Cautionary U.S. Transportation Tales for India's Growing Cities

Mark Gorton is a bona fide transportation evangelist. Founder of OpenPlans, a technology and advocacy organization, and publisher of the multi-city Streetsblog Network, Gorton has a deep interest in urban planning and transportation.

His main focus is what might be old-fashionably referred to as alternative transportation – public transit, bicycles and walking. These are three areas most of the U.S. hasn’t really excelled at over the past half century, but Gorton’s hoping to help change that. He’s been making presentations and giving talks recently about rethinking the place of the automobile in our growing cities, and how transportation planning can better accommodate walking and cycling. This, Gorton argues, makes for a more livable city. These talks, like Streetsblog and the work of OpenPlans, are mainly focused on the U.S., which clearly has some problems to fix. But now he’s also taking his advice abroad, starting in India, where the urbanization of people is happening in lockstep with the motorization of the cities they’re crowding into.