#automobile dependency

[atlurbanist]

Putting cars in their place

Thanks to Angie Schmitt for tweeting part of this quote this week. It comes from an excellent, must-read post on the Notes from the Underground blog:

"We should resist the false choices offered to us by the ideologues who tell us that our only two options are either abolishing cars altogether, or a continued spending spree on highway construction and urban sprawl.    

An important point established here: the choice between continuing the status quo and getting rid of all cars is a false one.

This is a particularly important to consider one when it comes to having productive public conversations about reducing car use. Many times I've read apologists for suburban sprawl write dismissively about smart growth-ers, new urbanists, etc. as being people who hate cars and who are unrealistically promoting car-free cities.

But no reasonable urbanist that I know of wants to ban car use or establish car-free cities. I certainly don't. Cars have a place in a multi-modal transportation system, even in a dense urban environment, alongside pedestrians, buses, trains, bicycles, and more. As the Underground blog post notes, "it's all about balance."

The problem arises when urban environments are unbalanced -- when they are built to exclusively suit personally-owned cars at the expense of all other options, hindering public-transit implementation and making pedestrian and cycling mobility either difficult or dangerous (check out the Dangerous by Design report for more info on that).

When car-centric places make it almost (or entirely) impossible to move around without ownership of or access to a car, communities are being ruled by transportation -- not served by it. Another quote from the post:

We should think long and hard about the reality of the fact that we’ve reordered our entire society; our built environment; even our very way of life, to serve this machine that we were told would serve us.  

Our generation’s challenge is to create a balanced transportation system that works for all of our citizens - rich and poor; young and old; urban, suburban, and rural.

Photo: Automobiles traveling by freight train, on tracks over the Downtown Connector, Atlanta, Georgia, December 10, 1963. From the GSU digital collection.

[atlurbanist]

[Google] has acquiesced to the basic failings of suburbia with an innovation so incremental that it epitomizes our national short-sightedness, and failure of imagination, when it comes to improving mobility in America

Self-Driving Cars Are Still Cars—Which Means They Won't Improve Your Commute | New Republic, 5/29/14

[atlurbanist]

Atlanta streetcars: mule-drawn & electric

This is an 1882 photo of the intersection of Whitehall (now Peachtree) and Alabama Streets. Notice the mule-drawn trolleys and horse-drawn wagons on the streets.

An article published recently, "Did Cars Save Our Cities From Horses? Debating a modern parable about waste and technology," gives an interesting rebuttal to the common story that personal cars saved cities from mounds of horse manure.

Between the era of horse-drawn carts and personal cars was an age of electric streetcars:

The late 19th and early 20th centuries was actually the age of streetcars. Running on steel rails, a few pulled by horses but most powered by electricity, they were the dominant urban mode of vehicular transport. The first suburbs date to this time, rising along streetcar lines in Boston, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and other cities.

You can include Atlanta in "other cities." We had an extensive line of streetcar routes covering the city, as seen in the 1946 map below:

Streetcar systems like this served cities for decades before cars began to dominate. As the article states, once car infrastructure was in place:

Streetcars now had to compete on roads suited to automobiles, and it wasn’t a fair fight. Cars clogged the streets, slowing traffic and preventing streetcars from keeping their schedules. Ridership fell. Streetcar companies struggled to stay profitable, all the more so because, as local monopolies, city governments limited fare increases.

Cut to -- this classic image. These are discarded streetcars from the west coast, but it’s an emblematic photo of the decline of street rail that happened in cities like Atlanta all over the nation as personal cars (and suburban sprawl) began to dominate. 

[atlurbanist]

How the US became Car Country

This is a great little video promoting the book "Car Country: an environmental history" by Christopher Wells.

It takes a concise look at some of the steps that led to much of our urban landscape being entirely dependent on car travel -- and the way that government and zoning policies nationwide favored car-oriented developments throughout the 20th century.

[dyatica]

[atlurbanist]

The sad tale of metro Atlanta's failure to embrace MARTA

There's a must-read article in the new Atlanta magazine by Doug Monroe called Where It All Went Wrong : If only we could undo the MARTA Compromise of 1971.

It explores the damage done to MARTA by the 50/50 compromise from 1971 which established that no more than 50 percent of MARTA's sales tax revenue (from City of Atlanta and Fulton/Dekalb counties) could go to operating costs.

As the article states:

That has meant that whenever MARTA needed more money for operating expenses, it had to cut elsewhere or raise fares. As a result, MARTA has raised the fare over the years to today’s $2.50, making it one of the priciest transit systems in the country.

My favorite part of the article is one that examines the way the metro embraced car-dependent sprawl while shunning transportation alternatives and a walkable built environment.

It reads like a case study of what happens when a metro focuses on short-term money making instead of long-term place making.

Georgia started “building highways expressly to enrich developers,” [former AJC reporter David Goldberg] says. “A whole lot of land owners and developers who knew how to do suburban development had the ear of state government and the money to buy influence...A lot of what was new suburban development back then is now underused, decaying, and part of an eroding tax base in the older suburban areas.”

“The sick joke of it all is that we built the place to be auto-oriented and designed it about as bad as we could to function for auto use,” Goldberg says. “The highway network we did build was designed in a way almost guaranteed to produce congestion—the land use around all that development put the nail in the coffin.”

Read the full article here.

[atlurbanist]

Florence Italy vs. Atlanta's I-75/I-285 Interchange

Look at Florence above… the blocks are tiny, and the streets are never much more than hairlines. From this high up in the sky, the intersections look like sharp right angles. This is because Florence was laid out for people and horses, which can turn on a dime. Cars drive on these streets today, but they drive slowly, which is far safer for the pedestrians.

The Atlanta interstates are each as wide as 2-3 blocks of Florence. The entire Duomo (the cathedral in the center of Florence that arguably began the Renaissance) could fit in one of the inner loops of the interchange, as you can clearly see. The central core of Florence, from the Duomo to the river, would fit inside the inner box of the interchange. The world was irreversibly changed by the people living and working in Florence who gave birth to the Renaissance. The interchange will never change the world… at best, it gets a small fraction of Atlanta workers to their jobs a bit sooner, barring any accidents.

-- Excerpt from The Price of Speed on BetterCities.net

The one quibble I have is with this: "it gets a small fraction of Atlanta workers to their jobs." I'll wager it's more than a small fraction (unsubstantiated hyperbole never helps your arguments, kids). But otherwise I think this a great illustration of the wasteful, car-centric land use we have in much of the Atlanta metro.

This interchange area was once beautiful wetlands and Chattahoochee River-side forest. Now it's a place where the land area is suited mostly for car traffic and parking. It's neither an efficient & beautiful built environment for humans nor a natural habitat for the native ecosystem. We've got too many acres in the metro that can be described that way and it needs to change for a more sustainable future.

[To be fair to Atlanta, though -- all those terracotta roofs make Florence look a bit like a skin rash at this distance. Just sayin'.]

[atlurbanist]

The cost of car dependency in Atlanta

The Atlanta Business Chronicle reports some sobering stats from AAA's "Crashes vs. Congestion – What’s the Cost to Society?" publication.

...metro Atlanta's car crashes cost the area $10.8 billion, or $1,979 per person, in 2009. The report also noted 498 deaths and 62,263 injuries related to car crashes in metro Atlanta.

In one year, car crashes cost each of us $1,979 and took 498 lives in our metro. That's something to consider when debating 1.) expansions to alternative transit and 2.) the development of walkable neighborhoods.

Photo by John Spink for the AJC