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My kids and I are supposed to be walking/biking/using transit, right? It's good for our health, good for our environment, and takes one more car off the road.

BUT it can be hard to do that when you walk out of your front step and cars whoosh by your residential street at 40 mph. It can be hard to do that when there are no crosswalks to indicate pedestrians might be crossing. It can be hard to do that when grandma is crossing the street and the signal turns before she's reached the other side. It can be hard to do that when there are no sidewalks, or the sidewalks are start-and-stop, or the sidewalks have no curb cuts. It can be hard to do that when there is nothing to slow cars down (four-way stops, speed humps) and roads are built overly wide (e.g. room for four cars side-by-side, with room to spare). And how fast is too fast, anyway? Even 30 mph is too fast in a dense residential neighborhood--why not make 20mph the new 30mph? That's a speed more friendly to pedestrians, which is why we use it at school zones.

My family and I walk anyway, because we're committed to showing our children a more sustainable way, or maybe we're just nuts. But seriously, if we want people to leave the car in the garage--or in the dealership altogether--and create a safe, vibrant pedestrian, cycling, and transit culture, we need to start thinking about infrastructure for those users, and not the cars.