Time we stop catering to the car
Newark Star-Ledger op-ed, August 2, 1999
by Donald Kaul, columnist for Des Moines Register
Urban sprawl is a bad thing. Everybody knows that. It produces godawful traffic jams, air the color of tea and soulless strip malls. It is anti-family. (How can you attend your kid's soccer game when you're out on the freeway in a sea of taillights?) Bad.
Politicians have caught on to this. More than half the country lives in suburbs these days, and they're the ones who are spending their time stuck in traffic on urban "superhighways." These citizens cry for relief, and politicians are quick to say they will provide it.
So they build more highways and people move ever farther out of town and the roads get more crowded.
"Enough," said Milwaukee. Blessed with a visionary mayor, the town plans to use more than $20 million in federal transportation money to tear down a freeway in the city.
The highway was supposed to cut through the heart of the city, but construction was halted years ago because of determined citizen opposition. The part that got built will now be unbuilt. New housing, restaurants and shops already are being planned for the area that was to be eaten up by the road.
"The urban superhighway should be relegated to the scrap heap of history," says the mayor, three-term incumbent John Norquist, who has become something of a crusader on the subject. Amen.
Vice President Al Gore has been at the front of the line of politicians trumpeting this new war on sprawl. He recently announced administration plans to offer $700 million in tax credits to preserve open space. Which sounds like a lot of money until you realize the federal government will offer $162 billion to states over the next five years of building, maintaining and expanding roads.
"Sprawl is the direct result of accomodating the automobile," Norquist says. He's right, of course, but somehow we keep clinging to the idea, all evidence to the contrary, that if we just "improve" that freeway by adding a lane, everything will be all right.
Atlanta, for example, spent billions in federal money building a beltway around the city, then crisscrossing the circle with other highways. The result? One of the worst urban traffic nightmares in the country. So it's planning a $5 billion outer beltway. Duh.
Recent studies in England and California, according to the New York Times, have concluded that new roads make getting places harder, not easier. For every 10 percent increase in highway capacity, there is a 5 percent increase in driving time.
And still we keep giving in to the builders, who make fortunes on sprawl, chasing the dream of every man in country estate. Which pleases smug conservatives, of course. The Times quoted Ben Wattenberg, perhaps the smuggest conservative on the planet, as saying:
"You're saying people can go out and have a quarter-acre, half-acre, an acre, build their own house, maybe put in a little swimming pool in it, all the things they want, and we call it bad, nasty sprawl. Why don't we call it great?"
Because, Ben, taking 2-1/2 hours to get to work and back every day is not great. Having "ozone red alert" days is not great. Neither is having to drive your kids everywhere they go. It is the opposite of great. Also, who wants to cut an acre of grass?
There are signs people are waking up in disparate places like Oregon and Virginia, where anti-growth and anti-traffic movements are taking hold, but very slowly.
What's needed is a national program of subsidy for light rail systems. The streetcar is still a wonderful invention. It can move more people more cheaply, with less pollution and, yes, faster than an armada of cars, each with one person in it. And you don't have to destroy a neighborhood to build them.
Cars are the enemy of cities. Let's hope Milwaukee's revolt is just a beginning.