Right Answer, Wrong Problem
There's a saying among transport planners that "Curing congestion by building more roads is like curing obesity by buying bigger pants." More roads make sense only if your sole objective is to move more cars. Move more cars they will…but will they move more people? According to the Worldwatch Institute, a two-track heavy rail system, such as most subways, can move as many people as thirty-five lanes of freeway. And it will take up no more land than two of those lanes to do it, while producing almost no pollution. So do we cure congestion by building more roads to move more cars, or by building rail systems to move more people? Do we address the first problem we see, or do we discover what the problem behind the problem is, and work on that?
And why stop there? We can also ask, do we really need to move people so far and so fast, whether by road or by rail or by any other system? Is it really "mobility" we need to provide, or should we look deeper and try to provide more directly the benefit that "mobility" provides to us right now? The word that pops up in progressive planning circles in this case is "access." You have to ask why people drive, why they get on the train, why they step out the front door. It isn't, usually, because they want to travel. They travel because they want to get someplace. But getting someplace is also not the primary goal: they want to get someplace because once they are there, they can obtain some good or service that they need, or they work there. In some cases this is very difficult: if you live in some bedroom suburb somewhere, everything you need will be far away, even the big-box stores that infest those areas. If you live in a younger city that has used zoning to enforce separation of uses (stores here, houses there, factories and offices somewhere else), you may still have to drive, or at least take a bus or tram, to a store that will offer what you need. Big box stores worsen this situation by concentrating certain categories of goods in widely separated locations--usually a limited selection of lower-quality merchandise presented in vast quantities to give the appearance of bounty (and qualify for vendors' discounts). Even in a city, if you are two miles from the shopping center, you aren't going to walk there. So how do we provide "access" that doesn't require "mobility"?
Mixed-use development is one answer. Imagine a neighborhood where no house or apartment was any farther than half a mile from a central plaza or a Main Street. Imagine that in this Main Street were the banks, the administrative centers, a few larger stores, and hordes of small shops offering everything you might need, in quantities suitable for the population of that neighborhood…shoes, wines, photocopying, computers, Chinese food, abstract paintings, or whatever. Imagine also that the people who owned and worked in these stores for the most part lived in the neighborhood, perhaps above or behind the stores, knew you and your kids and parents, would be willing to place a special order for you if they didn't stock what you had. Imagine too that everything cost 5 or 7% more than in a chain store or big box. But then imagine that you filled the gas tank of your car only six times a year, so you could go to the beach or the mountains or visit Aunt Madge or see that new movie…or imagine that you didn't own a car at all, and spent the money that you saved in your own neighborhood, giving profit to your neighbors, who gave profit back to you when they bought your goods or services, or employed you or your kids.
Imagine that you could still feel at home when you walked out your door to go shopping.
Our cities could be built like this…a thousand Main Street neighborhoods strung together along subway lines or streetcar routes, each almost self-sufficient and each different enough to make the occasional visit worthwhile, with a few special areas set aside for heavy industry, universities, and so forth. In effect, one could create a new city as a series of small towns that abut each other, each having its Main Street with its shops and offices surrounded by a few blocks of houses and small apartments, rather than continuing the practices now prevalent of building vast, sterile industrial parks abutted by huge malls, with most of the workers and customers living in more or less distant developments that are themselves devoid of any services save gas stations and video stores.
Many existing cities have always had housing and commerce side by side, but even cities are also full of massive office and retail developments, crowds of skyscrapers and hulking malls, which need far more workers and customers than the surrounding neighborhoods can generally provide. Now that developers have started tearing down enclosed malls in many cities and replacing them with imitation Main Streets, it may be time to ask them to go one step further and build the real thing….
And in suburbs, which are beginning to draw employment centers in a big way, now is the time when the activist community can voice its support for planning practices that will make a human scale the most important element of new or rebuilt neighborhoods. The Wal-Mart, the giant Safeway, the industrial park--in short, the scale and bleakness of postwar development--are more of an impediment to "access" than lack of roads. In fact, this sort of development creates a "lack" of roads, which are then usually given free of charge to the very entity that spawned the "problem" the roads "solve." More roads will move more cars, at the expense of more people's time and strength. But they will do nothing to improve our lives in the workday world. Compact development, where home is on both sides of the front door, will make life richer and more profitable for all of us…except perhaps for OPEC and the road-building lobbies.
We must begin to model our cities on the supercomputer, with its parallel processors, or on the Internet: many small towns working in concert as a city will be more efficient than one big sprawling obese conglomeration that can no longer button its own pants. A way to bring this about may be to demand that commercial development be limited in some sort of ratio to housing: small offices, small shops, surrounded by neighborhoods: again, Main Street, but Main Street every ten blocks. Then "mobility" will cease to be a problem, access will be easy, people will have time to live again, and we can put the civility back into civilization.
Next time some proposes a new road in or through your neighborhood, make sure you find out whether or not they're solving the problem behind the problem…because chances are that they're not. And it's up to you to set them straight. Your daily life depends on it.
Go to A Word from Eric Miller
