I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the curse of car dependence, and whether there’s another way for us to live.
Middle-class American life is built around the car. The assumption is that everyone owns a private vehicle and uses it to drive everywhere they go. Alternative methods of transit, like bike lanes, mass transit, and even sidewalks and crosswalks for pedestrians, are an afterthought at best. When this assumption is baked into the layout of towns and cities, the result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We make driving easy and everything else all but impossible, so of course most people choose to drive. The consequences are pollution, gridlock, deaths in traffic accidents, and all the other ills of car culture.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We used to have walkable, human-scale neighborhoods, and if we so choose, we can start building them again. In a suburb in Arizona, there’s an urban experiment in progress which aims to prove that life without cars isn’t just viable, but better.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:
When you look at places where people want to live, they look very different.
These desirable places aren’t sprawling suburbs fed by rivers of highway traffic, or impersonal strip malls and chain stores, or wastelands of concrete with buildings set far apart from each other.
They’re towns and neighborhoods that are built on a human scale. They’re charming, character-rich, and most important, walkable.
They have public green spaces, like parks and gardens, with shade trees and fountains. They have pedestrian-friendly boulevards where people can stroll, and public squares and plazas where they can sit. The boulevards and the plazas are lined with buildings that have small businesses like cafes, restaurants or bookshops on the ground floor and living space above.
We haven’t built places like this in a long time. But in Arizona, the builders of Culdesac are trying to start doing it again.
…and that’s an immediate “no” from me, and probably from most people I know. I don’t live walking distance, or even a half hour drive, from any of my friends. I don’t live walking distance, or even an hour’s drive, from my parents, or parents in law. I don’t live in the same COUNTY as most of these people. I don’t live walking distance or even a half hour drive from anywhere I can paraglide, don’t live walking distance from anywhere I can kitesurf, don’t live walking distance from anywhere I can rock climb, don’t live walking distance from anywhere I can whitewater kayak. I don’t live within a half hour drive of a hospital.
Obviously I could live in one of your walkable cities and not have a car… but the massive reduction to my quality of life would be completely unacceptable, and “boulevards and plazas” and shade trees and fountains don’t cut it as an alternative. The only way you’d get me – or someone like me – into a place like that is by force. Which I assume is the plan, much as it is the plan with electric cars.
We all remember, don’t we, when the government threatened Nokia and Motorola with massive fines if they didn’t pivot to smart phones and stop selling what are now referred to as “feature phones”?
We all remember, don’t we, when the government threatened Sony and Panasonic with massive fines if they didn’t pivot to flat screen, and later HD, and later 4k TVs, and stop selling CRTs?
We all remember, don’t we, when the government threatened battery manufacturers with massive fines if they didn’t pivot to Li-ion batteries and stop selling NiMh, NiCad or standard alkalines?
Oh, no, hang on – none of that happened. Those things came along, and were extremely rapidly adopted, because they were better. Nobody had to threaten any punishments for not moving to the new thing.
Except when the new thing is electric cars, that seems to be different.
Will walkable neighbourhoods be much, much cheaper to live in, to make up for the massive reduction in quality of life that they require? I think I can guess.
My guess is that they may be… to begin with. Once you’ve got a captive population who no longer have the means to move about independently, costs will rise. Slowly at first, then faster and faster until the costs are as high, or higher, than living anywhere else. It’s the Uber/Amazon business model – run at a loss until all the viable alternatives have been supplanted, then turn the screws on your captive customer base. Because what are they going to do? Move? In what? It’s not like they’ll be able to afford a car any more, even if they were allowed to own one.
Sounds dystopian to me.
Years ago, the “not-so-big” architect Sarah Susanka featured some car-less communities in her books. A quick search showed lists of car-less communities, including Denver, Seattle, Honolulu, Long Beach, Washington DC and Chicago.
Anecdotally, a decade ago I taught a seminar at the university of Vermont, Burlington. I really enjoyed the nearby pedestrian-only area with its shops, restaurants, and businesses. On more than one warm summer evening, I joined colleagues at a local restaurant and had a drink or two while listening to a band, then walked back to my off-campus apartment chatting with other pedestrians.
Also anecdotally, my son and his wife live in a neighborhood with a central shopping center, elementary school, ice rink, gym, and any number of walking paths winding through the community. There’s a train station that’s a bit of a hike (or a quick drive), and once there they can travel to a number of local places. They have cars to get to work, but they don’t use them on the weekends because they can easily walk to the grocery store, restaurants and cafes, a gym, a swimming pool in the summer, a liquor store, ahaircut place, and nature trails.
In contrast, where I live used to be farmland until the 1980s. You need a car to get anywhere–in part because there are no sidewalks and anyone foolish enough to walk the unlit, winding country roads is risking being run over by oblivious idiots in bloated oversized vehicles.