The malign impact of the automobile on urban areas is one of today's pressing environmental problems. This book reviews the urban planning responses to motor transport in British, America and German cities and shows how a combination of enormous misjudgements of private vehicle-growth and a neglect of opportunities to develop public transport, still largely a 19th-century infrastructure, has brought modern cities to the point of economic and environmental collapse, with the prospect of a grim future. The German concept of "traffic calming" - segregation of motor vehicles from pedestrians and the development of public transport as a cheap, efficient and comfortable alternative to motor cars - seems to offer a realistic solution to the urban transport dilemma. Dr Hass-Klau, a planning practitioner, has produced an analysis of where transport planners have gone wrong and how traffic calming can be applied.
