The closest town that I live near that I can relate most to with this assignment is Wayne, PA. Wayne is located about 30 minutes outside of Philadelphia and about a 5 minute drive from my house. Wayne is a small town; it is located on the Main Line and encompasses areas both within Radnor Township as well as Tredyffrin Township (which is me!). The last census done in Wayne was 2000 and there were 30,892 people residing within 12,662 households. The town itself is about 10 blocks in length and goes generally about 4 blocks in depth. The town is extremely friendly to both cars and pedestrians making it a combination of pedestrian-oriented and automobile neighborhood/suburb. It has lots of foot traffic especially on the weekends when people go in to the restaurants and shops, but one of Main Line’s largest roads cuts right through so it has very obvious traffic in it during peak hours.

I liked the video about Copenhagen’s efforts to make the city more bicycle/pedestrian friendly. One of the unique things about Wayne is that it is located on the Main Line, a train path through several large towns spanning to about an 80 minute ride outside of Philadelphia. Currently, this path is extremely unsafe to bike because the main ways of traversing through the towns is by the Main Line or a single road (Lancaster Road). I think something that Wayne could really prosper from is if they started making the town more biker friendly. It would be awesome to be able to go from town to town along the Main Line by bicycle and only one town needs to start that trend. I think once this happens there would be a lot more traffic into particular towns such as Wayne, promoting more customers to both restaurants as well as shops.

Another city that I learned to appreciate from this lesson was Curitiba, Brazil. I really admired the efforts that they put in to making sure the city is bus friendly and I think its something that Wayne, PA could prosper from. During peak hours, Lancaster Road (the main one that cuts through town) gets extremely backed up as most people commute into the city for work. I think if buses were more prevalent and easier to use, Wayne could really cut down on the traffic that it experiences, making a casual commute through much easier as well as appeasing to what I just talked about above in making it more bicycle/pedestrian friendly. I think one of the ways to do this would be introducing more buses that go into the city. The few times I’ve had to take a bus (or train) downtown the wait can be up to 60 minutes. If they began introducing train and bus schedules that overlapped with each other I think commuting would be a lot more efficient.