Golf Carts as Transportation
There is much for urbanists to critique about Florida's master-planned community the Villages–currently "the fastest-growing metropolitan statistical area in the country." But one thing the Imagineer-designed retirement community got right, argues Alissa Walker, is their enthusiastic support of golf carts as a transportation mode.
"Those golf carts, in fact, make a lot of urban-transportation planners salivate. By some estimates, one-third of all trips in the Villages are taken in them. They run on electricity, or on a little bit of non-ethanol gasoline (dispensed from old-timey pumps, even). They are lightweight and barely pollute. They’re not supposed to go faster than 20 mph, and they don’t kill many people the way cars do (although it does happen)."