Yves Engler > Quotes

“No great city has an abundance of parking.”
― Yves Engler, Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay

“In a country where you can get to the moon, God help you if you want to cross the street.”
― Yves Engler, Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay

“The typical U.S. resident walked three miles a day a century ago; today the average is less than a quarter mile.14”
― Yves Engler, Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay

“The car is “a system of human dissociation.”5 Behind the wheel of their private mobile spaces, drivers are far less likely to mix and mingle than pedestrians. By isolating drivers from fellow human beings, driving can engender hostility and mistrust. Pedestrians, cyclists and public transit riders are forced into a greater awareness of their environment and as a result are more likely to concern themselves with its wellbeing. Like”
― Yves Engler, Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay

“Animosity towards the automobile was so great that in 1906 Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, declared, “Possession of an auto car is such an ostentatious display of wealth that it will stimulate socialism.”16”
― Yves Engler, Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay

“Urban planners and politicians encounter less political opposition when building highways in marginalized, vulnerable communities.”
― Yves Engler, Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay

“Solnit explains: “Only citizens familiar with their city as both symbolic and practical territory, able to come together on foot and accustomed to walking about their city, can revolt. Few remember that the ‘right of the people peaceably to assemble’ is listed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, along with freedom of the press, of speech, and of religion, as critical to a democracy. While other rights are easily recognized, the elimination of the possibility of such assemblies through urban design, automotive dependence, and other factors is hard to trace and seldom framed as a civil rights issue.”29”
― Yves Engler, Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay

“Canadian mining companies have been the main beneficiaries of the World Bank’s push to promote capitalist mineral extraction in Africa. But in their quest for profits Canadian businesses have squeezed out domestic miners and solidified the colonial economic pattern whereby foreigners export the continent’s raw materials while African countries import value added products.”
― Yves Engler, Canada in Africa - 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation

“A major principle of Canadian foreign aid has been that where the USA wields its big stick, Canada carries its police baton and offers a carrot.”
― Yves Engler, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy

“As Martin Luther King once said, “Urban transit systems in most American cities have become a genuine civil rights issue.”34”
― Yves Engler, Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay