Urban planning has spent the last 70 years designing around the automobile. Gone are the integrated bus and trolley systems that could transport a person from a small town in southern NH to Cape Cod in 4 hours.
The thriving mixed residential / retail neighborhoods of my youth where the butcher, the barber and the florist lived above their shops were bulldozed decades ago in favor of retail only strip malls.
In many cases locally, those neighborhoods were destroyed by eminent domain takings. The long misunderstood WHITE FLIGHT from urban areas in the 1970s was not driven by race. It was largely driven by poor urban planning that destroyed many long standing neighborhoods.
A recent attempt to renovate a large mill complex into a cluster of shops and shop owner occupied lofts was held up for 3 years because of racist claims in was marketed to bring only whites into the area.
Too bad the race baiters making the accusations did not bother to notice over 80 percent of the waiting list was made up of minority shop owners who still had shops in town, but had moved out after becoming successful.
According to AAA, the average car commuter spends $715 a month for the privilege of commuting in a vehicle which, according to numerous studies, ruins your marriage, measurably increase stress levels and rates of depression, encourages heart and lung disease via air pollution and is a contributing factor for obesity.
That figure doesn’t include the lost time and productivity our commutes cost us, nor does it factor in the health consequences, so let’s say conservatively that spread over a lifetime, those amount to a little over an extra couple thousand a year, or enough to bring our total up to a round figure like $1000 a month. (Studies of the productivity costs of congestion alone put it at around $1000 a year.)
On top of all that, we tell pollsters that we hate our car commutes and that they interfere with our lives. So why do we persist?
I think the answer is simple: We’re so conditioned to think that car ownership is normal and mandatory that most of us don’t even consider the alternative. We don’t even get to the point that we consider where we could live on an extra $1000 a month (and that’s just the cost of a single car!) All of us except the youths, of course, who are poorer and more technology-obsessed than ever, leading to a profound decline in the rate at which they obtain driver’s licenses, reports Lisa Hymas at Grist.
There are also, of course, massive systemic issues with the way our cities are built, and this can’t be discounted. Even in the face of mounting evidence that oil is only going to become more expensive and our densest urban areas are as congested as we can tolerate, local governments continue to push for more sprawl.
Fortunately, all of us can vote with our wallets, and local governments are starting to wake up to that reality. In Washington, DC, the Office of Planning is paying residents up to $12,000 to more or less bribe people to move closer to work. Then there’s the larger trend toward telecommuting and the fact that bike commuting in already-dense cities like New York has doubled in just the past four years.
Meanwhile, websites like WalkScore and PadMapper help you find a home that doesn’t require a car. This is all well and good for the young and unattached, but the larger trend here — families moving back to the cities they abandoned in the 60’s — will mean everything from revitalizing downtowns to putting effort into school systems that were largely abandoned by the wealthy and well-educated.
Photo: SmokingPermitted
