Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [65]
In some cities, the street was relegated entirely to the poor and the homeless in favor of underground malls and pedestrian bridges, which continue to sap vitality from the street. Cities such as Dallas and Minneapolis built these stratified systems not because of the weather but to allow cars free rein of the terra firma. Dallas justified its system with the following explanation: “One of the chief contributing factors to traffic congestion is crowds of pedestrians interrupting the flow of traffic at intersections.”cc What some cities would now give to regain those pedestrian crowds!
Astratified public realm for a stratified society: pedestrian bridges abandon the street to the underclass
An appropriate fate for the Motor City: freeways and parking lots paved the way for Detroit’s decline (shown in 1950 and 1990)
It is difficult to count the number of cities that have been extensively damaged by kowtowing to the demands of the automobile. So many come to mind—Detroit, Hartford, Des Moines, Kansas City, Syracuse, Tampa—that it has to be considered the standard American urban condition. The typical result is a downtown where nobody walks, a no-man’s-land brutalized by traffic. In the apotheosis of this condition—in which the mixed-use street has been replaced by an “analogous city” of pedestrian bridges and tunnels, the outcome approaches the condition of a suburban mall. But the city cannot compete with the suburb by becoming more suburban, since it has no hope of providing the same amount of convenient parking and open space.
Designing the city around automobiles has yet to be widely recognized as misguided, and pedestrians are losing the battle against the car on a daily basis. New York City has recently made it an infraction for pedestrians to cross certain midtown streets where vehicles turn onto one-way avenue.1 Meanwhile, in the name of pedestrian safety, traffic engineers in Los Angeles are erasing the city’s crosswalks. They are taking this approach because “more pedestrians are killed in crosswalks than in unmarked intersections,” ignoring that the streets with crosswalks are wider and faster. It is troubling that most efforts meant to “improve” pedestrian safety end up limiting pedestrian access.
That said, the solution is not the removal of cars from the city—far from it. The most vital American public spaces are full of cars. But these cars move slowly, due to the appropriate design of the thoroughfares. Just as in residential neighborhoods, city streets must be narrow—lanes should be ten feet wide, not twelve—with on-street parallel parking to protect the pedestrian. To make life easier for both walkers and drivers, streets should be two-way (typically one lane in each direction), since one-way streets contribute to speeding and make it difficult to find one’s way around.cd Traffic lights must have short cycles, to avert both driver and pedestrian frustration.
The taming of the automobile is a necessary but not sufficient precondition to pedestrian life. Sidewalks must be lined with continuous building frontage, with few blank walls, parking lots, or other gaps that undermine the spatial definition of the street.ce Because there are never enough high-quality frontages for all streets to satisfy these criteria, the city may need to engage in what could be called urban triage. In pedestrian crises, as in battle, the worst-off must sometimes be sacrificed for the greater good. In the city, this means designating an “A/B” street grid. “A” streets