Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [66]
The need for a clear A/B hierarchy is particularly evident in newer cities such as Dallas. Its downtown has at least a dozen city blocks of excellent pedestrian quality. Unfortunately, no two are adjacent to each other. A person cannot walk more than four hundred feet in any direction without being confronted by automobiledominated banality. By attempting to be universally excellent, most cities are universally mediocre. The A/B grid is eminently practical because it recognizes that many cities are beggars. Desperate for the twenty-five jobs, they will accept onto their Main Street a McDonald’s with an iridescent plastic jungle gym in front and a drive-through at the side. With an A/B grid, a city can give McDonald’s a choice: behave in a responsible way—with doors and windows on the sidewalk and the drive-through to the rear—and you get a site on Main Street; behave in your standard boorish suburban way, and it’s off to the access road with you.
One of the most compelling reasons for an A/B grid is the demand for parking lots and garages, which must not be allowed to erode the network of A streets. But even well-placed parking, in excess, can be a bad thing. Like automobile use, parking rarely costs the driver as much as it should, and is thus a free good. For this reason, there is always an outcry for more parking, just as there is always a demand for more lanes of traffic. Building additional parking lots causes more people to drive downtown, which requires the construction of more roadway, creating demand for yet more parking lots. The question is not how much parking is enough but how many of its buildings a city must level before it gives up trying to meet the demand.cf
When it comes to parking, every city must eventually answer two questions: Do new buildings have to provide their own parking, and where should that parking go? Most cities answer both of these questions incorrectly. A commitment to suburban standards of parking is a commitment to a second-class transit system used by virtually no one but the poor, since everyone else will drive. Further, most cities require new and renovated buildings to provide their own parking on site. This is probably the single greatest killer of urbanism in the United States today. It prevents the renovation of old buildings, since there is inadequate room on their sites for new parking;cg it encourages the construction of anti-pedestrian building types in which the building sits behind or hovers above a parking lot; it eliminates street life, since everyone parks immediately adjacent to their destination and has no reason to use the sidewalk; finally, it results in a low density of development that can keep a downtown from achieving critical mass. All told, there is nothing to be said in favor of the on-site parking requirement. Cities that wish to be pedestrian-friendly and fully developed should eliminate this ordinance immediately and provide public parking in carefully located municipal garages and lots. Parking must be considered a part of the public infrastructure, just like streets and sewers.
Consideration of the pedestrian scale must also play a role in the provision of transit. Diesel-belching buses are a poor substitute for benevolent streetcars, trolleys, and jitneys. Where laying track is not affordable, the city should consider small electric trams, which have brought new life to cities such as Chattanooga and Santa Barbara.
The reader will notice that, in discussing the physical form of the city, we have not once advocated the use of brick sidewalks, festive banners,