In the Agora: A Road System for the Rest of Us

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January 04, 2005

A Road System for the Rest of Us

Environmental issues have to be about more than pollution, because pollution isn't always and everywhere a bad thing. Our mental calculus of the "environment" has to include accounts where we can debit and credit the quality of life that we experience, or else nobody will be an environmentalist.

Wired magazine talks about how traffic engineering can add to and subtract from the quality of life in cities. It can do so directly, of course, by making intersections more or less dangerous, and so by saving or endangering lives; but the very act of driving on American roads can be dispiriting. When the new bridge for Evansville's major east-west traffic artery was installed a few years ago, for instance, the engineers decided to make the walls of the bridge literally just high enough to block a view of the city. All you can see from the roadway now is concrete. Compared with major roadways in Spain or Italy, for instance, the United States has some really dismal places to drive on. (Ironic, then, that the "parkway" was invented in New York.)

Wired discusses Hans Monderman's traffic engineering, which relies on two central ideas. First, most "safety" innovations are evidence of poor traffic planning; the roadway should guide traffic, instead of traffic having to compensate for the road. Second, roads should be multimodal, allowing bicyclists, pedestrians and drivers to share the same roads. Other thinkers have scorned the suburban mode of road planning, with its odd turns, subpar roads, and lack of a grid system.

This isn't just a safety issue, or an urban planning debate. This is a debate over the built environment, which is where nearly all of us spend nearly all of our time. I can only hope that people will react as one traffic planner described:

What we really need is a complete paradigm shift in traffic engineering and city planning to break away from the conventional ideas that have got us in this mess. There's still this notion that we should build big roads everywhere because the car represents personal freedom. Well, that's bullshit. The truth is that most people are prisoners of their cars.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at January 4, 2005 02:16 PM

Comments

Just returned from a weekend in my parents' hometown in the Upper Ohio Valley. It is a gray, crumbling steel town with an aging populace.

The point of discussing Martins Ferry is that it is one of the few places I have been in the USA where people still WALK for much of their daily needs. Beauty salons dot the town at odd intervals, the Irish bar is at one end of town and the Italian-American Club at another, and the high school is in the middle of town, not slammed in a field equidistant from the consolidated towns. Depending on where you live in town, you would only need to use a car once or twice a month to survive.

Martins Ferry was built before Americans were so dependent on cars, and thanks to the geography of the Valley and the economy, the town hasn't grown since the '50s, precluding the necessity of 'modern' tract subdivisions and their entrapments. My Aunt Mary's car, a 1986 Pontiac, has 10,000 miles on it.

The trick is that people have to give up their big-box stores to obtain freedom from CamryLand, and I wonder how many of today's Americans really want that trade-off. To those who do, I say move to Martins Ferry, Ohio. It is the most "environmentally" friendly town in America for that reason. And a mall sits only about 10 miles down the road...

Posted by: Petronius Arbiter at January 4, 2005 06:01 PM | permalink

I think it's more than just giving up the big box stores. Most people still don't work near where they live. Jobs are clustered for efficiency's sake. I suspect that if someone were to take you up on your invitation to move to Martins Ferry, that someone would need to either be a writer or otherwise independently wealth? The issue identified is important, but it's also very very hard to get the worms back in the can at the moment. I'm no Al Gore fan, but even he got this issue right.

Posted by: Mark S. at January 4, 2005 10:55 PM | permalink

The jobs question is, for me, an extension of the big-box issue. If companies give up their desires for sprawling complexes and acres of free surface parking, and instead locate in dense areas, people could live nearby and drive less.

I agree that the problem is too advanced to solve quickly, and propose an extension of the "give up the big-box" idea to the corporations. Companies are always looking for innovations in cost efficiency. Put a facility in a dense area and hire locals. Company can pay them less because their commuter costs are lower. Commerce will have incentive to relocate as people live closer to work and don't want to drive to the suburbs to go to Target.

The market could drive this movement.

Where I see it beginning is in the immigrant Latino population, which often moves into dense urban areas vacated by others, and sees the jobs, commerce, and infrastructure follow. Smart companies will put facilities in these areas to decrease the cost of working. These communities will then rely less on the auto, and their "environments" improve.

Posted by: Petronius Arbiter at January 5, 2005 09:29 AM | permalink

Sooner or later, we're going to start running out of oil.

When gasoline is $20/gal. incentives for alternatives will become more relevant to the average consumer.

We'll probably see more re-zoning of neighborhood areas to include shopping centers, and smaller local schools within subdivisions. An urbanization of what are presently suburbs, if you will.

Posted by: Osama_Been_Forgotten at January 5, 2005 02:25 PM | permalink