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