Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [53]
The tragedy of this situation is that these hours were time that parents used to spend productively with their children. Instead, the parents are stuck in their cars, and the children are warehoused in front of the television, since they don’t have independent access to much else. Our locus of civic activity has become the highway, and theirs has become the TV.bp
Of course, time squandered in traffic extends well beyond the wasteful commute. Eighty percent of all suburban automobile trips have nothing to do with work at all,6 but are short drives to places that used to be accessible on foot, such as shops, schools, parks, and friends’ houses. With the disappearance of that once common activity, the useful walk, the weight of the average American adult has risen eight pounds in ten years. Nearly 60 percent of Americans are overweight.bq
Suburbia victimizes the middle-class commuter not only in terms of time and health but also economically. The typical American family spends four times as much on transportation as its European counterpart, even though gasoline costs four times as much in Europe. The economic plight of the suburban American family was summed up in a note from Peter Brown of Houston:
There are five of us in our family, and I am sad to say that we own five cars. This costs us over $27,000 a year. I have a car for business and pleasure. My ex-wife works; she has a car. Our son, away at college in Fort Worth, has a car; our eldest daughter has to have a car for college and her part-time job. Our youngest daughter recently got her driver’s license and has a car to drive to school and to her music lessons. Cars are essential to my children’s social lives. Neither I nor my ex-wife can afford to take time off from work to chauffeur the children, which they don’t want or expect anyway. Even more horrifying, we can’t afford to buy collision insurance for our children’s cars. So if one has a wreck and is at fault, the repair bills will be astronomical; if a car is totaled, it will need to be replaced somehow.
Recognizing the tremendous cost of the auto-dependent lifestyle, the author Philip Langdon has proposed a new national holiday: “Automobile Independence Day.” It would take place on that date each year by which we have earned one quarter of our salaries, the amount that it takes to support our cars.7 How appropriate that it is April Fool’s Day.
BANKRUPT MUNICIPALITIES
Other victims of sprawl include the organizations that suffer economically from the inherent inefficiency of an automobile-oriented environment. The most obvious of these are the local suburban municipalities that must provide services to distant houses, houses that do not begin to pay for themselves with their taxes. One such municipality the city of Franklin, a Milwaukee suburb of 25,000, conducted a careful cost analysis in 1992. It found that a new single-family home pays less than $5,000 in property taxes but costs the city more than $10,000 to service.8 The inefficiency of new sprawling development had to be covered by a general tax hike paid by all residents, even those in more efficient older neighborhoods.
Fearful of red ink, governments respond to the costs of sprawl in a variety of ways, many of them shortsighted. Rather than insisting upon dense, efficient development patterns that pay for themselves, beleaguered municipalities embark upon stopgap measures such as prohibiting new development that houses schoolchildren, or simply refusing to enlarge their sewage facilities—a strategy that typically leads to land-hungry septic-tank sprawl. Some municipalities, and even some states, require that