Designing For People, Not Cars
Yet these machines have also become our masters. As cars and trucks became the dominant mode of transportation after World War II, the built environment was restructured to favor car and truck travel over all other ways of getting around. Most Americans no longer have transportation choices. They drive out of necessity for every errand and social trip. Children must be bussed or go to school and activities. Even getting a half-gallon of milk requires getting in a car. To hold a job requires a car and commute for every wage earner in most American households.
Most communities are not built to make walking, bicycling, or mass transit convenient and appealing. The blocks are too large, the roads too wide, buildings are fronted by parking lots and garage doors, and facilities and signage are built to be legible at 40 or 50 miles per hour. At a walking speed, the built environment doesn’t bear much scrutiny. It is dumbed down, boring, and crude.
This spread-out, suburban layout carries an economic burden. For example, suburban households spend 24 percent of their income on transportation, while urban families in walkable neighborhoods spend only 12 percent on transportation1. As a result, the construction and maintenance costs of the road and highway system are a vast ongoing expense for society at large — primarily paid for through general taxes rather than gasoline levies.
The lower transportation costs for urban families indicate that communities built before the automobile’s dominance still function efficiently. People can drive if they want. The street networks accommodate traffic and parking. Yet people also have the choice of walking, bicycling, and mass transit.
Environmentally, automobiles take a considerable toll. It’s not just the gasoline and diesel fuel that is burned by cars and trucks but the construction and maintenance of the roads, highways, and parking lots; the environmental impact is enormous. When we tailored our towns and cities to the requirements of automobiles, few, if any, of us imagined global warming, oil depletion, or all the kinds of pollution that would result.
The health consequences are substantial. Besides the 40,000-plus Americans who die annually in automobile crashes — many are young adults and children — and the millions injured, our car culture contributes to a lack of exercise and obesity. It’s hard to say precisely how much of our growing healthcare cost burden is attributable to cars — but the figure is enormous.
Also, there are difficult-to-measure but high social costs. For example, America was a front-porch society where people got to know their neighbors. Now, we are a garage-door society where we press a button and disappear inside a house — in front of a street where few people walk. Yet, children used to be able to ride a bicycle to a main street store — where they knew the proprietor by name — and buy a Popsicle on a hot summer day. Growing up in such a neighborhood fosters independence missing from the typical American childhood experience today. We ought to bring it back.
The most straightforward answer to the automobile’s dominance is to design our communities for people, not cars. The benefits of such a shift in policy cannot be overstated. We can reduce our household costs, health problems, and environmental and economic burdens on future generations. We can make our communities stronger and happier people. We have to design our communities for people, not cars.
Instead of building subdivisions, shopping centers, office “parks,” and strip commercial corridors, we must develop main streets, neighborhoods, villages, towns, and cities again. That’s what New Urbanism and smart growth are all about. That’s the enduring and sustainable cultural legacy passed on to us by untold generations that lived before the middle of the 20th Century. Our children and grandchildren will thank us — and we will thank ourselves — if we build, or rebuild, such places again.