Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [29]
An unsurprising occurrence: driving as a generator of pathological behavior
Indeed, there are dissertations on the topic of automobileinduced maladaptive behavior, and no shortage of data. One recent study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology demonstrated that drivers take 21 percent longer to vacate a parking space if someone else is waiting for it, and 33 percent longer if that person honks.1 Another interesting phenomenon was described by Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker:
I’m a recreational walker, and in the past few years I’ve noticed something odd when I’ve hit the sidewalks of suburban Missouri and suburban Colorado: a not intangible percentage of men speeding by me in their cars and sport utility vehicles (it’s always men) feel moved to yell obscenities at me. It’s hard to know why they do this … My guess is that they yell at me simply because I’m a stranger, and from the perspective of their glassed-in vehicles I have no more human reality than the coach on their TV screens who has elected to punt on fourth and short. 2
More serious is the recently documented “road rage disorder.” According to the National Highway Traffic Administration, aggressive drivers account for one third of the crashes and two thirds of the deaths on U.S. highways. “Violent, aggressive driving” was a contributing factor in 28,000 traffic deaths in 1996 alone.af There is little need to offer anecdotes supporting this figure, since all of us have witnessed road rage firsthand, as either a victim, a perpetrator, or both. Studies show that road rage is directly linked to sprawl: the top five metropolitan areas for aggressive driving deaths—San Bernardino, Tampa, Phoenix, Orlando, and Miami—are all recently designed suburban cities. The same is true of cities six through ten.ag
DRIVERS VERSUS PEDESTRIANS
Why are people so much friendlier—or at least less sociopathic—when they are walking? The answer may lie in Jonathan Rose’s observation that “there is a significant difference between running into someone while strolling down a street and running into someone when driving a car.”3
Given that most time in public is spent driving around in isolation chambers, it is no surprise that social critics are witnessing a decline in the civic arts of conversation, politics, and just simply getting along. There are those who view suburbanization as merely another symptom of this malaise, rather than a cause, but their arguments ignore the degree to which the atomization of our society into suburban clusters was the result of specific government and industry policies rather than of some popular mandate. It does not seem too optimistic to believe that Americans would spend more of their time on public pursuits if it were only more convenient.
For evidence, consider Disney World, where a disproportionately large number of suburbanites choose to spend their holidays. Why do so many people go there—for the rides? According to one Disney architect, the average visitor spends only 3 percent of his time on rides or at shows. The remaining time is spent enjoying the precise commodity that people so sorely lack in their suburban hometowns: pleasant, pedestrian-friendly, public space and the sociability it engenders.
Social space, now almost exclusively the purview of the Walt Disney Corporation and the mall developers, used to be provided by builders of cities as a matter of course, from ancient Greek fishermen to early American surveyors. It is only since the advent of modern planning that we have witnessed a decline in the inventory of successful public environments. Of the many reasons for this decline, one should not be underestimated: the rules for creating such places may be too simple. While planners