Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [57]
But the case of Phoenix reminds us that there is more to urban health than economic viability, because it is precisely places such as Phoenix—and its cohort of Sun Belt cities—where civic life has almost ceased to exist, and where residents complain about their quality of life. This brings up a second factor determining a city’s health: whether the suburbs take a form that will accommodate public transit. The failure of Phoenix to maintain a pedestrian-scale downtown that supports civic life stems directly from the fact that very few people can get there without their cars. It is virtually impossible to generate urban density under the tyranny of today’s excessive roadway and parking requirements. Between one third and one half of urban America’s land is typically dedicated to the driving and parking of vehicles. In Los Angeles, that ratio jumps to two thirds. Houston provides the equivalent of 30 asphalt parking spaces per resident.1 The suburban-scale carscape that constitutes the vast majority of downtown Phoenix is the inevitable outcome of the fact that its suburbs cannot efficiently accommodate transit. The same shortcoming is also why, when one asks to see the social center of Houston, one is taken to a mall.bv
As we’ve already made clear, the only urban form that efficiently accommodates mass transit is the neighborhood, with its mixed-use center and its five-minute-walk radius. Only within a neighborhood structure will residents readily walk to a bus stop or tram station. The sole alternative to neighborhood-based transit is the park-and-ride, which could bring suburbanites into the city on transit, if it only worked. Unfortunately, park-and-ride is just another way of saying “intermodal shift”—switching from one form of transportation to another. This is a transit engineering bugaboo, since most commuters, once they’ve settled into the driver’s seat, will tend to cruise all the way to their final destination. If transit is to work, its users must start as pedestrians. While park-and-ride has been effective along old established rail corridors such as Philadelphia’s Main Line and the Long Island Railroad, it has not had much success elsewhere. If driving and parking downtown are anything other than a nuisance, park-and-ride will never be a popular alternative.
Besides placing transit stops within walking distance of most houses, how can suburbs contribute to the well-being of a city? The first step must be to acknowledge that the two are interdependent. An entire discipline called regional planning—about which very much is known and very little is put into practice—has emerged to address this reality. The few cities that have begun to plan regionally, such as Portland, Oregon, are already becoming popular relocation destinations.
Regional planning manages urban growth at the scale of people’s daily lives. Planning at the scale of a single town or city is rarely effective, because working and shopping patterns routinely take most people across municipal lines. What good is it for a New England village to outlaw Wal-Mart to save its main street when the suburb down the highway welcomes it with open arms? Any municipality that tries to limit sprawl typically risks the loss of its tax base to surrounding towns. Only at the regional scale can planning have a meaningful