In his new book “Ways to the West” (Utah State University Press) Tim Sullivan embarks on a car-less road trip through the Intermountain West, exploring how the region is taking on what may be its greatest challenge: sustainable transportation. Combining personal travel narrative, historical research, and his professional expertise in urban planning, Sullivan takes a critical yet optimistic and often humorous look at how contemporary Western cities are making themselves more hospitable to a life less centered on the personal vehicle.
Sullivan, a city planner and urban designer, says that the modern West was built by the automobile, but so much driving has jeopardized the West’s mystic hold on the American future. At first, auto-mobility heightened the things that made the West great, but love became dependence, and dependence became addiction. Through his travels by bicycle, bus, and train through Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, Boise, Salt Lake City, and Portland, Sullivan captures the modern transportation evolution taking place across the region and the resulting ways in which contemporary Western communities are reinterpreting classic American values like mobility, opportunity, adventure, and freedom.
Join Tim Sullivan at The King's English Thursday, September 10th at 7:00 pm.
Tim Sullivan is is a city planner, urban designer, and writer whose professional focus is the reshaping of cities and communities through alternative transportation planning. He is the author of No Communication with the Sea: Searching for an Urban Future in the Great Basin. He lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and two children.
