Grunnet den tunge trafikken i Hurdal sett i forhold til innbyggertallet, og veier som oppfordrer til fart og ikke ivaretar den gode bygdefølelsen, velger jeg her å kun gjengi de tre siste kapitlene i Siegels bok, som er relatert til trafikk.
Kapitlene kan også leses direkte fra hjemmesida til Siegels Preservation Institute:
- Chapter 5: Limits on Urban Growth
- Chapter 6: The Next Steps
- Chapter 7: The End of Modernism
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| Når man sitter på Rognstadkollen og ser utover Hurdal kan det virke underlig at også denne bygda er et offer for "suburban sprawl" |
Chapter 5
Limits on Urban Growth
Second, we can limit use of the automobile. One very effective way to do this is to reduce the speed limit for automobiles, which would shift longer trips to public transportation, would stop sprawl, and would shorten the average trip length.Why do we need all this planning to build cities that look like cities did a century ago, before there were any urban planners?
Simply doing away with planning will not let us build traditional neighborhoods, because technology has changed since the old neighborhoods that we admire were built. If we eliminated planning, developers would still build office parks, shopping malls, and suburban tract housing, even if the zoning laws did not force them to. That is why the conventional wisdom says that more planning is inevitable to deal with new problems of modern cities.
But we can reduce the need for planning by putting political limits on urban growth. We can directly limit effects of modernization that make planning seem necessary and inevitable.
First, we can limit the scale of development. We can limit the maximum land area that a development can cover, as we now limit height and ground coverage. The planners will still have to create a street system with small blocks, but these blocks can be filled in with individual small-scale developments.
Second, we can limit use of the automobile. One very effective way to do this is to reduce the speed limit for automobiles, which would shift longer trips to public transportation, would stop sprawl, and would shorten the average trip length.
This chapter will look at different ways that cities would be built if we had different political limits on scale and on speed, with these limits in effect during the entire time that the cities are being developed. These are not proposals for changing our existing cities. They are models used in a thought experiment, to show that political limits on growth could let people choose what sort of city they live in, and to show that political limits on growth are essential to creating livable cities.
Today's New Urbanists and regionalists are practical planners, so their most striking accomplishments have been based on the biggest opportunities for practical planning: entire suburban developments and comprehensive regional plans. By contrast, this chapter asks a theoretical question: if we are building a region from scratch, what is the best way to create a traditional urban pattern - best politically, esthetically, and environmentally?
Limiting Scale
With conventional zoning, cities, suburbs and towns try to control their character by controlling which land uses are allowed. Instead, this section suggests that they can control their character by using the appropriate scale when they lay out their street systems and by limiting the scale of development.To create the proper scale, cities should begin by laying out a street system with small blocks. Cities should follow Portland's rule of at least eight street connections per mile; research in Portland found that small blocks are a key variable in determining how pedestrian and transit-friendly neighborhoods are.110 In addition, streets should be relatively narrow, with a 10-foot-wide traffic lanes and 8-foot-wide parking lanes at the most, to slow traffic and save land. They should also have adequate sidewalks, at least 10 feet wide. Other features of street design might depend on climate: for example, in a cold and windy location, the street grid should be oriented diagonally to the prevailing winds, so rows of buildings shelter streets from the wind.
Cities should require new developments to fit into these traditional urban blocks, rather than being built in oversized superblocks like suburban shopping centers, office parks and housing tracts. Developments may be larger than one block, but they should be designed around the street grid and should retain all the streets. New York's Rockefeller Center is an example where this was done very well: it is a large complex that not only fits into the existing street grid but also adds a new internal street. (When large developments are built, the city might specify the locations of the streets but leave it to developers to build the sidewalks and streets within their developments.)
When it lays out the street system, the city must also decide on the location of transit lines. Some streets will have to be wide enough to have room for exclusive bus or light-rail lanes, and some streets may have to be laid out around commuter rail lines.
In addition to laying out a street system on the appropriate scale, the city can control the character of development by setting a maximum height and maximum land area for new development.
Conventional zoning laws already limit building height. It is best to set height limits as a number of stories, as traditional cities did, rather than as a number of feet, as most modern zoning laws do, to make the streetscape more interesting by creating minor variations in buildings' height.
Conventional zoning laws also limit how much of the site can be developed, and we need some maximum on ground coverage to prevent developers from building on 100% of the property, overshadowing the neighboring lots, and creating neighborhoods without light or air, like nineteenth-century tenements. A rough limit would probably be enough for most locations. A city can vary the character of different neighborhoods with different limits on height and ground coverage.
Most suburban zoning laws go much too far in limiting height and ground coverage, because they are trying to keep densities down to levels needed to accommodate automobile dependency. However, it is also possible to limit height and ground coverage just enough to promote the traditional densities of walkable neighborhoods.
Though conventional zoning laws just limit height and ground coverage, experience should make it clear that we also need to limit the total land area that a single builder can develop. Suburban shopping centers, office parks, and housing developments usually have very low height limits and ground coverages, but they are oppressively monotonous - with acres of one-story buildings in a sea of parking. We can eliminate this sort of large-scale single-use development by limiting the land area that a single builder can develop; lots larger than this area would have to be subdivided and developed independently by multiple builders, each developer building around the street system that the city has laid out.
Controlling a City's Character
By looking at a few examples, we can see how a city can control its character by limiting the maximum height and land area of development - but we must bear in mind that these limits are meant to be used in conjunction with the limits on automobile use described later in this chapter.A small town or a city that wants to have the character of a traditional streetcar suburb might set a maximum height of three stories and also require that the frontage of a development may be no wider than one third of a block. Its commercial streets would have a quaint character, because they would be made up of rows of small buildings, each designed by a different developer. Its neighborhoods might be filled with freestanding houses, row houses, small apartment houses, or some mix of the three, depending on what the market demands. Houses on the same block would have varied designs, because the limit on the size of development means that no more than a few houses could be built at a time. We would avoid the monotony of typical suburban subdivisions.
A city that wants to have the character of a traditional urban neighborhood might set a maximum height of five or six stories and a maximum lot frontage of one-half of a block. With small blocks, this scale could give the neighborhood a character something like Greenwich Village in New York or North Beach in San Francisco: small five or six story buildings with apartments and offices, many of them above shops.
A city that wants to be developed as something more like a mass suburb might set a maximum height limit of three stories and a maximum lot size of one, two, three, or four blocks. This would allow developers to build shopping centers and to mass produce tract-housing, though they would have to design the developments around the small blocks of the street system. This scale of development is small enough that different uses would be developed near each other, and people would be able to walk from their homes to shopping.
(Though we are describing the maximum size in terms of blocks, developers would probably orient their projects to streets, not to blocks. For example, with a maximum development size of two blocks, a developer could build a shopping center on both of the sides of a street that is a major transit route, which would be two blocks long and would take up half of the square block on each side of the street.)
A city that wants to be developed as a local business center might set a maximum height of five or six stories and a maximum lot size of one block. Then it could have large office buildings and apartment buildings, but not the multi-building office complexes that the biggest corporations need.
A city that wants to be a major regional business center might set a maximum height of six stories or twelve stories and a maximum lot size of nine or twelve city blocks, to accommodate large office complexes and housing complexes. Like today's edge-city suburbs, this city would be developed with a mix of shopping centers, office developments, and housing developments, with the mix depending on what the market demands. But this city would be much more walkable than today's edge-city suburbs, because it would be built around a traditional street system.
If a city allows lot sizes as large as nine or twelve blocks, it should probably require that developers provide retail on the outer edges of large developments. There should be a standard that requires a certain amount of retail space for every 1000 square feet of office space or of housing in developments larger than a few blocks. Otherwise, the city could end up with stretches of office parks or of housing developments that have no retail within walking distance. It could also end up with dead zones, like the ones around urban housing projects: if developers build large tracts of just housing, people would have no reason to walk in that direction, and it would hurt businesses on surrounding blocks. Requiring retail on the edges of these large developments would provide local shopping and would give pedestrians a reason to walk in that direction.
Usually, controlling the scale of development does away with the need for this sort of land-use planning: when developments are small, there will be enough diversity that there will be shopping and other services within walking distance of homes and worksites. But when we allow development as large as nine or twelve blocks, we need some planning to require a diversity of land uses.
Realistically, modern metropolitan areas need some large-scale development. We can imagine an ideal world where each building is designed and developed individually and where the economy is so decentralized that large office complexes are not needed. But in the real world, we will need some large-scale tract housing for the foreseeable future, to make housing more affordable. And even if we decentralized the economy as much as possible, we would still have corporations and government agencies that need large office complexes. However, traditional city blocks can accommodate these large developments as well as small developments, as Rockefeller Center proves. Because the city sets a maximum size for development, the large-scale complexes will probably be interspersed with some smaller developments, as Rockefeller Center is, making the city more varied and interesting.
Piecemeal Planning
The early planners clearly were wrong to think that we must rebuild the city in the form of superblocks surrounded by wide arterial streets, in order to accommodate the "great scale" of modern technology. Actually, mass production has not taken over as completely as they expected, and the modern economy has a mixed scale: we have both large and small-scale businesses, shopping districts, and housing developments. Modernist urban design does not work well for the small-scale uses, but traditional neighborhood design can accommodate both the small and large-scale uses.Even with these large-scale developments, the city will hold together if the street system is laid out first, designed for pedestrians as well as traffic, and large developments are built around the street system. If large housing developments and office complexes are required to fit into the street system, they will be integrated with the rest of the city.
In other words, the city will hold together if it is developed using piecemeal planning, with the street system designed first and both large and small developments added in an ad hoc way.
Of course, there should be a few exceptions to the rule that developers must fit into the street grid. There are some land uses, such as college campuses, that are traditionally designed on a large scale and ignore the street grid. These should be subject to strict design review to insure that they are knit into the surrounding city, rather than turning their backs on their surroundings.
There are also some urban land-uses that have to be kept away from other land uses, such as oil refineries, large factory complexes, and centers of warehousing and distribution. There must be some areas zoned as districts for nuisance industry and for other incompatible uses, and there should be a relatively short list of land uses that are not allowed in the mixed use parts of the city and are required to locate in these industrial zones.
Apart from these exceptions, though, it would be best if cities controlled their character by limiting scale rather than by controlling land use. The modernists wanted to separate functions so each could be designed on a large scale. We should do just the opposite: limit the scale of development so different functions are built within walking distance of each other. If there is an old-fashioned street grid, even large-scale office complexes or housing developments could have shopping and restaurants within easy walking distance.
A metropolitan area could allow different scales in different neighborhoods. If the area were all a single city, it could give its downtown the scale of a major business center, and it could give outlying neighborhoods the scale of streetcar suburbs. But it would be better for the metropolitan area to be divided politically into many smaller cities: this would give citizens more democratic control over the character of local development, and it would have the added advantage of creating juxtapositions of different scales. For example, if one small city that wants to make itself into a regional downtown is near other small cities that want to be developed at the scale of streetcar suburbs, then it will be easy for people who live in these suburbs to get to this small downtown for shopping and other services. In general, the market will generate the local shopping and services that residents demand, and smaller cities have less ability than larger cities to get in the way of this process.
Visual Coherence
For aesthetic and symbolic reasons, height limits should apply only to the ordinary buildings that make up the fabric of the city: housing, shopping, and office buildings. Height limits should not apply to symbolic structures, such as obelisks and bell towers, or to buildings with symbolic importance, such as major government buildings, religious buildings, and schools. In small towns and suburbs, the local churches, high schools, and city halls should stand out above the urban fabric of homes and businesses to establish each neighborhood's identity visually. In cities, the major government buildings, cathedrals, and symbolic structures should stand out above the urban fabric of apartment buildings and office buildings to establish the city's identity visually.In visual terms, it is best for a city to have a height limit of no more than six stories for fabric buildings. This is the scale that gives visual coherence to traditional European cities, where the cathedral and perhaps the campanile stand out above the urban fabric. We have a similar coherent scale in Washington D.C., where the Capitol dome and Washington Monument stand out above the urban fabric. It is also possible for a city to be visually coherent with a height limit of as much as twelve stories for fabric buildings, if it has symbolic buildings or towers large enough to give it a strong visual identity. With fabric buildings much higher than twelve stories, though, a city is bound to be dominated visually by a crowd of faceless high-rises, like most modern American downtowns; it can still work well as a city, but it will not be visually coherent.
The cathedrals and government buildings that dominate the skylines of traditional cities symbolized the shared values of the people who live there - common religious, cultural and political values. The glass and steel high-rises that dominate the skylines of American cities today symbolize our shared belief in technology and economic growth; the modernists said they were symbols of purely rational decision making, but they look more like symbols of technology that has never been controlled, of a society where growth is not subordinated to human purposes.
If a contemporary American city were built with a six-story height limit for fabric buildings and no limits on symbolically important buildings, it would not center on one religious building, like the cathedral of mediaeval cities whose life centered on a common religion, and it would not center on one or two government buildings, like Washington, DC, a company town where life is dominated by the federal government. It would be much more pluralistic.
In the city center, the largest buildings of the city's major religions would rise above the urban fabric: perhaps a cathedral, a mosque, a Hindu temple. Several different types of civic building would rise above the urban fabric: city hall, the main courthouse, major museums. There might also be a purely symbolic structure in the city center, such as a campanile or a obelisk. Out in the neighborhoods, hundreds of smaller buildings would rise above the urban fabric: church steeples, local library branches, local courthouses, community centers.
These should be designed to make a distinctive mark on the skyline: even if the building proper does not have to be larger than the fabric buildings that surround it, it should include a tower or spire that rises above the fabric. In some cases, we already have conventions that let us identify the type of building from a distance - steeples for churches, minarets for mosques, classical cupolas for government buildings. We should try to create an equally strong visual identity for other types of buildings.
The typical skyline of our cities today is a clutter of faceless high-rises. You cannot even tell by looking at them which are office buildings and which are housing. It is usually boring, because most high-rises look more or less the same, but it is even worse when developers pull in avant-gardist architects who design high-rises that are weird just for the sake of being different. It is usually meaningless, because it is made up of housing and offices, which have no symbolic value, but if one building dominates the skyline, it can create inadvertent symbolism: for example, in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, the 60-story Bank of America Corporate Center, by the well known modernist architect Cesar Pelli, towers over the usual clutter of faceless high rises, and the skyline very clearly symbolizes the fact that this city is so fixated on growth that the developers can do what they want and the bankers are in charge. (They themselves would say it symbolizes the "economic dynamism" of their city - but that is just another way of saying the same thing.)
The skyline of the city we are imagining would be interesting, with distinctive building types rising above the fabric, including some structures that are unique to the city, like the Duomo of Florence or the Campanile of Venice. This skyline would also be meaningful: the urban fabric represents the necessities of life, housing and business, and the buildings that rise above the fabric represent the things that people believe make their lives worthwhile - religion, culture, self-government.
The city could adopt a law like the informal rule they used to have in Philadelphia saying that no other building in the city could be as high as the statue of William Penn at the top of City Hall. It would be most appropriate for City Hall to rise above all the other buildings. This would symbolize the fact that growth is subject to political control. It would also show that, though the city is diverse and contains a variety of different public buildings, its democratic self-government holds it together.
Limiting Speed
Limits on height and scale are not enough in themselves. Today, if a typical American city limited development to the smallest scale described above, developers could turn its main street into a strip mall, with a fast-food stand surrounded by a parking lot on each site. At other scales, we could have other sorts of auto-oriented development.We also need limits on automobile use. Even more than limits on scale, these will determine the character of the city and the way of life of its residents.
In this section, we will look at three different limits on the automobile to show the sort of effect that they would have on urban design. We continue our thought experiment by using these three ideal types as models to describe what cities would be like if they were developed from the beginning with a consistent limit on automobile use.
The models all assume that most residents have the typical American preference for neighborhoods of single-family houses. The cities would look very different if the same limits on the automobile were used in Italy, Austria, or other cultures where people prefer higher densities. This assumption is useful because conservatives often claim that Americans want to live in lower density suburbs, and that this would be impossible without giving free rein to the automobile; we will see that the suburbs would work better with limits on the automobile.
Looking at three models, each with a different limit on the automobile applied consistently throughout the entire metropolitan area, is useful as a thought experiment. It will make it clear that, by choosing different sorts of limits on the automobile, we are choosing different ways of life - which is a political decision that people should make for themselves, not a technical decision that should be made by the planners.
A Pedestrian-Oriented City
As the first ideal type, consider a metropolitan area that banned cars and other personal motor vehicles. Residents could still rent cars to use for recreational trips to the country, and motor vehicles would still be used for deliveries and other services. But in-city personal transportation would rely on walking, bicycling, buses, light rail, and commuter rail.Banning cars and limiting the scale of development could give us a city where most neighborhoods have the density of the streetcar suburbs that were common in American cities a century ago.
Because Americans are wealthier now, virtually everyone who wanted to could live in neighborhoods like the streetcar suburbs where the minority of Americans who were middle class lived before World War I - a time when middle-class Americans did not own vehicles. The streetcar suburbs were a high-point of American urban design. They had private houses on lots that were typically one-tenth of an acre, with small front yards and adequate backyards. There were shopping and trolley lines within easy walking distance of houses, with a few stories of housing above the stores on the main streets. Many stores offered delivery of groceries and heavy goods.
Of course, many people would also want to live in row houses or in apartments, once these higher density neighborhoods were no longer overrun with cars. Nineteenth-century row-house neighborhoods are still very livable for families. Apartments are the most convenient choice for many young people and elderly people.
Compare this model with the cities we have in America today. These streetcar suburbs would be quieter and safer for children than modern suburbia, because the cars would be removed. They would be more neighborly, because people would walk to local shopping and parks and would meet their neighbors along the way. They would be healthier, because of lower air pollution levels and because people would get regular exercise from walking and bicycling: as recently as 1970, more than half of all American children 6 to 11 years old walked to school; today, only 15% of American children walk to school,111 and obesity has become such a serious problem among children that doctors are calling it an epidemic.
Most people would consider this sort of streetcar suburb a better place to live than modern American suburbia, and it also would be about as convenient in terms of transportation, because of its higher densities and mixed uses. Turn-of-the-century streetcar suburbs had an overall density of about 15 people per acre, while postwar American suburbs had only about 2 people per acre (including, in both cases, the land used for roads, shopping, parking and other uses as well as the land used for housing itself). Streetcar suburbs would save almost seven-eighths of the land eaten up by the sprawl suburbs we build today. The higher density alone would reduce the distance of the average trip by almost two-thirds, but actual trip length would be reduced by more, because smaller-scale development allows more local services - for example, neighborhood shopping rather than regional malls.
It would be possible to provide very frequent transit service in this sort of compact city, where private automobiles do not draw users away from public transit. We would also expect many improvements on the bicycle to appear once people no longer drove cars, such as bicycle trailers to carry small children or cargo, and pedi-cars with light-weight convertible roofs that snap on for rainy days. Even more important, people would not need to use much transportation: it would be quicker to walk to the local store or doctor's office than it is for modern suburbanites to drive to the shopping mall or medical center.
Though it is hard for us to imagine today, one hundred years ago, most middle-class Americans who lived in cities or towns did not own vehicles. Maintaining a carriage was a sign of wealth and was beyond the means of the middle class. Streetcars were used for commuting to work and for occasional trips to other parts of town, and everyone lived within walking distance of a neighborhood shopping street, where you could find stores, doctors' offices, and other everyday services right there in your neighborhood. People nodded to neighbors as they walked to the main street, and they invariably met people they knew at the neighborhood stores.
There is a good picture of the life in middle-class American towns and streetcar suburbs before World War I at the beginning of Booth Tarkington's novel Seventeen.112 The book begins by describing a teenage boy walking home from the soda shop on Central Avenue. At home, he finds that his mother has gotten a bargain by buying some wash tubs at an auction. Because the store that sold them has gone out of business, it will not deliver them; because the tubs must be picked up by the end of the day, there is no time to hire a delivery man; and so the boy has to carry the tubs home. It is only in this sort of extraordinary situation that the family is inconvenienced by not having a vehicle: ordinarily, it is easy to walk to the store, and easy to get bulky goods delivered. The book was written in 1915 - less than a century ago, but it seems like a different world where middle-class American families did not own vehicles, and middle-class teenagers walked to the local main street rather than driving to the mall.
With a ban on automobiles, this ideal type would eliminate the need for land-use planning almost completely - apart from special zoning for noxious industries and other incompatible uses. Commercial uses would tend to be built around transit nodes and transit corridors without any planning, as they were a century ago, because they would have to be located where customers and employees could get to them easily. Some commercial uses would be in neighborhoods as conveniences. Instead of outlawing them through zoning, the city would allow corner stores in neighborhoods: they would be convenient for local residents, they would not attract cars, and they would not turn into boutiques with a regional draw because they are not at transit stops. The city could also allow doctor and dentist offices in neighborhoods, rather than concentrating them all in one regional "pill hill" hospital district. And the city could allow local shopping streets to expand onto nearby side streets if the demand is there: residents would not have to worry about customers driving around their streets looking for parking, because customers would take transit on the main street, and would walk up the side street to get to the shopping.
In addition to eliminating most zoning that specifies land use, this city could also do without urban codes that make sure that buildings are oriented to pedestrians rather than set back behind parking lots. Buildings would be oriented to pedestrians because almost all of their users would be pedestrians. For example, most stores would be built to the sidewalk, as they were in traditional shopping streets, but there would not be the complete uniformity that we have when planners use urban codes; there would also be room for an occasional idiosyncratic variations in the store frontages, such as a setback that allows a restaurant to have more space for seating in front.
A City that Tames the Automobile
As a second ideal type, to illustrate the effect of a different limit on the automobile, consider a city with a speed limit of 12 mph to 15 mph for private vehicles. This limit would let people use cars for local errands, but people would use a higher speed regional rail system for longer trips.Because of the low speeds, automobiles would no longer dominate transportation and exclude other users. Bicycles and small electric vehicles similar to golf carts could travel along with the automobiles in the main traffic lanes. Shopping streets would be quieter and safer for pedestrians than they are in today's cities. Residential streets could slow traffic even more, as the Woonerfs in the Netherlands do, to make them safe places for children to play.
With this sort of speed limit, there would be a massive shift to public transportation for commuting and for regional shopping. Both office and shopping developments would naturally tend to cluster around transit nodes and corridors, because they would have to locate there, in order to attract customers, clients, and potential employees who use public transit.
With the lower speed, people would travel shorter distances. Because it would take longer to get to regional shopping, for example, most every-day shopping that is now is done in malls would shift to local shopping streets. There would probably be some stores on these local shopping streets where most customers come by car, particularly supermarkets, but most stores would have to appeal to both drivers and pedestrians.
Though densities would not be as high as in Victorian streetcar suburbs, they would be higher than in modern American suburbia. Typically, people might live on one-sixth acre lots - a size midway between the one-tenth acre lots that were common in streetcar suburbs and the one-quarter acre lots of postwar suburbia. Neighborhoods might have the feel of the bungalow neighborhoods that were popular during the 1920s, which had lots about this size.
This city would retain some of the advantages of the car-free streetcar suburb that we looked at earlier, such as good transit services and shopping streets that are relatively near to people's homes, but it would be less neighborly, less compact, noisier, and less safe than the car-free streetcar suburb. It would also have some of the advantages of suburbia: automobiles would let people live in houses with larger lots, haul big loads of groceries to the basement deep-freeze, chauffeur children around the neighborhood, and generally live a more suburban way of life.
This moderate limit on cars would not reduce the need for planning as much as the ban on cars that we looked at earlier. For example, this city would need design guidelines to make sure that parking is located behind stores: many developers would want to put parking in front of the store, to attract drive-by customers, and if they were allowed to do this, it would ruin the street for pedestrians. This city would also would need single-use residential zoning to protect neighborhoods. Neighbors would object to corner stores, because they would draw automobile traffic into the neighborhood. Though it would need some land-use planning, this model would need far less planning to control sprawl and to solve transportation problems than today's cities do.
Suburbia that Works
As a third ideal type, consider a city with an even looser limit on automobile use, an in-city speed limit of 25 or 30 miles per hour.Even this loose limit on the automobile would do much more to solve our cities' problems than the comprehensive regional land-use and transportation planning that environmentalists usually advocate. Long-distance commuting that is now done by freeway, would shift to public transportation on heavy commuter rail systems. Commercial development would tend to cluster around the rail stations, to take advantage of the regional workforce and customer base that comes by rail: instead of freeway-oriented regional shopping malls, the city would have mixed-use shopping and office complexes (with plenty of parking) at rail stations - though there would also be some districts zoned to accommodate automobile-oriented big-box shopping. Much of the suburban sprawl at the edges of today's metropolitan area would be eliminated because it is totally dependent on high-speed freeway access and would be isolated from jobs and shopping without it.
Yet this speed limit would allow everyone to live a suburban life: if the city had a relatively high-speed commuter rail system, people could all live in suburban neighborhoods in houses with two-car garages on quarter-acre lots.
At this low a density, most people would drive whenever they left their houses, but there would still be major differences from today's suburbia. People who had long commutes would drive to the local train station in order to commute to work. People would generally shop and work in mixed use complexes built around these train stations, with most local customers driving there to do their shopping and with most commuters and regional shoppers coming by rail. Both these differences would both be improvements: commuting by rail is generally less grueling than fighting traffic on the freeway, and mixed-use centers are more interesting and more convenient than shopping malls and office parks.
These changes would cut automobile use at least in half, because most commutes would be shifted from freeway to rail, because most people would drive to nearby shopping, and because workers could walk from their offices to lunch. This reduction in automobile use would dramatically reduce the city's environmental problems.
None of the environmentalists who call for regional governments and massive planning bureaucracies expect as much from them as you could get from a simple political decision to limit automobile speed to 25 or 30 miles per hour.
Because it allows so much automobile use, this city would need a substantial amount of planning. Like the previous model, it would need land-use planning to protect residential neighborhoods from traffic, and it would need urban design guidelines to require businesses to be oriented to pedestrians as well as to cars. Because it allows higher speeds, it would need to plan the street system to protect residential neighborhoods from through traffic: neighborhoods would not be safe or livable if drivers could use them as shortcuts to avoid arterial streets.
Modern suburbia deals with this problem by building housing on cul-de-sacs and twisting streets, but as the New Urbanists have pointed out, this sort of street pattern makes distances so long that is virtually impossible for people to walk from their homes to local services. It is better to use an old-fashioned street grid with traffic diverters, which keep automobile through-traffic off the streets but which do not stop pedestrians and bicyclists. At least the people who live nearest to the shopping streets would walk to them, and some hardy souls would bicycle to them despite the intimidating speed of the traffic.
With all the automobile traffic concentrated on arterial streets, we would also need the planners to do the sort of traffic engineering used in modern American cities to keep traffic flowing - such as left-turn only lanes and signal phases - even though this would make the commercial streets uglier and a bit harder for pedestrians to negotiate.
This model is not at all radical: it is how our cities would have developed after World War Two, if we had retained traditional street patterns, and if we had decided to promote suburbanization by investing in commuter rail systems instead of freeways.
American cities became automobile-oriented without any deliberate decision. People moved from the city to suburbs where they could afford houses, without thinking about the effect they were having on the region as a whole; planners projected and accommodated this trend by building suburban housing and freeways; and the public never made a deliberate political choice of what sort of cities it would live in. By contrast, this ideal type, with a speed limit of 25 or 30 miles per hour, represents a deliberate, responsible political choice of a suburban way of life: it would let everyone live in suburbia without blighting the entire region with freeways and traffic, and without blighting the earth with global warming.
Outside of the City
Incidentally, regardless of which of these limits is used inside the city, moderate speed limits would also be useful outside of the city.Building freeways through our countryside turned many of our rural areas into exurbs filled with commuters: for example, much of southern New Hampshire is now essentially a suburb of Boston. Because they were designed by transportation planners whose only goal was to speed traffic, the freeways by-passed small towns: new developments near the freeway interchanges drained business from nearby Main Streets. The freeways also fragmented the open countryside and reduced wildlife populations.
Outside of cities, our goal should be to replace the freeways with old-fashioned country roads designed for speeds of 45 miles per hour or so. Rather than bypassing towns, these country roads should go through the towns' Main Streets, where they should be slowed to the speed of local traffic. By slowing traffic in this way, we would shift many long-distance automobile trips and most freight hauling to rail: there are abandoned and semi-abandoned tracks all over the country that could be upgraded relatively inexpensively, without the cost of purchasing new rights of way.
Small towns that have been neglected during the last fifty years would revive, once they had a railway station in the center of town and cars driving through slowly on Main Street again, as they did during the early twentieth century.
Rural roads would be used primarily by local people and by people driving for pleasure; people in a hurry would take rail. The people who drove would actually get a feel for the countryside and the towns they passed through, rather that driving on a freeways that feel the same everywhere.
Today, for example, when Californians go skiing in Utah, they fly to Salt Lake City and then rent a car at the airport to drive to the ski resort, but when Californians go skiing in the Sierras, they drive across the state on freeways to the ski resort. If there were country roads with lower speeds, people who wanted a slow, leisurely trip would still drive across the state to go skiing in the Sierras; it would take longer and be more pleasurable than the drive is today. People in a hurry would take the train to the Sierras and rent a car at the station to drive to the ski resort. With high-speed rail, it would be faster to go by train than it now is to drive, and the central valley and the Sierras would not be as overwhelmed with automobiles as they are today.
Political Limits or Planning
As a thought experiment, we have compared three ideal types of cities that consistently apply different limits on the automobile - a ban on automobiles, a 12 or 15 mile per hour speed limit, and a 25 or 30 mile per hour speed limit. This thought experiment lets us compare the two different approaches to controlling urban growth: the direct political limits on growth described in this chapter and our usual method of controlling growth through planning. It shows that direct political limits on growth are more effective than planning, are more democratic than planning, and allow more freedom of choice than planning.More Effective
We can see that political limits on growth are more effective than planning by comparing our three models with Portland, Oregon, which has the most effective and most environmentally oriented regional land-use and transportation planning in the United States. As we have seen, Portland's urban growth boundary and its zoning to concentrate new development in downtown and in pedestrian- and transit-oriented neighborhoods were projected to reduce per capita automobile use by less than 11% in five decades. Automobile use is reduced relatively slowly, because even with strict zoning to concentrate new development around transit, most people still live in older auto-oriented neighborhoods, and most people still drive to distant shopping centers and jobs. Even its relatively small reduction in automobile use is possible only because Portland has also made political decisions to limit automobile use, for example, by removing the Harbor Drive freeway, and by converting two downtown streets into transit malls. Without the political will to occasionally put this sort of direct limit on the automobile, the planning would have reduced auto use even less.By contrast, if we had the political will to limit the speed of automobiles, we could do much more than Portland has done with all its planning. For example, reducing automobile speeds by 10% or 20%, could reduce traffic overnight as much as Portland's planning will in five decades, because lower speeds would encourage local shopping and shorter commutes by everyone, not just by those who live in the new neighborhoods around transit.
More Democratic
Political limits on urban growth also are more democratic than planning, because limits on scale and speed are issues that ordinary people can understand and vote on, while regional planning is so complicated that most people cannot fully understand the technical issues involved and do not have the time that it takes to participate in the planning process. Most people resist proposals for regional land use planning for exactly this reason: they know they can have some influence over the local zoning board but that they could have no influence at all over a remote regional planning agency.Our three models show that, underlying the technical questions that land-use and transportation planners deal with, there are political questions that should be decided democratically - questions about the sort of life that people want to live. A ban on automobiles would create pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods, a 30 mile per hour speed limit would create suburbia, and these different neighborhood designs obviously involve different ways of life.
The ban on automobiles limits private satisfactions for the sake of the public realm, with people foregoing cars to live in neighborhoods that are quieter, safer, and more neighborly.
The 30 mile per hour speed limit sacrifices these public goods for the sake of private satisfactions, with people living on larger lots and having two cars per family.
This is a decision about how we want to live, so it is a decision that ordinary people should make for themselves. It is not a technical decision that should be made by experts in urban planning.
Planning is inherently undemocratic, because planners make decisions by correlating and analyzing information that is not accessible to people who are not specially trained experts. By contrast, the idea that we need political limits on technology means that building a livable city requires political decisions that ordinary people can make democratically.
More Freedom of Choice
Political limits on urban growth also allow more individual freedom of choice than planning. After a city made the initial political choice to adopt the limit on automobile use in one of our three models, the mix of single-family houses, row houses, and apartment buildings in the city would depend on individuals' decisions about how they want to live. When we discussed these three models, we assumed that most people would have the usual American preference for low density: even with a total ban on cars, they would move to streetcar suburbs, as Americans did a century ago. But if people preferred more urban neighborhoods, any of these three limits on automobile use would lead to a higher density city. Instead of the density of a streetcar suburb, the first model could give us the density of a traditional European city - but without the cars - if people chose to live at that sort of urban density.The final shape of the city would depend on individuals' choices about what sort of neighborhoods they want to live in, as well as on the political choice about limiting the automobile. With the same limit on the automobile, cities would turn out differently in places where people put a premium on privacy and green space (as they historically have in America and England) and in places where people prefer urban neighborhoods (as they historically have in Italy or Austria).
Comprehensive regional planning restricts individual's choice of the type of housing they can live in: the mix of different housing types and densities is a technical decision, made by experts who run the computer models that analyze the region's land use and transportation system. By contrast, with political limits on technology, the type of housing that is built would depend on people's individual choices. In any of these three models, people could choose to live at higher or lower densities; transportation planners would have to project these trends and provide the public transportation needed to accommodate them.
More Livable
Finally, these three models show that we must limit automobile use to make our cities more livable. Any of the three models works better, is more attractive, and is more livable than modern, freeway-oriented suburbia.The idea that we can make transportation work better by limiting transportation is counterintuitive. If people are stuck in traffic jams on the freeways, their gut response is that we need wider freeways and maybe also rail systems to get some people off the freeways - and that limiting speeds would make it even harder for them to get around.
In fact, the distance that the average American drives doubles every few decades.113 Are Americans better off today than we were in the 1960s because we drive twice as much as we did then?
We travel more precisely because we have built so many freeways and other forms of high-speed transportation. Research has shown that people have a roughly constant amount of time that they budget to transportation: if they can travel at higher speeds, they travel longer distances rather than spending less time traveling.
The idea that there is a constant amount of time budgeted for transportation, so that higher speeds just make people travel longer distances, was first advanced by Yacov Zahavi of the U.S. Department of Transportation, who studied changes in travel patterns between 1958 and 1970 and found that people did not spend any less time traveling, at a time when massive freeway construction let them travel much faster.114
Follow-up research confirmed his conclusions. It showed that the amount of time that Americans spend commuting to work has remained constant since the 1840s, when the movement to the suburbs began as a reaction against the industrial revolution, despite the vast changes in technology since then.115 The total amount of time that Americans budget to transportation also tends to remain constant, about 1.1 hours per day.116
As speeds have increased, the suburbs have sprawled over more land, the malls and big-box stores have attracted customers from further away, and the distances we drive have gotten longer.
Regardless of the limit we put on transportation, people would spend about the same time traveling. When we decide what limit to put on transportation, the question that we should ask is what sort of city we want to live in. Higher speeds do not save people time, but they do allow people to live in different types of neighborhoods.
Any of the limits on transportation that we have looked at would reduce the need for planning. Some planning would still be needed, of course: even with a total ban on automobiles, transportation planners would still have to lay out streets and transit lines by projecting future residential patterns and future demand for transportation, and we would still need planning to run large park systems, to reserve areas for nuisance industries, and so on. With less stringent limits on automobiles, we would need even more planning, including zoning. But even with the least stringent limit we looked at, a 30 mile per hour speed limit, it would be much less difficult than it is today to provide efficient transportation, to control sprawl, to control pollution, to build viable city centers, and to protect the region's open space. Any of these political limits on urban growth would eliminate many of our cities' environmental problems and make it easier for the planners to solve the remaining problems. And any of these limits would also dramatically reduce larger environmental problems, such as global warming.
Our models are ideal types with the same limit on transportation imposed throughout the metropolitan area, but in practice, political limits on the automobile do not have to be consistent throughout a metropolitan region. Local municipalities could make their own decisions to lower speeds; large cities could lower speeds or ban cars only in certain areas, as many European cities have banned cars in parts of the city center. Any local decisions to limit the automobile would reduce the transportation problems and the environmental problems of the entire region.
Chapter 6
The Next Steps
Technocratic planners have always said that we should replace the irrational patchwork of city governments with a regional land-use and transportation planning authority, which could deal with all of the region's problems in a comprehensive way. The old political divisions should be replaced with a single regional planning authority, because in modern societies, political decisions are not as important as the technical tasks of planning.In reality, to reclaim our cities, we need to do almost the opposite: we need to recover the political use of government, so we can use the law to limit technology.
We do need some special-purpose regional planning agencies that cut across local jurisdictions and are responsible for transportation, for air and water pollution control, and the like, but we do not need centralized control of all regional land-use and transportation planning. Instead, we need to begin making responsible political decisions to limit technology, in order to cut our cities' problems down to a size that the planners have some chance of solving.
The three models in the previous chapter showed that urban planning should be subordinate to political choice. In this chapter, we will look at the practical political actions that are needed as the next steps to rebuilding our cities.
Stopping Freeways
The political struggle for our cities began with the anti-freeway movement of the 1960s. During the 1950s and 1960s, there were plans to cut freeways through the hearts of most major American cities. For example, Robert Moses wanted to build three cross-Manhattan freeways that would have destroyed the city's pedestrian feel. In San Francisco, planners wanted to slice up the city's neighborhoods and hide its waterfront with freeways, but in 1961, San Francisco residents stopped the Embarcadero freeway, which would have cut the city off from the waterfront: freeway construction had already begun, and beyond the last off-ramp, there was a freeway stub hanging in the air for decades, showing where the freeway was supposed to continue. After beginning in San Francisco, the anti-freeway movement spread across the country, and by the end of the 1970s, it was virtually impossible to build new freeways in the centers of most major cities, though freeways continue to be built at the urban fringes.An essential first step in reclaiming our cities and our countryside is to stop building freeways. Funding is needed to maintain existing roads and freeways. New freeways may be needed under unusual circumstances, but the freeway planners should be required to prove that some special circumstance makes it necessary before adding new freeway capacity. Apart from that, all the funding that now goes to expanding freeway capacity should go to public transportation, to bicycling, and to improvements for pedestrians.
In 1991, there was a small shift away from the federal government's pro-freeway bias with the passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), which replaced the old Highway Trust Fund, dedicated solely to freeway construction, with funding for multi-modal transportation. ISTEA and its successor laws were a step in the right direction, but most of the funding still goes to freeways.117 Freeways are still being built in the countryside and on the edges of metropolitan areas, where they do the most to encourage sprawl. In some cases, citizens' groups make heroic efforts to stop them: In Indiana, Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads has been working against the Dept. of Transportation for many years to stop the I-69 freeway, which would cut through some of the state's best farming land. But when exurban or rural freeways are proposed, there usually are not enough people around to stop them, as there are in the city, and the planners in the state departments of transportation build the freeways without many citizens thinking about them.
The transportation planners are still at it even in Great Britain, where the anti-freeway movement is much stronger than in the United States.
During the 1980s, the Thatcher Administration developed plans to build freeways throughout the country in order to encourage the development of American-style shopping centers on the edges of towns: to emphasize how much it would do to spur investment and economic growth, they called the plan "Roads to Prosperity." There was a huge public outcry against this plan, which cut across the usual political boundaries. It was opposed by staid Tory ladies who wanted to preserve the traditional character of England, and by self-styled anarchists who protested freeway plans by illegally sitting in trees on the proposed routes. There was such strong opposition to the Thatcher plan that three-quarters of the funding for the National Roads Programme was eliminated within five years, and even the construction industry realized that it has lost the battle over new roads.118 Ultimately, virtually all of the proposed new roads were stopped. The UK changed its planning policies to make it more difficult to build freeways: highway planners must base their planning on the assumption that providing capacity can induce enough demand to fill that capacity.119 The opposition to freeways was so successful that Alarm-UK, the umbrella group coordinating all the anti-freeway protests, dissolved itself on the grounds that it was no longer needed.
But after a lull, the UK's transportation planners came up with a new plan for building more freeways. In 2000, the government released a transportation plan that had a relatively strong environmental bias: more of its £121 billion funding went to public transportation than to roads, and much of the road funding was for maintenance. Yet the plan did include an explicit target of widening 5% of the country's roads and building thirty new bypasses around towns,120 though much of England's anti-freeway activism focused on stopping bypasses, because they pave the open countryside and drain life out of towns. The planners tried to take a balanced approach - but, after all, they are transportation planners whose job is to provide people with mobility, and sometimes they will find that building roads is the way to provide mobility.
The best model of citizen activism is in Switzerland, where voters passed an initiative in 1994 to ban all freeway expansion, despite opposition from their own government and from the European Community's transportation experts. Switzerland also has a law banning all trucks over 28 tons, to reduce the environmental effect of truck traffic and to shift freight onto rail.121 These direct political actions to limit environmentally destructive forms of transportation give us much better results than we would gotten if the Swiss had considered these issues technical problem in transportation planning and placed them in the hands of a regional planning authority. Yet these political actions would have been impossible if Switzerland had joined the European Community and surrendered some of its sovereignty to the continent's transportation planners.
Controlling Sprawl
Along with the political battles to stop freeways and slow traffic, there have been many political battles during recent decades to stop suburban sprawl and out-of-scale development.Wal-Marts and other superstores have sometimes been stopped in rural parts of the country - most notably in Vermont - where they threaten the character of its small towns. We also need to stop freeway-oriented superstores in cities, where they threaten neighborhood shopping streets. Big-box discount stores, such as Costco and the Price Club, are now driving older supermarkets out of business, just as supermarkets drove independent grocers and corner stores out of business a half-century ago. Neighborhood supermarkets that have been in business for decades are closing, no longer economically viable once they have lost 10 or 15% of their business to larger superstores a few freeway exits away. People in these neighborhoods who do not have cars suddenly find it difficult to buy food.
Britain implemented national planning guidelines that strictly limit suburban shopping centers after a government survey found that one new shopping center, with parking for 10,000 cars, took 70% of its shoppers from the nearest town and many shoppers from other surrounding towns.122 We need similar legislation in the United States.
There have also been many successful political battles to stop low-density, automobile-dependent suburban housing development. The Sierra Club alone has stopped hundreds of developments all over the country that would have suburbanized open space. During the last decade, a number of states have developed more general policies to stop sprawl. As we have seen, Oregon requires all cities to establish an Urban Growth Boundary (UGB), a line beyond which suburban development is not allowed. Maryland concentrates state investments in infrastructure in existing cities and towns and does not subsidize infrastructure for new sprawl development. Other states should adopt similar policies to stop sprawl.
Zoning Choice
The most important thing we can do to stop sprawl is simply to loosen up local zoning laws that require sprawl. Despite the talk about smart growth, municipalities and counties all over the country still have zoning laws based on the 1950s ideal of suburbia, which require developers to build low-density, single-use projects. All this land-use planning is the greatest contributor to sprawl today, as it was in the 1950s.We have seen that the New Urbanists have begun building more traditional neighborhoods, which are popular with home buyers, but developers who want to build in this style almost always must go through a burdensome process to get around the standard zoning. Most developers are not willing to spend the extra time and money needed to get zoning variances, so they build the conventional suburban development required by the zoning laws.
The National Association of Governors has estimated that about one-third of Americans would prefer to live in traditional neighborhood developments, but that only 1% of the new housing available is in this type of neighborhood, because zoning laws all over the country require developers to build low-density, single-use suburbia. The Congress for the New Urbanism has estimated that, in the next decade, because of demographic changes and continuing changes in taste, 55% of all American homebuyers would prefer to live in traditional neighborhoods if they had the choice.123
A number of cities across the country have given people this choice by adopting Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND) zoning laws in parallel with their conventional zoning laws: developers can choose to use either of the two zoning standards. In 1999, Wisconsin passed a state law requiring all cities and towns with more than 12,500 people to adopt TND zoning laws, which can either be the sole code regulating development or can be used in parallel with their conventional zoning laws, giving developers the choice of which they want to follow.
Other states should do the same as Wisconsin, by requiring cities to allow zoning choice. We know more about the problems that conventional suburban zoning causes today than we did in the 1950s. We should realize by now that it is foolish to legislate sprawl.
Current laws that allow zoning choice generally apply only to larger greenfield developments, but zoning choice is also needed in existing suburbs, to allow developers to rebuild shopping centers and strip malls as pedestrian oriented neighborhoods. New Urbanists have begun to do this all over the country.124 One of the first examples was Andres Duany's Mashpee Commons,125 which converted a 1950s shopping mall in Cape Cod into a development that looks like a traditional town center, and Duany found that the main obstacle to building this project was zoning: for example, the zoning laws required setbacks that made it illegal to build storefronts facing the sidewalk, and in order to get around the law, Duany had to say that the streets of this traditional development were the internal circulation system of a shopping mall.
The movement to rebuild malls and strip malls would spread through the country and change the character of suburbia, if only we changed the zoning laws so it was not illegal. We cannot allow zoning choice in the residential neighborhoods of existing suburbs. It would not be politically feasible to pass laws that let developers demolish two houses on an existing suburban street and replace them with five houses. In fact, we would not want these extra houses added to a residential suburb, where the street system makes walking impossible. But if we allowed zoning choice for commercially zoned areas in existing suburbs, it would change their character by giving them walkable centers, and it would raise their density enough to support better public transportation.
The smart growth movement has had many successes, but it would be much more successful if it changed its tactics in one important way: it should start lobbying for zoning choice instead of for comprehensive regional planning.
Zoning choice has important political advantages over the usual demands for comprehensive regional planning. Conservatives attack regional planning by saying that people prefer living in suburbia and that environmentalists are trying to use big government to force people to live in a way that they do not want to live. Ordinary people are suspicious of regional planning because it takes power from local government and restricts individual choice by letting planners decide what types of housing will be available.
Proposals for zoning choice sidestep the usual conservative criticism of environmentalists by making it clear that sprawl is not the result of free consumer choice. Sprawl is caused by government planning, by zoning laws that force developers to follow the 1950s suburban ideal. Conservatives cannot very well attack zoning choice by saying that people should be forced to live in sprawl, even if they do not want to. If the environmental movement began to emphasize zoning choice, traditional neighborhood development would sweep across the country, because no one can argue against giving people this choice.
Zoning choice is such an obvious winner that it is hard to understand why environmentalists have not made it one of the key policies that they advocate politically. There is only one explanation: they are so used to demanding top-down solutions imposed by the planners that they cannot imagine giving people more choice.
Controlling Speed
Finally, we also need to slow automobile traffic. There are three possible ways of doing this: limiting speeds on neighborhood streets, removing automobile lanes on arterial streets, and reducing speeds on freeways.Limiting Speed on Neighborhood Streets
We have to limit speeds on local streets to make walkable neighborhoods safe enough that people with children want to live in them rather than in suburban cul-de-sacs. To keep walkable neighborhoods safe and livable, existing neighborhoods need "traffic calming" to limit speeds, and new neighborhoods need streets designed for lower speeds.Many European cities have calmed traffic dramatically. In the Netherlands and Germany, many residential streets have been converted to Woonerfs, redesigned to slow traffic to five or ten miles per hour.
Traffic calming on residential streets has also begun in the United States, generally using simple and inexpensive methods such as speed humps, gradual undulations in the road that make it uncomfortable to drive more than 15 miles per hour. The city of Oakland, CA, planned to begin a study to determine the best way to protect residential streets from high-speed traffic, but there was such strong neighborhood pressure for immediate action that the city decided to install speed humps in five hundred locations before even beginning the study. Many cities have also used more expensive devices to slow traffic, such as islands in the center of roads or roundabouts at intersections.
The New Urbanists design new neighborhoods with streets that work for pedestrians as well as for cars, by making streets and lanes narrower and making turning radii tighter. New Urbanism has begun to influence official design standards for new roads. Research has shown that the usual standards for street design, which require wide lanes, wide shoulders, and straight roads, encourage people to travel above the speed limit. The Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) issued alternative street-design guidelines in 1998, which allow narrower streets in urban neighborhoods, and narrower, curving roads in the country, to slow traffic.126 The ITE represents more progressive traffic engineers, but we can expect this movement to spread to more conventional traffic engineers in coming decades.
Removing Traffic Lanes on Arterial Streets
There has also been some movement in American cities and suburbs to remove traffic lanes on arterial streets, slowing traffic.American cities are beginning to give transit priority over cars by converting lanes from general use to transit lanes, which not only speeds up transit but also slows cars by reducing the road capacity available to them. Cities have also begun to use technology that allows transit drivers to preempt traffic lights with electronic devices that turn the light green as the bus approaches: lights on these streets are currently timed to optimize the flow of automobile traffic, so that these devices slow down automobile traffic as well as speeding up transit.
Some American suburbs have begun to convert strip malls into urban boulevards with slower traffic. One well known example is Walter Kulash's redesign of the main street of Winter Park, Florida, near Orlando, where he was the city's traffic engineer. Before he started, the street was a typical strip mall, with three lanes of high-speed traffic in each direction, no on-street parking, and parking lots facing the sidewalk. Kulash converted this strip into an old-fashioned Main Street, by replacing two traffic lanes with curbside parking, by planting street trees, and by changing the zoning so developers had to build new stores facing the sidewalk, with parking behind them. The on-street parking slows traffic, because cars have to stop when someone is parallel parking. Storefronts on the sidewalk also slow traffic, because they make the scene interesting enough that people want to slow down to see it. These changes reduced the average speed on the street to 15 miles per hour, and they also made it a very successful shopping street. Kulash points out that many people driving though do not have to be there at all; they choose to drive there because they enjoy being on the street.127
Because he was so successful in Winter Park, Kulash is now in demand as a consultant, using similar methods to revitalize declining downtowns in older cities around the country.128 Some suburbs are beginning to get the idea by adding on-street parking and pedestrian oriented uses to their strip malls, as the New Urbanists suggest.
Reducing Freeway Speeds
Reducing speed limits on freeways is one of the most effective things we can do to reduce traffic regionally, but of course, it would also be one of the most controversial.In one experiment, eleven of Switzerland's twenty-six cantons reduced the speed limit on all highways to 80 kilometers per hour (about 50 miles per hour) for five days in February, 2006, in an attempt to reduce high levels of air pollution caused by fine particulates. They found that overall traffic on the highways decreased by 14%, and that traffic flowed more smoothly with no traffic jams. Particulate emissions near highways went down by 5% to 10% but went back up after the experiment ended.129
Consider how much more effective reducing speed is than regional planning. Switzerland cut traffic by 14% overnight by reducing speed. Portland expects to cut traffic by 11% in fifty years using regional planning.
A number of American cities have slowed traffic dramatically by removing freeways and replacing them with surface streets, The trend began on the west coast, in the environmentally conscious cities where we would expect this sort of experimental project: Portland removed Harbor Drive in the 1970s, and San Francisco removed the Embarcadero Freeway and Central Freeway during the 1990s. The trend moved to the American heartland when Milwaukee, Wisconsin, removed the Park East freeway and replaced it with a street grid. Eight other American cities have adopted plans to remove freeways.130 However, these cities are generally removing minor freeway spurs that blight central neighborhoods in order to promote economic development, and they generally consider the slower traffic an undesirable side-effect of the plan.
In Seattle, the Alaska Way Viaduct, a major freeway that cuts the city off from its waterfront, has reached the end of its life, and there is a strong citizen's movement to remove it and replace it with surface streets and transit. Citizens voted in a referendum to reject plans to replace it with a new elevated or underground freeway. Mayor Greg Nickels continued to push a plan to build an underground replacement freeway. As a result, he was voted out in November 2009, beaten by Sierra Club activist Mike McGinn, who made his name by fighting against this freeway.
Though the movement to slow freeway traffic is currently an uphill battle, it is conceivable that more people will begin to support this movement, if we recognize that building livable cities requires this sort of political choice. In Seattle, the political movement to remove the Alaska Way and replace it with a slower surface boulevard will transform the region if it succeeds, and this could spur similar changes elsewhere.
Limits on Parking
Apart from reducing speeds, other limits on the automobile are also useful. For example, most cities now set minimum parking requirements for new development that are high enough to accommodate all the automobiles that are projected to come if free parking is provided. These requirements are a self-fulfilling prophesy: because the free parking is provided, the cars come.Instead, cities could set a maximum parking limit for new developments - perhaps 2 or 2.5 spaces per 1000 square feet for shopping, about half the usual suburban standard. This standard is low enough that it would encourage developers to locate stores where they attract customers who come by walking and by transit. It would also prevent developers from building shopping centers out in the countryside and drawing customers out of the city by providing unlimited free parking.
With this standard in place, businesses would have to charge for parking to ration the available spaces, giving people an incentive to use other forms of transportation. Like limits on speed, this limit on parking requires a responsible political decision that may cause a bit of inconvenience in the short run but that will make the city more livable in the long run.
Transforming our Cities
If we shifted funds from freeway expansion to public transportation and pedestrian safety, if we allowed zoning choice, and if we began to lower speeds and limit parking, we could transform American cities as dramatically in the next few decades as they were transformed during the postwar decades.Freeways are perennially congested because of induced demand, and suburbanization can continue only because we are constantly increasing freeway capacity. If we stopped expanding the freeway system and we provided high-quality public transit on exclusive rights of way, people would flock to transit-oriented neighborhoods because of their convenience. Older neighborhoods would attract new infill development, because they were originally built around public transportation and would be the prime beneficiaries of revived transit. Most new development would also be transit-oriented, because it would be the most convenient way for people to get around.
Ultimately, the goal would be to go further and move gradually toward something like the three models described in the previous chapter. So far, freeways have only been torn down in the center of cities, where there are obviously better uses for the land. After a few decades of expanded public transportation and transit-oriented development, it may become possible to begin transforming entire metropolitan areas to make them transit-oriented rather than freeway-oriented.
This seems like a radical change, but fossil fuel depletion and global warming may provide the impetus that lets us make radical changes during this century.
And after all, the changes our cities need during the twenty-first century are less radical than the changes that occurred during the twentieth century. If we followed the most extreme model described in the previous chapter and banned cars entirely, that would undo the changes that happened during the last century and bring back the sort of neighborhood where the American middle class lived in 1900. But no one would predict such an extreme change: some neighborhoods may ban cars, but some neighborhoods undoubtedly will continue to allow them. The changes in our cities that the most radical environmentalists hope for during the twenty-first century are not as extreme as the change from pedestrian and transit-oriented cities to completely automobile-dependent cities that hard-headed traffic engineers and suburban zoners brought us during the twentieth century.
Chapter 7
The End of Modernism
No one today believes in the complete technological determinism of the technocrats and the early city planning theorists. Events have overtaken this view: the environmental movement has stopped many dams, freeways, and power projects by showing that they would damage the quality of life, so it is no longer possible to claim, as Jacques Ellul did, that choice of technology is no more feasible than "personal choice, in respect to magnitude, between 3 and 4.''131Yet a vestige of technological determinism lives on in the widespread belief that the problems of modern society involve such complex issues that decisions about how we live must be made by planners on technical grounds.
This book has shown that individual and political choice of technology is possible, that we can put the planners in their place if we think about the city in human terms. When we think about what a city's design means in terms of how we live, then we can choose technology on human grounds.
The early planners believed we needed city planning to accommodate modernization and growth. Today, we should be able to see that we must set political limits on destructive forms of modernization and growth - and that these limits will reduce the need for city planning.
Modernism in Its Dotage
In both architecture and city planning, the old modernist doctrines have been discredited.In architecture, modernism is moribund, but it is dying a slow death. The functionalist architecture of the early and mid twentieth century was modernism in its prime - vigorous, filled with a sense of its moral superiority, out to change the world - but today's avant gardist architecture is modernism in its dotage. The modernist establishment still has power: avant gardists like Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind get the commissions for museums and for other buildings that are self-consciously artistic, and avant gardists regularly win the Pritzker Prize, which bills itself as the Nobel Prize for architecture. But this establishment modernism has lost its social content. No one today believes in the functionalists' theories about "honest" design or about technocracy bringing us a better world.
Modernist architecture is in the position that academic art was in during the late nineteenth century: it still has the support of the establishment, but it is just an echo of a style that has not had real vitality for at least a generation.
In urban design, the shift away from modernism has gone even further than in architecture: modernism is completely dead as both a social and an esthetic ideal. Developers still churn out modernist projects where the zoning laws require them, but innovative urban designers and writers about urban design all have rejected modernism, and all are trying to rebuild the traditional urbanism that was destroyed by modernism.
Modernism began as a radical movement, but now it is the status quo. Early in the twentieth century, socialists and other radicals believed modernist architecture was the style that would lead us to the ideal planned society of the future, but no one today believes that Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and other belated modernists are leading us toward a better society. Today, the political idealists are the environmentalists and preservationists who fight to stop modernist projects. The New Urbanists are the ones who believe that they are leading us toward a better society, that their neo-traditional designs will produce cities that are more environmentally sustainable and that have a stronger sense of community than modern cities.
Unfortunately, some New Urbanists have been apologetic about not using modernist architecture, explaining that they use neo-traditional architecture only because the market demands it and that their urban codes can also accommodate modernist buildings. They should be able to see that the modernist symbolism is wrong. Modernist architecture, in its prime, expressed the idea that we should scrap the past entirely and rebuild a purely rational modern world, but we should know by now that is wiser to modernize selectively. In some cases, modern technology is obviously an improvement: when we buy old houses, we want to remodel them by giving them modern heating systems, bathrooms, and kitchens; we do not want them to have coal-burning heaters and stoves, as they did a century ago. But it does not follow that we should scrap every traditional element of design and build houses that are shiny boxes of concrete, steel, and glass.
Technical Questions and Human Questions
We need to reject the modernists' technological determinism by seeing that decisions about design involve human questions as well as technical questions. We must decide what to design as well as how to design it.If we do not want a freeway to collapse, we must let the engineers design it on the basis of their technical knowledge; but we are wrong to reduce the question of whether the freeway should be built at all to a technical decision that transportation planners make on the basis of projected traffic volumes and cost-benefit studies. Engineers and planners have no special competence to decide whether our cities should be built around the automobile, because this is a decision about how we want to live.
When we think about the human purposes of technological decisions, we can put the planners in their proper place. The traditional relationship between an architect and a client is a good example of the way that ordinary people should control experts. Architects have special knowledge about materials, structures, and other technical questions, which let them make certain decisions about designing a house, but the clients know how they want to live, which lets them make the fundamental decisions about what sort of house the architect should design for them to live in.132
Ordinary people should have similar power over fundamental decisions about urban design, so they can decide what sort of cities and neighborhoods they want to live in.
Decentralizing
Decentralizing government could give ordinary people some control over some decisions that are now made by planners.The conventional wisdom says we should replace local zoning boards, which the average person can try to influence politically, with comprehensive regional land use and transportation planning agencies, which are so remote and deal with such complex technical issues that they leave the average person helpless. Ideally, we should do just the opposite: we should decentralize local government as much as possible, to give people more control over how their own neighborhoods are designed and to create a stronger sense of community.
Though we will never get back to the New England town meeting, there are many decisions that can still be made locally. The San Francisco Bay Area developed in a more decentralized way than other American cities, and it still has many small municipalities near its core, including a few with populations of only 10,000 to 20,000. There are larger special districts to provide water, regional parks, public transportation, and the like, but these small cities have their own zoning departments, their own park departments, their own police departments, their own traffic engineering departments with authority over their streets (except for a few major streets that have been designated as state highways), and their own City Councils that pass all the usual municipal legislation. They are no less efficient than larger cities in the region, and they are certainly much more efficient than large cities such as New York and Los Angeles.
Ideally, we should break up our cities into small self-governing municipalities like these. When a city's population is greater than 100,000, it becomes difficult for the average person to deal with the bureaucracy or to get anything done politically, but in cities of 20,000 or 30,000, people can have a voice in deciding how their own streets and neighborhood parks can be improved. Regional planners must lay out transit lines, major arterial roads, and regional parks, but small municipalities can do the best job of designing local streets, parks and plazas. Small municipalities can also take the lead on larger political issues: for example, small cities have been among the first to pass laws banning styrofoam containers, promoting recycling and illegalizing discrimination against the handicapped. Decentralized city governments can give ordinary people a say on this sort of major national issue.133
If it is not politically possible to break up a large city, it may still be possible to decentralize its planning. A large city could be divided into planning districts of, say 50,000 people each, which have their own zoning departments, traffic engineers, parks departments, and planning commissions. It is important that there not only be a local planning commission but also a decentralized planning bureaucracy that is responsible to the local commission. When local planning boards deal with city-wide traffic engineering, zoning, and parks departments, they have to make immense efforts to get the mayor to control the city bureaucracy, and they have very little power of their own. Of course, the city or region as a whole needs its own traffic engineering and park department to deal with major roads and large parks, but the planning districts also need their own traffic engineering and park departments to deal with local streets and parks.
Decentralization would let people take a first step toward political responsibility: after they have acted locally as citizens, they would be more likely to act regionally and nationally as citizens. Decentralization would also help create local community as people dealt with their neighbors politically - though this would often be a conflictful community.
Yet decentralization cannot work in cities built as modern automobile oriented developments. Decades ago, for example, a new high-rise housing project was built next to the freeway in the smallest of the cities in the center of the Bay Area, raising its population from 4,500 to 6,000 people. When the project was done, local political activists discovered that the project's security system would not let them in, so they suddenly could not leaflet about one-quarter of the city's voters. And they also could not leaflet the new residents on the city's streets, because people living in this development usually drove right to the freeway whenever they left their apartments. Most of these new residents know more about what is happening in Washington or New York, which are heavily covered on television, than they do about what is happening in their own city, because they live at the scale of the freeway rather than living in their own city. People must walk around their neighborhoods before they can govern their own neighborhoods.
Thinking Qualitatively
Though decentralization is useful for promoting democratic self-government, there are obviously many decisions in a modern society that must be made centrally, such as decisions about designing the regional transportation system. Even though they cannot be decentralized, these decisions can still be controlled democratically if people think about them concretely and qualitatively.This change in the way we think about technological decisions is far more important than decentralizing decision making. Decentralization can let people control details of local design. But this book has shown that people can use the law to control the big decisions about technology if we think about these decisions in concrete human terms, as decisions about how we live our lives, rather than being mystified by the planners' abstractions. We need to move beyond the planners' quantitative studies and to think about these decisions qualitatively.
As long as we think that abstractions such as transportation, housing, and pollution control are our "urban problems," we will let city planners and other experts decide what kinds of neighborhoods we live in. For example, one set of planners will analyze the "transportation problem" quantitatively and come up with a solution that moves people efficiently - and people will not see that this decision controls the way that they live.
By contrast, when we think about cities qualitatively, in human terms - as we did when we looked at the three ideal types described in Chapter 5 - it becomes obvious that people should make the political and personal choices that control the city's design. Traffic engineers and city planners are the experts on "solving the transportation problem," but ordinary people are the experts on what sort of city they want to live in.
As we saw in Chapter 5, different political limits on technology create cities with different ways of life. A 30 mile per hour speed limit would promote suburbia and a way of life that focuses on private satisfactions, such as houses on large lots and two cars for each family. A ban on automobiles would promote a way of life that focuses on public goods rather than on private satisfactions: people would live on smaller lots and without automobiles in order to have a city that is quieter, safer, and more neighborly. This decision must be made politically, because it is a decision about the public realm.
Within the framework of this political decision, people can also make individual decisions about how they want to live. Even in postwar America, where the political push was all for suburbia, there were some people who chose to stay in their old ethnic neighborhoods or to move from the suburbs to old inner-city neighborhoods that attracted bohemians because the rent and living expenses were low. Likewise, the city that you would get after putting political limits on automobile use would depend on people's individual preferences: the three models in Chapter 5 assumed that people preferred low densities, as most Americans do, but the cities would end up looking very different if people preferred urban neighborhoods, as most Europeans do.
People should make these decisions for themselves, because they are decisions about what sort of lives people want to live. The decision about limiting automobile use must be a political choice. The decision about what sort of housing to live in with any given transportation system should be an individual choice. These key decisions determining how a city is designed are not technical decisions that should be made by urban planners.
This does not mean that we should - or can - do without planning. Even with the most extreme limits on urban growth that we looked at in Chapter 5, planning is needed to lay out transportation routes, regional parks, utilities, and so on.
It does mean that we should subordinate planning to political and individual choices about how we want to live. Democratic decisions, such as the decision about what sort of transportation system we want to spend public funds on, and individual decisions, such as people's decisions about what sort of neighborhood they want to live in, should determine the big picture of how the city is designed. Planners should project the trends that result from these choices and should provide the transportation lines, regional parks, water systems, and other infrastructure needed to accommodate these choices.
If we put political limits on technology, we will put the planners in their proper place, useful but subordinate. We will also reduce the problems that the planners have to solve to a manageable level, making it possible for the planners to deal with these problems successfully.
Our thinking about technological decisions has already begun to change.
When city planners built freeways during the 1950s, everyone believed that the decision about whether a freeway was needed was a technical problem, which the planners should decide by doing studies of projected demand. But when some city planners began to oppose freeway construction during the 1960s, they talked about the freeways' effects on the "quality of life." By asking this qualitative question, this question about whether we want to live in cities built around freeways, they turned the decision about whether the freeway was needed into a political question that should be decided democratically.
Likewise, the New Urbanists have made decisions about urban designs more democratic by holding charettes where people in a community make decisions about neighborhood design by looking at drawings and computer visualizations of alternative designs. They have found that people react very differently when they are shown designs visually than when they are told about the same designs in abstract terms, as a given number of units built at a given density. When proposals are presented as an abstraction, people are more likely to be against density, but when the same proposals are presented visually, people are more likely to think that a shopping street looks more friendly and livable with a couple of stories of housing added above the stores.
Both of these examples show that looking at urban design in concrete, human terms does not mean ignoring the planners. City planners were among the first to talk about limiting freeway construction, because they were the first to learn the facts about the subject. But there was a big difference between the city planners who built the freeways, who wanted to solve technical transportation problems for a passive public, and the city planners who opposed the freeways by talking about their effect on the quality of life, a human question that turned freeway construction into a political issue. Likewise, the urban designers who run charettes allow ordinary people to make sensible decisions about urban design by converting the abstractions that planners deal with into concrete visual terms, so people can decide which is the sort of city they want to live in.
When we stop thinking about cities as bundles of technical problems and start thinking about cities qualitatively, about the different ways we live in different types of cities, then we will be able to act as citizens who use the law to govern ourselves - not as clients who expect the planners to provide us with more housing, more transportation, and a better environment.
The Failure of Growth
Why did our thinking about technology and growth change so dramatically during the twentieth century? Early in the century, everyone thought it was inevitable that the planners would gain more power because they were competent to mobilize technology and maximize growth. Today, almost everyone agrees that we need some control on technology and growth: the idea that we need planning to control the destructive side-effects of growth has become a commonplace, and this book's call for direct political limits on urban growth carries the same bias one step further.This change occurred during the twentieth century because we moved from a scarcity economy to a surplus economy.
In late nineteenth century, the average American lived at what we now define as the poverty level, and new technology was increasing production income rapidly. This is the economic situation that gave birth to the technocratic theories of Thorstein Veblen and the early functionalist architects. When America desperately needed more economic growth to eliminate widespread poverty, people were willing to give power to the technocrats who could engineer growth.
In the late nineteenth century, for example, urban workers in the United States lived in over-crowded tenements, where the inner rooms had no windows and where all the apartments on a floor shared one toilet. The early functionalists drew up plans for mass produced "workers housing" that used new technology to provide everyone with housing that met basic standards of decency. No one objected that the housing was impersonal and monotonous; the important thing was that people had enough living space, a private bathroom, some sun shining into the windows, and somewhere for the children to play - because those basics were enough to make this housing an immense improvement over the tenements.
In the twentieth century, most Americans emerged from poverty. In 2000, America's per capita GDP was more than seven times as much as it was in 1900 (after correcting for inflation).134 Because of increasing affluence, twentieth century America was very successful at producing housing for the masses - with Levittown as the archetypal mass-produced suburb. In America today, the masses live in suburban subdivisions and own two cars per family - and many have trouble keeping up with the payments. They have the basics that the technocrats planned for a century ago - a private bathroom, sun shining into the windows, lawns where the children can play - and they are forced to go so far beyond the basics that they are economically stressed: their neighborhoods are designed so they cannot buy groceries or get a cup of coffee without driving. Their lives would be easier if they had the choice of living in neighborhoods where they could get by with one car, or even with none, rather than needing two.
One hundred years ago, it made some sense to let the planners make the decisions about what should be produced. In a scarcity economy, where the way to improve people's well-being was by using technology to increase production, it was plausible to give decision-making power to the planners who could mobilize technology effectively.
Today, it no longer makes sense to let the planners make the decisions for us. Now that the average American has the necessities and many extras, we need to think critically about the human purposes of the economy. The goals of production are no longer as obvious as they were when most people did not have adequate housing. Rather than deciding how to produce basic, decent housing most efficiently, which is a technical question for housers and other planners to answer, we have to decide what types of neighborhoods we want to live in, which is a human question for everyone to answer.
The Rise and Fall of the Suburbs
We can see the failure of growth very clearly by looking at the history of the middle-class neighborhoods of American cities. During most of American history, growth made neighborhoods more livable, but during recent decades, growth has made our neighborhoods less livable.Before the nineteenth century, all large cities were built as "walking cities."135 Because most people got around by foot, cities had to be very dense. People lived in three to six story buildings, in row houses and apartments, often with shopping on the ground level. Streets were narrow, and buildings were not set back from the sidewalk. The older parts of European cities and towns are still built this way, and some early American cities were just as intense: the streets of eighteenth century Philadelphia looked like the streets of London, though there were vast areas of open land nearby.
Beginning early in the nineteenth century, steam-powered ferries and horse-drawn omnibuses let the American middle class live at lower densities. New neighborhoods typically had residential streets made up of three-story row houses: streets were wider, and houses were set back a few feet from the sidewalk and had larger backyards. Houses were commonly built on one-twentieth acre lots.
Beginning late in the nineteenth century, horsecars on steel tracks, cable cars, and electric trolley cars let the middle class move to "streetcar suburbs,"136 which we think of today as classic American neighborhoods. They were made up of free-standing houses, with fairly large backyards, small front yards, and front porches looking out on tree-lined streets. Houses were commonly built on one-tenth-acre lots.
Streetcar suburbs felt spacious and quiet, but their most important form of transportation was still walking, though they were only about one-tenth the density of the traditional walking city. Streetcars were used for commuting to work and for occasional trips to other parts of town, but everyone lived within walking distance of a neighborhood shopping street.
Many people like cities, but for those who prefer the suburbs, new transportation technology and economic growth brought real benefits during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. From the walking city, to the row-house neighborhood, to the streetcar suburb, middle-class neighborhoods became greener, quieter, more spacious, healthier, safer for children.
During the twentieth century, Americans moved to even lower density suburbs. After World War I, middle-class neighborhoods were made up of bungalows on one-sixth acre lots: often, the neighborhood stores were not quite close enough to walk to easily, so people drove a few blocks on local streets to buy their groceries. After World War II, middle-class neighborhoods were made up of suburban homes on quarter-acre lots: the city was rebuilt around the freeway, and you had to drive on high speed arterial streets, where the traffic was nerve racking, to buy your groceries.
During the twentieth century, the middle-class moved from one-tenth acre lots in streetcar suburbs where you can walk to quarter-acre lots in postwar suburbs where you have to drive.
Yet all the extra land that we consumed during the twentieth century did not make neighborhoods more livable. All the automobiles made neighborhoods noisier, more congested, and less safe for children. The nearby farmland and open space that attracted people to suburbia was paved over, replaced by more freeways, strip malls and tract housing. The sense of community disappeared, as local shopping streets were replaced by regional shopping centers.
Likewise, all the extra transportation that we consumed - the freeways and the two or more family cars - did not make it more convenient for us to get around. As we have seen, research has shown that the amount of time that Americans spend commuting and budget to transportation tends to remain constant.137 As speeds increased, suburbs sprawled, and malls got bigger, and people drove further to get to their jobs or to go shopping.
The middle class did become much larger during the twentieth century. One hundred years ago, most Americans were working class, and only a minority could afford to live in streetcar suburbs. Families generally considered themselves better off when postwar prosperity expanded the middle class and let them move from urban apartments to Levittown - but they would also have been better off if they had moved from apartments to streetcar suburbs.
Lower densities stopped improving neighborhoods during the twentieth century. Neighborhoods became more livable as middle class Americans moved from the walking city, to row houses, to streetcar suburbs. But by World War I, the middle class was already living in neighborhoods that were adequate. The streetcar suburbs gave families enough space, enough privacy, enough quiet, a big enough yard. Modern suburbia does not bring much added benefit, but it does cause real social and environmental problems, such as air pollution, automobile accidents, congestion, loss of open space, the ugliness of shopping malls and strips, and now global warming. At some time during the twentieth century, we reached the point where the costs of urban growth outweighed its benefits.
Limiting Noise
Noise is another telling example of the failure of growth. All through the nineteenth and twentieth century, the middle class tried to move to quieter neighborhoods by moving to lower density suburbs. Until World War I, they succeeded: from the walking city to the streetcar suburb, middle-class neighborhoods did become pleasanter and quieter. But during the twentieth century, so many new sources of noise appeared that modern suburbia is noisier than the much denser streetcar suburbs were one hundred years ago.It should be obvious by now that the only way to reduce noise is by limiting its sources.
For example, cities and suburbs could cut their noise levels significantly by banning gasoline-powered gardening equipment. Electric edgers and electric chain saws work just as well, and there are always electrical outlets within reach on urban or suburban lots; there are also rechargeable battery-powered lawn mowers available. Some cities already have banned gasoline powered leaf blowers, because people refuse to put up with this new nuisance; the next step is to go back and get rid of the old nuisances that people accepted in the days when they thought less about the quality of life.
Some sources of noise can be banned at the municipal level, but we also need strict Federal standards to limit noise from motorcycles, garbage trucks, construction equipment, trucks with refrigeration equipment, and the like. Federal noise standards were developed in the 1970s, but they were never implemented, because the Reagan administration said they would slow economic growth: no doubt Reagan believed that people needed faster growth so they could afford to move to suburbia and get away from the city's noise.
Likewise, if we want any quiet in our parks, we need to restrict the use of jet skis, snowmobiles, off-road vehicles and other motorized recreational equipment. Americans already spend too much time pushing buttons and getting instant gratification, and we would be better off with outdoor recreation that requires more physical effort, such as canoeing, sailing, hiking, and bicycling. Environmentalists have had some success in banning off-road vehicles, snowmobiles, and jet skis.
Finally, if we want any quiet in either our cities or our countryside, we need quieter cars and trucks. Hybrid cars, such as the Toyota Prius, are much quieter than ordinary cars. Likewise, hybrid turbine buses reduce the noise and pollution from diesel buses dramatically, and we need similar technologies to replace conventional diesel trucks.
Vehicles are the single greatest source of noise in suburbs and cities. Noise is the number one reason that people give for wanting to live in lower density neighborhoods. Noise is also responsible for some of our worst suburban design - such as subdivisions surrounded by sound walls. There will be limits to the popularity of neotraditional neighborhoods until we do something to reduce traffic noise: many people will not want to live in denser neighborhoods if they have to listen to neighbors revving up their cars and motorcycles.
Noise is a clear example of the failure of growth. Through the nineteenth century, growth and new technology such as electric streetcars allowed people to escape from the cities to lower density neighborhoods that were quieter. During the twentieth century, new technology allowed people to escape to even lower density neighborhoods, but new technology also made these neighborhoods noisier. By now, it should be clear that political control of technology is needed to give us quiet neighborhoods or even a quiet countryside.
Urban Growth and Economic Growth
The failure of urban growth is just one part of a larger failure of economic growth. In fact, federal funding for freeways and guarantees for suburban mortgages were justified during the postwar period, precisely because they promoted economic growth by stimulating the auto industry and the construction industry. We have seen that consuming more transportation and more land for housing no longer makes our cities more livable. There is also reason to believe that economic growth generally has also stopped increasing our well being.Several studies have developed indexes that measure America's economic well being, correcting the Gross Domestic Product by subtracting money that we spend to cope with problems caused by growth, such as the cost of pollution control technologies, and by subtracting an estimated money value of environmental costs that we live with, such as noise. In general, they have found that growth increased our well being until the 1960s or 1970s, and then growth began to reduce our well being.
The Daly-Cobb Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, one of the earliest of these indexes, corrected the Gross National Product by subtracting the estimated money value of environmental costs and also subtracting extra spending on health care, education, commuting, and urbanization that is necessary only to support growth, which economists call "defensive expenditures." It also corrected for inequality of income. According to this index, Americans' economic well being increased substantially during the 1950s and 1960s, leveled off from 1968 until the end of the 1970s, and declined after 1980.138
The Genuine Progress Indicator, compiled by an organization named Redefining Progress, makes even more extensive corrections to the Gross Domestic Product. It shows that our actual economic well being rose until the early 1970s, then leveled off beginning in the late 1970s, so the average American has become no better off since the 1970s, despite our much higher per capita GDP.139
The economist Juliet Schor has shown that a significant number of Americans are now "downshifters," people who have deliberately chosen to consume less so they can work shorter hours and have more time to devote to their families and their other interests.140 But there is a limit to how much individuals can downshift if they live in cities that burden them with the expense of driving every time they leave their homes. Downshifting could go much further if we also made political decisions that promoted it.
We tend to think about the larger issue of economic growth in the same way that we think about urban growth. Just as we consider the city a bundle of problems that must be solved by planners because they are too complex for ordinary people to deal with - transportation problems, housing problems, environmental problems, and the like - we also think of the economy as a bundle of problems that we must leave to the planners because they are too complex for us to deal with - inflation, unemployment, shortages of resources, global warming. We ignore the human question that underlies all these technical economic problems: how much we should consume to live a good life.
The three models in Chapter 5 look at the city and ask what level of consumption is enough to live a good life. We need to ask the same question about the entire economy: How much is enough?
This book has looked at ways that we can choose the sort of cities we live in, politically and individually, based on the sort of lives we want to lead, and it has shown that these choices can dramatically reduce the problems that urban planners need to deal with. The same is true of the entire economy: if we begin to choose our standard of living politically and individually, we can dramatically reduce problems such as resource shortages and global warming, making it more likely that our economic and environmental planners will be able to deal with these problems successfully.
The limits on urban growth that we looked at in this book are just one part of a larger change that is needed to move beyond the era of economic growth.
Citizens or Clients
The policies needed as the next steps toward rebuilding our cities are all politically feasible. Wisconsin requires cities to offer zoning choice. Freeway construction has virtually been ended in Great Britain because of political opposition. Many cities in America are reengineering streets to make them safer for pedestrians and are adding light rail or exclusive bus ways, and a few cities are removing freeways. Old downtowns are being revived, and the New Urbanists have begun replacing shopping centers and strip malls with old-fashioned neighborhoods.There is enough support for these policies that they add up to a new political movement. Until recently, it was primarily a negative movement that tried to stop things from getting worse by fighting against freeways and sprawl. Today, it has become a positive movement that is making things better. Only one thing prevents it becoming a mass movement that changes our cities dramatically: everyone believes that changing our cities is a technical problem that must be left to the planners.
We still believe it is up to the planners to redesign our cities, as the technocrats claimed a century ago. Ordinary people are passive consumers of the services that the planners provide: the most they can do is demand more and better planning.
We believe it is up to the transportation planners to provide us with mobility. We ignore the fact that the average American drives twice as much now as in the 1960s and is no better off as a result of all this extra mobility. Instead, we stick with the old technocratic idea that it is up to the planners to deploy the technology that provides us with transportation. This technocratic approach implies that ordinary people are consumers who have no political responsibilities, and so it has drained us of the political will that we need to limit technology and make our cities livable.
It is revealing that we try to reduce traffic problems not by limiting the automobile but by subsidizing public transit. Our urban planners agree that Americans travel too much, that we need to build housing, work, and shopping near each other to reduce the need for transportation. But instead of reining in the automobile, we provide subsidies to mass transit in addition to the huge subsidies we give the automobile, though all these subsidies obviously cause us to travel longer distances. Our newer urban rail systems give a subsidy of over $10 per one-way trip to people who commute to the most remote suburbs, which comes to over $10,000 per year to a family with two commuters - and that only includes the operating subsidy, not the capital expenses.141 With huge public subsidies to both commuter rail and the automobile, more people keep moving to suburbia, and traffic keeps getting worse.
This sort of thing will happens as long as people expect the planners to solve our problems. Rather than demanding that the planners provide us with more transportation, we need to realize that we would be better off with less transportation - and that the way to get there is by using the law to put direct limits on destructive forms of transportation.
The calls for more planning assume that centralized organizations staffed by experts should provide us with goods and services, and ordinary people are nothing more than consumers. This view made some sense one hundred years ago, when scarcity was the key economic problem, but it makes no sense now that over-consumption is the key economic problem in the United States and the other developed nations. Today, we need to invert this technocratic view, so we can change from clients who expect the planners to solve our problems into citizens who deal with these problems ourselves by putting direct political limits on destructive technologies and on growth.
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