Control Car Culture for Better Living

"We have more to gain [by consulting] our planners than our psychiatrists. We can achieve more to improve our relationships with others by participating in community planning, rather than group therapy encounters. What ails us—most of us, anyway—is not that we are incapable of living a satisfactory and creative life in harmony with ourselves, but that our habitat does not offer sufficient opportunities. It hems us in. It isolates us. It irritates and disrupts." – Wolf Von Eckardt

My good friend's mother was killed in an automobile accident last weekend right here in Gloucester County, NJ. A drunk driver took her life. By now, we have all heard the story and the easiest way to deal with it is to shame the irresponsible driver.... but it really goes beyond that. Ray Oldenburg, author of the Great Good Place writes, "Why should a nation of drinkers arrange their municipalities such that drinking and driving are frequently and almost necessarily combined? “Gasoline and alcohol don’t mix,” says the American slogan. Of course they do. Our urban planners mix them all the time and in great doses. See the zoning codes for confirmation." It's time America holds their town and city planners responsible for what they have built and demand change.

Is this the America we all envision?

I grew up with Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and Sesame Street so forgive my leanings towards a properly functioning urban neighborhood rich with community and mass transit. But unfortunately my real life upbringing was quite different. My parents moved us from Philadelphia to the New Jersey "suburbs" because by then car culture was in full swing and had most Americans under a sort of spell. I suppose my parents ultimately felt it would be safer to raise children in a less urbanized environment, not an uncommon thought in those days. However, recent studies show in actuality the opposite to be true. “A 2013 University of Pennsylvania/Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) study challenges the entire notion that suburbs are safer. The study examines, for the first time comprehensively, all kinds of accidental and violent deaths in America. Contrary to conventional wisdom, urban streets are significantly safer than leafy suburbs and rural areas. While counterintuitive at first glance, the finding is not hard to fathom if you think about it. The number one US cause of death from ages 5 to 34 is automobile crashes, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Deadly automobile crashes are far less likely on lower-speed urban streets.” (Top 10 Reasons for a New American Dream)

Sesame Street set... nice mixed use, walkable neighborhood.

“Social mobility is higher in compact urban places, Arizona State University researchers found. The more walkable the census block — as measured by Walk Score — the more likely someone from the bottom fifth of income will reach the top fifth in their lives.” (Top 10 Reasons for a New American Dream)  I spent the later years of my childhood inherently feeling that something was not quite right about my car-centric hometown. Of course once I reached adolescence I felt downright trapped and ineffectual. When I was told that I NEEDED to drive and own a car to survive in today's world, even then, I felt the perversity of it all. It felt as if my parents told me I needed an artificial appendage grafted on to me to become really human. All the while, I found my visits to Philadelphia with my friends (via Patco Speedline) to be rich with friendly and rewarding human experience and acceptance, compared to my (dangerous) walks around my small-minded town or local mall which were replete with deriding insults and bullying. My favorite was getting stuff thrown at me from cowardly anonymous drivers.

But how does the presence of the automobile really effect community? Cars, as essential as they have become to survive in America have a serious unintended side-effect. They ruin our living environments. We need only to look at Ye Olde Broad Street here in Woodbury to see it. Pre-auto dominant Broad Street was once lined with mansions. Now you'd be hard pressed to find anyone that would want to live there amongst the roar and rush of the auto. Fortunately, with the recent road diet, we have taken a step in the right direction in returning our downtown to a place for people and not merely a state highway through-road. But with most things, it could be better.

The safest roads in America are ones that are not made for easy speeding. The more "obstacles" such as trolley tracks, twists and turns, or even a nice tree-lined median significantly tame the car and signify to the driver that they have entered the domain of humans. The Charter for the Congress of New Urbanism states, "road engineers [once] put the safety of motorists first by designing road and intersections for speeds beyond the posted limit. The idea was to protect those motorists who drive carelessly or too fast. But when the road is designed for speeding, more drivers take advantage of that invitation, and more mayhem results. Proper traffic engineering today reverses that approach by providing physical cues--including street trees, narrower lanes, and intersections designed for pedestrians--that urge motorists to slow down rather than speed up."

Typical Woodbury, NJ Broad Street residence is now the former Bottom Dollar PARKING lot.
Once a grand residence for people has been relegated as a domain for the automobile.
image courtesy Gloucester County Historical Society

“If you plan cities for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. If you plan for people and places, you get people and places," says Fred Kent. If you go with the former you get an unsightly, unfriendly, and unwelcoming place devoid of real community. Millions of American's flock every year to the most successful Main Street in America to experience what a downtown could look like devoid of the damaging effects of the automobile. Unfortunately it's all a mirage and goes by the name Disney World, but it was once a reality all across small town America and still exists in other countries. One of the reasons Disney theme parks do not do well outside of America is that in most other countries there exists public realms that are far superior to the artificial ones presented by the Disney corporation. They don't need the fakery, they have the real thing. They don't need to lose themselves in the fantasy realm because their everyday urban life experience is rewarding enough.

People have the upper hand in this typical European street scene

Thankfully even in "the most car-mad country" of America, driving statistics have been steadily falling since 2004. Combine this with studies that show 3 out of every 4 US Millennials expressing they would like to live in a place where they do not need a car to get around, and throw in of course rising gas costs, rising car costs, car maintenance costs, carbon emission damage to the planet and war for oil… the alternative for smart growth to build better, aesthetically-pleasing, human-scaled neighborhoods is a no-brainer. Only 10% of Millennials and Active Boomers want to live in a suburb where most trips are made by car.

Manhattan neighborhood event
image credit: PPS

We can choose to demolish every last vestige of humanity from our towns in favor of more freeways and faster byways or we can choose to relocalize our communities and reduce the necessary miles needed to drive on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. I've blogged before about the self-sufficiency of 18th, 19th and early 20th century Woodbury, and the story is no different from any town in the United States at that time. Everything needed to survive and live happily could be found within a 5 minute walk from one's home. Why are we now forced to get in a car for virtually everything? It is seriously frustrating, wasteful, polluting, and severely imprisoning especially for Americans who claim to value their so-called freedom. I can't help but view the car as some sort of gas-powered wheelchair. We have voluntarily disabled ourselves through planning and zoning. 

Top is what happens when the car is allowed to dominate (looks scarily like most of our rt.45 sprawl)
Bottom is what happens when you bring people into the equation

1.61 people die on average EVERY DAY in New Jersey alone from automobiles. Here we are in America talking about gun control, when really we need auto control. Death by firearms in NJ is actually lower than death by automobile, but Americans in general evince a sickening complacency when it comes to cars and the violence they can inflict. "Between 2003 and 2012, 47,025 pedestrians were killed by drivers in the United States. To put that in perspective, that’s 16 times the number of fatalities caused in the same period by the natural disasters – floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and the like – that get so much more attention. An additional 676,000 were injured, the equivalent of one person every eight minutes." Of course banishing the auto is just not going to happen in our car-crazy-country (not until the last drop of affordable oil is squeezed from the Earth) but we have the means to tame the automobile where they enter our immediate living areas, our downtowns and our streets and avenues. And of course ultimately we need better mass transit options... trains, trolleys, etc. 

In the latest poll from the American Planning Association, two thirds of all respondents and 74% of Millennials believe investing in schools, transportation choices, and walkable areas is a better way to grow the economy than recruiting companies. It's time to really get serious about transportation reform especially with bankruptcy looming for the nation's transportation trust fund. We can't keep throwing good money after bad trying to prop up the unsustainable network of automobile-based infrastructure. NEVER put all your eggs in one basket. We need more options. Had the drunk driver had the ability to walk or take effective public transit home from a neighborhood pub, perhaps my friend’s mother would still be here today.

For many of us, we drive because we are forced to, not because we want to and our sense of community suffers all the more for it... not to mention our safety. The automobile must be tamed. We should never let a machine dominate our lives... or give it the opportunity to take it from us so freely.

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This post dedicated to the memory of Katherine C. Steponick and for all who have been taken from this Earth by a machine.