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Livable Streets, a book by Donald Appleyard. VG+ to Near Fine condition, 1st edition 1st printing large format hardcover with dust jacket, no handwriting except erased pencil price on flyleaf, book very slightly bent from storage. 1981 UC Berkeley Press. Notable social science book dealing with the ever-worsening impact of cars dominating our urban landscapes.

"Nearly everyone in the world lives on a street. People have always lived on streets. They have been the places where children first learned about the world, where neighbors met, the social centres of towns and cities, the rallying points for revolts, the scenes of repression. But they have also been the channels for transportation and access; noisy with the clatter of horses’ hooves and the shouts of their drivers, putrid with dung, garbage and mud, the places where strangers intruded, and criminals lurked."

"Streets have become dangerous, unlivable environments, yet most people live on them. Streets need to be redefined as sanctuaries; as livable places; as communities; as resident territory; as places for play, greenery, and local history. Neighborhoods should be protected, though not to the point of being exclusionary. The neighborhood unit, the environmental area and the Woonerf are examined as models for the protected neighborhood. The criteria for a protected neighborhood depend on acceptable speeds, volumes, noise levels, reduction of accidents, and rights-of-way for pedestrians."

Livable Streets was described at the time by Grady Clay, the editor of the Landscape Architecture magazine, as "the most thorough and detailed work on urban streets to date". It contained a comparison of three streets of similar morphology in San Francisco, which had different levels of car traffic: one with 2,000 vehicles per day, the others with 8,000 respectively 16,000 vehicles per day. His empirical research demonstrated that residents of the street with low car traffic volume had three times more friends than those living on the street with high car traffic.