Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [120]
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James Carroll, “All the Rage in Massachusetts,” A14–A15. According to U.S. News & World Report, the rate of aggressive driving incidents has risen 51 percent since 1990 (Jason Vest, Warren Cohen, and Mike Tharp, “Road Rage,” 28).
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Michelle Garland and Christopher Bender, “How Bad Transportation Decisions Affect the Quality of People’s Lives,” 7. “When people have to get behind the wheel to perform every small task in life, driving becomes just another chore to be finished as quickly as possible. It’s really no surprise that in such an environment we see more people dying because of … aggressive driving behavior.” The metropolitan areas ranked sixth through tenth are Las Vegas, Fort Lauderdale, Dallas, Kansas City, and San Antonio, all predominantly suburban.
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This is, unfortunately, meant literally as well as figuratively. As the Surface Transportation Policy Project has demonstrated, “Cities which are notorious for their sprawling patterns of land use development [have] the most pedestrian deaths” (Garland and Bender, 4-5). Walking with care—and teaching your children to do the same—is of little help. A recent study found that 90 percent of pedestrian deaths were the driver’s fault, with 74 percent of such deaths resulting from a traffic violation (Surface Transportation Policy Project, “Campaign Connection,” 8).
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From Chester E. (Rick) Chellman, P.E.’s research into AASHTO committee reports. As with Napoleon’s Paris, it may also be likely that the ease of troop movement was a factor. Mr. Chellman is astute in pointing out how architects were equally obsessed with wartime concerns, and how the prospect of an aerial bombardment figured heavily in their designs for the city of the future. In the book Can Our Cities Survive?, published by the modernist Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, Jose Luis Sert insisted (correctly) that “some districts offer better targets than others.” Based upon the likelihood that a bombardment would be more devastating to an old European city—“it is nearly impossible to miss a hit on some overcrowded building”—Sert and his colleagues advocated the two alternatives that became the staple of the suburban city: the single-family house and the “tower in the park” (Sert, 69).
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The avoidance of reverse purportedly derives from the fact, now irrelevant, that the earliest fire trucks powered their pumping mechanism with the reverse gear, rendering it inoperable. It is ironic that cul-de-sacs, with their image of small-scale domesticity, must be so wide to satisfy fire trucks, but this comes partly because they provide only a single access point for each destination. In a traditional interconnected network of through streets, there is always an alternate path to the fire, and one truck rarely has to drive past another. Unfortunately, this distinction is never made in suburban zoning codes, and every type of street must meet the cul-de-sac’s thirty-foot street-width requirement.
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This activity may also be the result of what the fire marshals do when they go to their fire marshal conventions, which is to compare the size of their trucks. Never mind that their entire jurisdiction consists of split-level ranches, these chiefs are not about to be outdone in the hook-and-ladder department. One can only hope that the advent of woman-led fire departments will eventually bring this tendency in check.
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Peter Swift, “Residential Street Typology and Injury Accident Frequency,” 4. Interestingly, traffic volume was not found to be a major factor, except where a lack of volume made speeding easier. Unsurprisingly, the most lethal streets were those that most closely matched the suburban engineering ideal: arrow-straight, long, and wide, with a free flow of light