangerous also; the bike lanes are not safe. Pot holes, need I say more?

This does, of course, lead directly to “New Urbanism” that translates in places like Indianapolis (without mass transit) to “hide the parking lot out back”.

Until it’s possible and relatively easy and non-threatening to live in a city like Indianapolis without driving everywhere in a car (as it already is in places like NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, DC, Chicago), no one will do it. To make it possible, incremental steps (as opposed to massive “nuke” change) are the best way forward.

Ask everyone to drive one or two miles less each day this year…then do the same again next year. Build a good transit system and ask people to ride one day a week. Then two. Crawl before walking; walk before running.

That said, Cabrini Green is a rather poor example of good-ideas-gone-bad in the name of urban renewal. Yes, issues of race thoroughly permeate any notion of “urban renewal” (all too often a code for “relegate non-whites and the poor to walled ghettos”) but race played a particular place in the development and history of Chicago’s projects, of which Cabrini Green was only the most notorious but perhaps not the most interesting (that distinction, I think, goes to the Robert Taylor homes) and you really can’t point to Chicago’s experience as iconic of the “urban renewal” impetus. I think that New Haven, CT or even Albany, NY are better examples.

Too often in the Urbanophile, I sense a nostalgic desire to preserve the essence of the historic city but within the new “modern” suburban paradigm. It strikes me as a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too desire and thus all too human. But ultimately destructive I think, due to the inherent conflicts of interest between the suburban and the urban and the fact that the former is naturally corrosive to the latter.