One of my new favorite blogs is Ryan Avent’s site The Bellows. In a post about biking and mass transit in DC, Avent makes a striking statement about density:
Imagine [...] a world where the city established dedicated bus and bike lanes, free from automobile traffic. Imagine that drivers who did want to come into the city had to pay a daily toll, and that the proceeds of that toll went toward increased bus, streetcar, and rail capacity in the city and out into the burbs. Does it not seem that everyone, drivers included, would get where they were going a lot faster? That those without cars would enjoy greater mobility, and that the metro area as a whole would spend a lot less on gas?
Automobiles just weren’t made for the kind of urban density one finds in the District, and it’s incredibly inefficient to just give the streets over to them. At some point, a city reaches a threshold at which it needs to say that cars are welcome, but they’re going to defer to people using other modes of transportation, because we simply can’t afford to accommodate the parking and road space occupied by thousands of single-passenger motor vehicles.
I would love to bike to work, though doing so would necessitate some sort of showers at my office and–in the relatively small city where I live–a death wish as I combat obscene amounts of traffic, no bike lanes, etc.
This is of course an issue of city planning priorities and resources, an unchecked car culture (where 15 minutes waiting in traffic still, for many folks, beats a city bus or a bike ride up a hill), and a host of other factors (like pre-existing narrow streets with scant room for a bike lane). But it’s also, fundamentally, an issue of density.
I have no real wisdom to offer on this subject, but I wanted to highlight Avent’s comments and pose a few questions: What’s the solution for small or mid-size cities that lack the requisite density for these measures to really work? Is that density threshold lower than I imagine? Instead of transportation alternatives, should we be equally concerned with expanding incentives for tele-commuting and satellite work locations?
Image used under a Creative Commons License courtesy of Flickr user bfick.
I wish I had the expertise to add some useful information to this topic (especially since density is the big hot-button issue in Austin’s local elections), but here’s how not to deal with sprawl on a very local level: Austin has all these charming neighborhoods–Hyde Park, North Loop, South Congress, etc.–and they all have their own completely un-charming fascist neighborhood groups. A new development on a tract of land previously owned by the state ran into opposition from the Hyde Park neighborhood group, who feared the increased density adjacent to Hyde Park would bring increased congestion to the neighborhood. They wanted a park instead. The completely stupid compromise reached by the neighborhood and the developer was to close off the 50th St access to the new development from not just cars but bikes and foot-traffic as well. (Of course, the FD needs access, so there’ll be a road where now the street dead-ends, but it will have a locked gate.) Here’s the whole story from a blog I think you’ll find pretty interesting.