The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Traffic and Transportation
Introduction to City Planning and Rebuilding
This book critiques existing city planning methods and introduces new principles, contrasting those taught in architecture and planning schools. The attack focuses on the underlying principles and aims of modern city planning, not just superficial design choices.
Core Principles of City Functionality
The book explores how cities function in daily life, discussing essential elements like:
Street safety
Park functionality (or dysfunctionality)
Slum regeneration
Downtown dynamics
The role of neighborhoods
The goal is to identify planning principles that foster social and economic vitality, differentiating them from those that inhibit such vitality.
The Myth of Monetary Solutions
A common belief suggests that significant financial investment (e.g., ) could eliminate slums, revitalize decaying suburbs, stabilize the middle class, and solve traffic issues within a decade. However, evidence from past investments reveals a different reality:
Low-income projects often worsen social problems.
Middle-income housing lacks vibrancy.
Luxury housing seems artificial and shallow.
Cultural centers struggle to thrive.
Civic centers are underutilized.
Commercial centers lack authenticity.
Public spaces are deserted.
Expressways damage urban areas.
Instead of rebuilding, these projects often lead to the "sacking" of cities.
Consequences of Current Practices
These projects often fail to support surrounding areas, leading to urban decay. They create segregated communities, fostering suspicion and tension. Commercial and cultural centers diminish the organic aspects of city life.
The Impact of Automobiles on Urban Environments
Automobiles as Instruments of City Destruction
Automobiles, along with supporting infrastructure like parking lots and gas stations, significantly contribute to the destruction of cities. Streets become fragmented and unfriendly to pedestrians. Downtown areas, known for their complexity, are dissected. City landmarks lose their significance. The unique character of cities is diminished, leading to homogenization. Areas become functionally isolated.
Beyond Blaming Automobiles
However, automobiles are not solely responsible. Even with efficient mass transit, the application of conventional anti-city planning ideals, such as project-based urban development, would yield similar negative results.
The same issues arise: fragmented streets, dissected neighborhoods, irrelevant landmarks, homogenized character, and functionally isolated areas. In such scenarios, automobiles become a necessity to escape the resulting vacuity and institutionalization.
The Disrespect for City Needs
The destruction caused by automobiles reflects a disregard for other urban needs and functions. City rebuilders often lack alternative visions beyond renewal projects. Similarly, traffic engineers focus solely on overcoming immediate traffic challenges without considering the broader needs of the city.
Transportation and Communication as Necessities
Effective transportation and communication are crucial for cities. The essence of cities lies in the multiplicity of choice, which requires easy mobility. This multiplicity is enhanced through cross-use. Trade, the economic foundation of cities, relies on efficient transport of ideas, services, skills, personnel, and goods.
Balancing Transportation and Land Use
Cities require immense population concentrations, intricate use patterns, and complex networks. The challenge lies in accommodating city transportation without disrupting the concentrated use of land, and vice versa.
The Myth of Antiquated City Streets
The notion that city streets are outdated remnants of the horse-and-buggy era is false. While historical streets supported pedestrians and mixed-use environments, they were poorly suited for horse traffic, which negatively impacted pedestrian traffic as well.
Historical Perspective on Urban Congestion
H. B. Creswell's description of London in 1890 illustrates the conditions of large cities during the horse-and-buggy era. The Strand was a vibrant hub filled with diverse establishments, but it suffered from mud, noise, and smells due to heavy horse traffic. The streets were paved with granite sets, creating immense noise from iron-shod hooves and wheeled vehicles. This environment influenced figures like Ebenezer Howard to view city streets as unfit for humans.
Le Corbusier's Radiant City
Le Corbusier's Radiant City, conceived in the 1920s, was envisioned as a modern version of Howard's Garden City, featuring parks, skyscrapers, and freeways. However, it superficially adapted reforms aimed at recreating a simpler, bygone era. His plans inadequately addressed the traffic demands of densely populated areas, leading to the emergence of skyscrapers surrounded by parking lots.
The Irony of Progress
The current relationship between cities and automobiles is paradoxical. The rise of the automobile coincided with the development of suburbanized, anti-city ideals. However, the internal combustion engine has the potential to enhance urban intensity and alleviate its liabilities.
Potential of Automotive Technology
Automotive engines are quieter and cleaner than horses. Mechanized vehicles can reconcile population density with efficient movement. Railroads demonstrated the ability to combine concentration and movement. Automobiles offered an additional means to reduce congestion.
Misapplication of Automotive Power
The issue arises from replacing each horse with multiple mechanized vehicles, rather than using each vehicle to replace several horses. The overabundance of vehicles leads to inefficiency and congestion. While trucks have largely fulfilled their potential, passenger vehicles have not, which in turn affects the efficiency of trucks.
Pedestrianization versus Vehicular Dominance
The False Dichotomy
The conflict between automobiles and cities is often portrayed as a war between automobiles and pedestrians. The solution is sometimes viewed as separating spaces for each. However, such schemes are practical only with a significant reduction in the number of automobiles. Otherwise, the infrastructure required for parking and access becomes overwhelming, leading to city disintegration.
The Gruen Plan for Fort Worth
The Gruen plan for downtown Fort Worth proposed a ring road encircling a square mile, feeding into large garages. The interior area would be automobile-free and feature mixed-use development. The imitators of the plan isolate shopping streets with parking, rather than create an interlocked whole, which would foster complexity and concentration.
The Real Problem: Reducing Vehicle Numbers
The core problem is reducing the absolute number of vehicles in the city. Gruen's plan presupposes a decrease in vehicle use, even with elaborate car arrangements. It includes express bus service to integrate the downtown area with the city and suburbs. Without this, the scheme would be unrealistic or require converting the downtown area into garages.
Vertical Separation Schemes
Some plans propose vertical separation, with pedestrians above or below automobiles. However, the roadbeds required for the vehicles negate pedestrian convenience. These schemes also necessitate a drastic reduction in vehicle numbers and increased public transportation use.
The Importance of Vehicular Access for Businesses
Businesses reliant on pedestrian traffic need vehicular access for services and supplies. Complete separation leads to impractical situations. Pedestrian preserves without enterprises become deserted, while the actual pedestrian activity occurs in vehicular streets.
Servicing Solutions
Servicing schemes, like underground tunnels for trucks (as in Gruen's Fort Worth plan), can address the access issue. "Post officing," a system of central sorting and rationalized distribution, reduces truck deliveries. This primarily separates vehicles and pedestrians temporally, involving extra expense for materials handling.
The Necessity of Limited Separation
Except for intensively used downtown areas, the complexities accompanying thorough separation are often unjustified. The conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles stem from excessive vehicle numbers, sacrificing pedestrian needs. In Amsterdam and New Delhi, bicycles in large numbers can create similar conflicts.
Observations on Pedestrian Streets
People tend to stay on the sides of pedestrian streets. In Boston and Disneyland, sidewalks remain crowded while roadbeds are empty. People cross over from one side to the other freely because they are easy to cross.
The main advantage of pedestrian streets is not the absence of cars, but the lack of domination by cars and ease of crossing.
Considerations for Children's Play
For children, the key is to reduce car domination and sidewalk erosion. Housing projects with pedestrian precincts often see activity shift to service alleys, where children play. Life attracts life, and arrangements fail when they suppress activity.
The Inseparability of Pedestrian and City Considerations
Consideration for pedestrians is linked to city diversity, vitality, and concentration of use. In the absence of these elements, people are better off in cars. The underlying problem is cutting down the number of surface vehicles and improving the efficiency of those that remain. Either dependence on private automobiles or city concentration must give way.
Erosion versus Attrition
Erosion of Cities by Automobiles
Erosion involves incremental changes: street widening, straightening, one-way conversions, staggered signals, double-decking bridges, expressways, and increased parking. Each step adds to the total effect and accelerates the process. This creates a negative feedback loop.
Gruen's Analysis of Downtown Roadbed Requirements
Victor Gruen calculated potential business for Fort Worth's underdeveloped downtown by 1970. He translated economic activity into numbers of users and then into vehicles. He determined that square feet of roadbed would be needed, compared to the existing square feet.
However, providing this space would lead to sprawl, thin out uses, increase dependence on cars, duplicate parking spaces, and render public transportation inefficient. The result would be a smear rather than a coherent downtown.
The Paradox of Accessibility
More space for cars increases the need for cars. This is evident in cities like Los Angeles and Detroit. Manhattan's one-way avenues, intended to speed traffic, increase walking distances for bus users. Increased traffic flow brings more vehicles and reduces pedestrian convenience.
During 1948-56, Manhattan enabled 36 percent more vehicles to enter daily but saw a 12 percent decline in public transportation passengers, resulting in a deficit of 375,000 users. Increased car accessibility is always accompanied by declines in public transportation and cross-use of the district.
Standard Remedies and Their Consequences
Standard remedies involve increasing car accessibility, such as building city-owned parking garages. This erodes land and undermines small businesses.
The more urban an area, the greater the contrast between the gains and the losses from erosion.
The Lack of a Solution
The need for more vehicles grows with the palliatives, preventing a solution. A state of equilibrium might be reached when accessibility and intensity of use balance out, but this has not yet happened in any American city.
The Case of Los Angeles
Even in Los Angeles, with 95 percent of travel by automobile, pressures remain unequalized. A transit strike revealed that the highways and roads are still congested. Parking pressure continues to increase, with new apartments providing three spaces per unit. Delays due to accidents are common, and transport is slow. The cost to investment ratio declines, the land is taken from the tax rolls, and the environment is damaged.
The Impossibility of Reversal
No city intends to cultivate such problems, but one step leads to another. There is no easy point to stop the erosion process. Many city districts, even before automobiles, were impractical except by private vehicles. However, suburbs can handle the land waste and high ratios of private automobile travel because of their lack of concentration.
The Great Blight of Dullness
City districts like suburbs require constant automobile use. In-between densities are impractical for transportation. These districts are often abandoned or ârenewed,â requiring extensive car accommodations, which reinforces the existing deadness and thinness of use. The Great Blight of Dullness increases traffic pressure on lively districts.
Conflicts with the Erosion Process
City uses interfere with the erosion process. High land costs and other factors exert friction on unlimited surface traffic flow. Public hearings about erosive proposals reveal opposition from citizens concerned about impacts on their homes, streets, businesses, and communities. These protests represent friction on the erosion process but not a reversal.
Attrition of Automobiles by Cities
The Concept of Attrition
Attrition, unlike erosion, is not deliberately planned but occurs by chance. It involves diminishing vehicular traffic.
Ephemeral Occurrences
When an off-Broadway theater led to the blocking of streets by theatergoers, it discouraged car use by some. Similarly, traffic near Madison Square Garden after events can cause disruption.
Garment District Example
The garment district in New York City discourages car use due to truck traffic. Fabric firms have moved into the area to be within walking distance of customers, reducing vehicular use.
The Case of Washington Square Park
The closing of Washington Square Park to automobiles in New York City is an example of attrition. The plan to close the park to traffic without widening the perimeter roads was radical.
City officials predicted increased traffic, but these predictions did not come true. The traffic disappeared; traffic counts have dropped. The alternate routes were not noticeably affected.
There is no fixed number of automobile riders; the numbers vary in response to speed and convenience. Through traffic was gone.
Attrition as a Gradual Process
Attrition operates by making conditions less convenient for cars. A gradual process (which doesn't exist now) decreases the number of persons using private automobiles. It needs to decrease the need for cars with the declining convenience for cars.
Tactics for Attrition
Suitable tactics give room to other necessary city uses that compete with automobile traffic needs. Sidewalk widening, double rows of trees, outdoor lobbies, and small parks carried across the street are examples of tactics that have benefits but make car travel harder.
Shorter blocks (and therefore many crossings) interfere with traffic flow, while simultaneously, generating diversity. Possibilities for adding to convenience, intensity and cheer in cities, while simultaneously hampering automobiles, are limitless.
Selectivity in Attrition
Attrition must be selective. Traffic exerts pressure upon itself. Vehicles adapt to each other. An example of differential traffic is the construction of oneway streets that make car traffic more efficient, while slowing down buses.
Encouraging Efficiency of Public Transportation
William McGrath proposed selective vehicular encouragement and discouragement through several means:
Speeding up buses by the use of short interval times, the regulation of traffic light frequencies to short intervals and not staggering them, while slowing down private transportation.
Creating pedestrian streets by making the streetâs traffic less desirable for cars.
Using expressways as bypasses by protecting alternate routes with judiciously placed dead ends.
Traffic should only be for those with a local problem in mind.
Encouraging Truck and Taxi Use
The use of trucks for city maintenance can be encouraged if the arteries are arranged to favor them. Similarly, the use of taxis over private vehicles can also be encouraged by diminishing the incentives for private auto use.
Learning from Erosion
Anything so effective has something to teach, and is worth respect and study from that point of view. The changes required or wrought by erosion always occur piecemeal so much so that we can almost call them insidious. Therefore, each change is absorbed piecemeal, as it occurs. Each erosive change requires changes in the habits which people follow to get around in a city, and changes in the ways that they use a city, but not everybody needs to change his habits at once, nor does anybody (except those displaced) have to change too many habits at once.
The piecemeal erosive changes that cumulatively eat away a city are by no means all thought out in advance, in some Olympian scheme or master plan. If they were, they would not be nearly as effective as they are. In the main, they occur as direct, practical responses to direct, practical problems-as those problems appear. Every move thus counts; few are gestures and boondoggles. In the case of attrition of automobiles, this same kind of opportunism will give maximum results, and also best results in terms of city utility and improvement. Attrition tactics should be applied where conflicts exist between traffic flow and other city uses, and as new conflicts of this kind develop.
A Positive Approach to Attrition
Attrition must be approached positively, as a means of supplying positive, easily understood and desired improvements, appealing to various specific and tangible city interests. This is desirable not because such an approach is a superior persuasive and political device (although it is), but because the objects should be the tangible and positive objects of increasing, in specific places, city diversity, vitality and workability. To concentrate on riddance as the primary purpose, negatively to put taboos and penalties on automobiles as children might say,