KEY POINTS:
Soaring fuel prices are Dan Burden's ally in his mission to resurrect walking as a universally desirable means of transport, prosperity, health and happiness.
"I personally am delighted with the price of oil - I couldn't be happier," the urban designer and founder of the United States non-profit organisation Walkable Communities confessed to a packed chamber of civic planners at Waitakere City.
"Cars made things so easy in the early days that we didn't focus on rebuilding our cities, so only now are we beginning to realise how important that focus is."
Mr Burden, a former National Geographic photographer and forestry graduate brought here by Land Transport New Zealand to lead seminars and address the national Walking Conference in Auckland next week, acknowledged the pace of change forced by prohibitively expensive fuel would catch many people off guard.
"But we're an adaptive culture - it is going to be painful for many, but the end result is that we are going to be much more healthy," he said.
"We did it in World War II - we had to - and everyone benefited from it.
"I think we are going to have Victory gardens, and people saying: I'll start with one day a week without the car, within a month go to two days without it and then, by the third month, I'll figure out some shift in my lifestyle where the car is now the luxury - it's not the necessity."
Mr Burden, who has been hailed by Time magazine as a world-leading civic innovator and served for more than 15 years as Florida's first state cycling and walking co-ordinator, wants to see the masses legging it as a way of regaining personal and community health rather than suffering foot-slogging hardship out of economic necessity.
He urges planners to embrace the concept of "walkability" to design attractive urban spaces where people will look forward to getting out of their cars to enjoy themselves with others, restoring prosperity to city centres and neighbourhoods in the process.
Although cycling and public transport also feature prominently in his ideal city, he is not trying to outlaw cars, and sees on-street parking as a useful safety buffer between traffic and pedestrians.
He showed slides of two North American streets, one in his former home of Montana in which traffic was crawling in two lanes each way, and another in British Columbia where vehicles were far less obtrusive among trees and pedestrians.
Although both served major arterial routes, carrying equivalent traffic volumes, he said one out-performed the other on every measure.
"It makes more money, it's more sustainable, it's more beautiful, and when people drive down it, their blood pressure goes down," said Mr Burden.
Seattle was another city which was continuing to prosper despite the collapse of house prices in many other parts of the US, having spent "huge bucks" on public transport, walking and neighbourhood development. "They're focusing on their people."
The strategy included road "diets" in which lanes had been removed from 23 streets, including some of Seattle's busiest, with no loss of overall traffic or business.
