Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [38]
It bears repeating: we shape our cities and then our cities shape us. The choice is ours whether we build subdivisions that debase the human spirit or neighborhoods that nurture sociability and bring out the best in our nature. The techniques for achieving the latter are well known, and available to all who wish to make places worth caring about.
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THE AMERICAN TRANSPORTATION MESS
THE HIGHWAYLESS TOWN AND THE TOWNLESS HIGHWAY;
WHY ADDING LANES MAKES TRAFFIC WORSE;
THE AUTOMOBILE SUBSIDY
During the height of automania, a zoologist observed that in animal herds excessive mobility was a sure sign of distress and asked whether this might not be true of his fellow human beings. Perhaps it was distress … but what historian can list all the causes that led twentieth-century man to race from highway to byway, tunnel to bridge? Suffice to say that he seemed to be constantly going from where he didn’t want to be to where he didn’t want to stay.
—PERCIVAL GOODMAN, COMMUNITAS (1960)
Redesigning streets and roads for pedestrian viability is a first step toward making our neighborhoods more livable, but there is a larger problem still to be addressed: this country’s fundamentally misguided approach to transportation planning as a whole. Because settlement patterns depend more than anything else upon transportation systems, av it is impossible to discuss one without discussing the other.
While we do enjoy the benefits of an effective system for the national distribution of goods—nobody is lining up outside shops with empty shelves—it would still be difficult to overstate the degree to which transportation policy has damaged both our cities and our countryside. This outcome was by no means inevitable; in fact, we knew better all along. By 1940, the rules that should govern the development of a transportation network for the healthy growth of society were well known. They were widely acknowledged, thoroughly disseminated, and, apparently, immediately forgotten.aw
THE HIGHWAYLESS TOWN AND THE TOWNLESS HIGHWAY
The most significant of these rules is illustrated, alongside its violation, in the accompanying diagram. This drawing, more than any other, depicts the greatest failure of American postwar planning, and helps to explain why our country faces both an urban and an environmental crisis. Titled “The Townless Highway and the Highwayless Town,” the upper half illustrates the proper relationship between high-speed roadways and places of settlement. Highways connect cities but do not pass through them. Norman Bel Geddes, the visionary behind the U.S. Interstate system, declared in 1939, “Motorways must not be allowed to infringe upon the city.” Where they do provide access to the city, highways must take on the low-speed geometries of avenues and boulevards. In exchange for this courtesy, the city does not allow itself to grow along the highway. Where high-speed roads pass through the countryside, roadside development is not permitted. The results of these rules are plain to see in much of Western Europe: cities, for the most part, have retained their pedestrian-friendly quality, and most highways provide views of uninterrupted countryside.
Forgotten wisdom: the proper and improper relationship between highway and town (Drawing by Thomas E. Low, DPZ)
This country has allowed the exact opposite to occur. As depicted in the lower half, highways were routed directly through the centers of our cities, eviscerating entire neighborhoods—typically, African American neighborhoods—and splitting downtowns into pieces.ax Meanwhile, the commercial strip attached itself like a parasite to the highway between cities, impeding through traffic and blighting the countryside in the process. The damage is not yet complete, for we continue to let this happen, with predictable results.ay How obvious and damaging does an error need to be before it is addressed and corrected? Jane Jacobs may have answered this question in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “The pseudo-science