www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2007-04-15-1.html
Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card April 15, 2007 Walking Neighborhoods Last week I wrote about how little sense it makes for us to build our lives around cars, because: 1 Oil dependence funds our enemies.
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, byAndrews Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. This book makes the case for cutting back on driving much better than I could. What Government Must Do I'm not urging that the government mandate any more absurd mileage requirements for cars, or ration gasoline, or any other absurd proposals. But even hybrids still burn gas, and if we could drive less, then hybrids would save even more gasoline. In fact, all that I want government to do, locally and at higher levels, is to stop with the regulations that force us to use cars for everything, and replace them with regulations that permit us to walk or bike. Right now, in most locations zoning laws force developers to create neighborhoods with houses of about the same size and cost, on roughly the same size lot, while forbidding any retail within walking distance. Meanwhile, those same laws generally forbid the construction of new neighborhoods that mix income levels, house sizes, and densities. The result is that the poor are shunted off into isolated islands, where crime thrives, employment is remote, and the poor have to own cars just to get a job. Meanwhile, most people can't walk or bike to any useful destination, because the law has forbidden retail or office buildings anywhere near where people live. I have no problem with allowing people to continue to live in pedestrian-hostile neighborhoods, if they want to. I just want the law to allow the construction and adaptation of low-car-use neighborhoods. That means allowing low-parking retail to be built close to new and existing residential neighborhoods, like the old-fashioned "Main Street" town, where a commercial strip leads immediately to residential side streets. In a town the size of Greensboro, this doesn't mean one downtown that gets all the money and attention. It means dozens of little "downtowns" so that all the residential neighborhoods can be within easy walking distance of vital retail. Sidewalks It also means sidewalks everywhere, on both sides of the street, wide enough for pedestrians, strollers, and bicycles to share the space. It also means a mandate for what should have been required all along: The sharing of parking and easy pedestrian access between all retail centers. The shopping center at North Elm and Pisgah Church is a perfect example of the hostility to pedestrians that must be reversed. There is no safe pedestrian access from the parking area to the sidewalks along the street. That means that they almost forbid you to walk into or out of their property. This is the model that should be, not just encouraged, but required, to break down the walls between retail centers. Meanwhile, our city should be ashamed of intersections like North Elm and Pisgah Church, where sidewalks are only intermittent, and two directions across the street have no crosswalks, and there are no crossing signals. And yet this intersection has been worked on twice at great expense to "improve" the way it handles cars. Nothing for the pedestrian, everything for the automobile. And it will disappear, as soon as voters make it clear we're fed up with pedestrian-hating streets. Subsidized Public Transit I don't know why this idea makes some people go so crazy. Many insist that public transportation has to pay its own way, right from the start. They do studies showing how many riders we have and take that as an indicator of how many potential riders there are. They raise prices or cut routes when there's no profit, even though anyone with half a brain could figure out that if you cut routes and raise prices you'll have fewer riders. Because the reason people don't ride buses is: The buses don't go where they need to get; In Greensboro, public transit runs at a loss, but it does run, and with federal subsidies. Because students at participating colleges ride for free, ridership is up substantially. Recently, the city council faced the choice: Improve to 30-minute service from every-hour service and raise rates, or keep rates where they are and maintain the one-hour rate. Nobody says: If we spend the money to improve the service, eventually more people will ride because the service will be more convenient; com run at a loss, living off of its investors, until it finally began to break even? Amazon had to take the time to raise awareness of what they offered, develop a clientele that gradually learned to turn to Amazon first, and, in the meantime, constantly figure out ways to upgrade the service so that people felt it was worth the cost. Why can't we recognize that until we invest enough in public transit for it to be a credible alternative to automobiles, and convince people of this, it will always be the transportation medium of people who have no choice. When I was in So Paulo and Ribeiro Preto, I lived on buses. I wouldn't have a car in those cities because there's no reason to. But the opponents of public transit answer with the nonsequitur: "Of course they have a great subway or bus system -- look at all the riders they have!" They have all those riders because their public transit is so good (and the parking and traffic so bad) that you'd be crazy to drive yourself anywhere. Now, our Greensboro traffic planners do understand about making traffic worse to discourage people from driving. They also understand that if you build roads into undeveloped areas at public expense, the tax revenues can increase from the increased commerce -- that's what the Wendover area development was all about. They can spend the money to build huge new roads into vast box-store complexes with zero residential space -- a traffic nightmare and, I might add, a hideous place to drive, park, and shop. But they cannot see that to double the frequency of the buses might also have a beneficial effect on commerce and quality of life. Make walking, biking, and public transportation convenient and easy and safe and cheap, and people will do more of it, to the benefit of us all. When I lived in Orem, I was commuting every day to Salt Lake City -- 45 miles each way. I carpooled, but what I wanted to do was take the bus or train. In those days, though, the enemies of public transit ruled, so there were only a couple of buses each day, operating at ridiculous times -- not commuter buses, but destination buses. They wouldn't take you there and back again in the same day, with time for a day job in between. But a few years after I left, someone with a working brain redesigned the whole Utah Transit Authority to make it a viable choice for workers and shoppers, and to link together all the cities in the great metropolitan area. I hear rumors about the Piedmont Authority for Regional Transportation. This puts a ceiling on their funding that will make it hard for them to install a system that will be extensive enough to make a difference. I know that government scrambles to find money to fund desirable goals. But let's admit something: Highways and streets are financed routinely, because everyone knows that they "pay for themselves" in the long run. Nobody seems to recognize that public transportation (with protection for walkers and bikers) does so too. So you can always find money to build "needed" roads, but anyone trying to fund the infinitely more desirable and sustainable public transit is always treated as a beggar. Instead of choosing between higher fares and more-frequent buses, we should be aiming for a higher goal: We need to run in-city buses often enough that you know that on key routes you can show up any time and never wait more than fifteen minutes. But how many rider-miles would it take before we start saving the lives of teenage drivers or family breadwinners who aren't driving cars? How long before the money saved by leaving cars at home turns into an increase in retail sales? And you who scream about increasing subsidies, think of this: A bus system that let...
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