Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [50]
I want to walk somewhere so badly that I could cry. I miss walking! I want the kids to walk to school. I want to walk to the store for a pound of butter. I want to take the kids on a neighborhood stroll or bike. My husband wants to walk to work because it is so close, but none of these things is possible … And if you saw my neighborhood, you would think that I had it all according to the great American dream.
BORED TEENAGERS
Those who have experienced adolescence in modern suburbia have their own stories of boredom and frustration. Eric Bogosian’s play Suburbia, set in a 7-Eleven parking lot, depicts the culture that develops in a public realm devoid of decent public gathering places. In an interview, Bogosian noted:
There’s nothing wrong with these kids. The landscape around and within their own minds isn’t providing them with the tools to get around in the world beyond the suburbs. Meanwhile, T.V. is bombarding them with so much stuff that all they can feel is frustration. No wonder they think there’s no point in doing anything … The people who designed the suburbs were married couples with children, who wanted a sedate place to grill burgers in the backyard. Young people didn’t have a say in it, and they get into a lot of trouble there because they’re bored. Driving around, driving drunk, drowning in frozen ponds. The suburbs can be a dangerous place at a certain age.1
It seems odd to say that the suburbs are dangerous, since many families relocate to suburbia precisely to find a safer environment. In terms of crime, this motivation seems justified, but suburbs are hardly free from violent crime, and recent examples of suburban gang activity call the assumption into question. It is fair to say that the suburbs are no more crime-free than their higher-income demographics would suggest.
Highway carnage: an accepted outgrowth of an automobile-dependent society
But there is more to protecting life than avoiding crime, as any parent of a sixteen-year-old driver will attest. Far and away, car crashes are the largest killer of American teenagers, accounting for more than one third of all deaths.2 Yet all the suburban parents who can afford it will readily buy the additional cars that provide independence for their children, often in order to regain their own freedom.
When they get behind the wheel, teenagers automatically join the most dangerous gang in America. Automobile accidents kill over 45,000 people annually in this country, almost a Vietnam War of casualties every year.bl A child is twenty times more likely to die from an automobile mishap than from gang activity, as most young drivers are involved in at least one serious auto accident between ages sixteen and twenty. In their first year of driving, over 40 percent of teenagers have an accident bad enough to be reported to the police.3 For this reason, it is more dangerous, statistically, to grow up in the suburbs of Seattle than in that city’s most urban neighborhoods. bm
The Triple-A rates its drivers
The second most likely cause of death among teenagers, suicide, is also correlated with the growth of sprawl. Teenage suicide, almost unheard of before 1950, had nearly tripled by 1980 and now accounts for over 12 percent of youth mortalities. Sociologists, who cite “teen isolation and boredom” as a contributing factor, confirm that national rates of teenage suicide are much higher in suburbs than in cities.4 This “isolation and boredom” is the outcome