(from http://www.preservenet.com/studies/SlowBeaut.html)
The history of the American city makes it clear that we have reached the limits of economic growth. At first, growth made our cities more livable; but during the last few decades, we reached a point where growth began to make our cities less livable.
Before the nineteenth century, all cities were built as "walking cities."1 Because they had to be compact enough for people to get around by foot, cities were made up of three to six story buildings. People lived in apartments and in rowhouses that were less than twenty feet wide. Streets were narrow, buildings were not set back from the sidewalk, and there was often shopping on the ground level. The older parts of European cities and towns are still built in this form, and the earliest American cities were just as intense and congested: the streets of eighteenth century Philadelphia looked like the streets of London, though there were vast areas of open land nearby.
Early in the nineteenth century, steam powered ferries and horse-drawn omnibuses let the American middle class move to lower density rowhouses. The new neighborhoods typically were made up of three-story rowhouses: streets were wider, houses were set back a few feet from the sidewalk and had larger backyards, and trees were often planted along the sidewalks. Lots were larger: a house was commonly built on one-twentieth of an acre.
Beginning in the 1870s, horse-drawn streetcars on steel tracks, cable cars, and electric trolley cars let the middle class move to what we now call "streetcar suburbs."2 These neighborhoods were made up of free-standing houses, with sizable backyards, small front yards, and front porches facing on tree-lined streets. Houses were commonly built on one-tenth acre lots. Today, we think of these as the classic American neighborhoods.
Streetcar suburbs felt spacious and quiet, but their most important form of transportation was still walking -- even though they were one-tenth the density of the "walking city." Streetcars were used for commuting to work and for occasional trips to other parts of town, but everyone lived within walking distance of Main Street or of a neighborhood shopping street. Though you could catch a streetcar on the main street, you usually you did not have to, because you could find shopping, doctors' offices, and other everyday services right there in your neighborhood. As they walked to the main street, people nodded to neighbors sitting on their porches, and they invariably met people they knew at the neighborhood stores.
As astounding as it might seem today, most middle-class Americans who lived in cities or small towns did not own vehicles one-hundred years ago. Maintaining a carriage was a sign of wealth, and was beyond the means of the middle class. Booth Tarkington's novel Seventeen gives us a good picture of the way of life in middle-class towns and streetcar suburbs.3 At the beginning of the book, a teenage boy is walking home from the soda shop on Central Avenue. When he gets home, he finds that his mother has bought some wash tubs at an auction. Because the store that sold them is going out of business, it will not deliver and the tubs must be picked up by the end of the day, so there is no time to hire a delivery man; the boy has to walk a mile and a half across town and carry the tubs home. It is only in this sort of extraordinary situation that the family is inconvenienced by not having a vehicle. The book was written in 1915: it was not so very long ago that American teenagers walked to the local shopping street rather than driving to the mall.
Many people like cities, but for those who prefer a suburban way of life, technology and growth brought real benefits during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. From the walking city, to the rowhouse neighborhood, to the streetcar suburb, middle-class neighborhoods became greener, quieter, more spacious, healthier, safer for children.
As the twentieth century progressed, Americans moved to even lower density suburbs. After World War I, middle-class neighborhoods were built around the automobile, and they were made up of bungalows on one-sixth-acre lots: often, the neighborhood stores were not quite close enough to walk to, so people drove a few blocks to buy their groceries. After World War II, middle-class neighborhoods were rebuilt around freeways, and they were made up of suburban homes on quarter-acre lots: to get to a shopping center to buy groceries, people drove on high speed arterial streets, where the traffic was nerve racking.
Yet consuming all this extra land and transportation did not make the suburbs more livable. The automobiles made neighborhoods noisier, more congested, and less safe for children. The nearby farmlands and open space that attracted people to suburbia were replaced by freeways, strip malls and tract housing. The old sense of community disappeared, as local shopping streets were replaced by anonymous regional shopping centers. Today, suburban neighborhood groups invariably organize to stop new suburban development near their homes; everyone knows that this style of urban growth makes cities less livable.
The most important trend in urban design in American today is a reaction against modern suburbia, which is called the New Urbanism or Traditional Neighborhood Design.4 Architects such as Andres Duany and Peter Calthorpe are building neighborhoods modeled on the streetcar suburbs that were built in America before World War I. When Duany first built this sort of neighborhood at Seaside, Florida, real estate experts predicted that the houses would not sell -- they did not see why anyone would buy a house at Seaside, when they could pay the same amount and get a house on a third of an acre lot in a conventional suburb -- but Seaside was a tremendous success, because home buyers wanted the sense of community that you have when you can walk to the town center or sit on your front porch and see neighbors walk by. Several cities and counties have adopted Traditional Neighborhood Design zoning ordinances as alternatives to their conventional suburban zoning, so developers are not required by law to build low-density, automobile centered suburbs, as they still are in most of the country, and a couple now require Traditional Neighborhood Design rather than conventional suburban development.
Post-war suburbia, with housing on one-quarter or one-third-acre lots, is less livable than the streetcar suburbs built before World War I, with housing on one-tenth acre lots. All the extra land that we consumed to build suburbia did not give us more livable neighborhoods.
Likewise, all the transportation that we consume to travel through suburbia -- the freeways and the two or more family cars -- did not make it more convenient for us to get around. As speeds increased, suburbs sprawled further and malls got bigger, so people commuted further to their jobs and drove further to go shopping.
Research has shown that the amount of time that Americans travel to work has remained constant since the 1840s, when suburbanization began, despite the vast changes in technology since then.5 The total amount of time that people budget to transportation also tends to remain constant: Americans travel about 1.1 hours per day.6
In Great Britain, where there is a very active anti-freeway movement, a recent report led the Dept. of Transport to adopt a guidance document saying that cost-benefit studies on new freeways must assume that elasticity of demand with respect to trip speed is as high as 1.0 -- that is, that travel increases proportionally to increased speed, so that time savings can no longer be claimed as a benefit of freeway construction.7
In the United States, cost benefit studies assume that freeway construction has no effect on trip length: they begin by projecting development patterns and travel demand on the basis of current trends, and then calculate how freeways will effect the amount of time it takes to travel the projected distances, so that they count time savings as a major benefit of new freeway construction. But this is beginning to change: at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington, D.C. in January of 1997, Kevin Heanue, the Federal Highway Administration's director of environment and planning, said that an FHWA study of Milwaukee found that traffic created by new highway capacity between 1960 and 1990 wiped out 8-22% of the time savings the new capacity had afforded. But at the same meeting, professor Mark Hansen of the University of California said his studies of highway expansion in California showed a 10% increase in highway lane-miles induced an immediate 2% increase in traffic at the county level, and a 6% increase within two years. When he also counted induced traffic in neighboring counties, Hansen found that a 10% increase in highway capacity induced a 9% increase in distance traveled.
Planners are beginning to realize that higher speeds do not save people time. They just encourage people to travel longer distances to lower density suburban homes and to bigger regional shopping malls. Speed creates distance.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)