By: Eliana Zhang
Picture, if you will, a town that has never seen an automobile.
There are no sprawling parking lots. Mile-wide roads need not exist. Pedestrians do not share the pavement with tonnes of steel contraptions, and most importantly, everyone is a pedestrian. The town you have walked into is the antithesis of the modern American suburb, and it was everywhere just fifty years ago.
For millennia up until then, human settlements had been designed for walking. In the 16th century, animal-drawn carriages rose in popularity; in the 19th century, internal streetcar networks were developed; yet even as technology evolved, people continued to make their daily trips by foot. New inter-city transportation technology always yielded to the pre-existing infrastructure, and said infrastructure had been catering to pedestrians for a very long time. It was frequently more convenient to walk to your destination-- streetcars and carriages did not cut any corners there.
Today, however, the average person can hardly go to ShopRite without driving around a steel vehicle the size of a small room, even if it was just to pick up something as small as a tube of toothpaste. At the same time, it’d rarely be more convenient to walk to your destination, because as much as you’d rather not waste gas on a trip to ShopRite, you simply could not walk there. If, by any chance, you are part of the minority who live within walking distance of a grocery store, you are met with poorly maintained sidewalks and a stroll made unbearable by either lack of foliage or having to walk alongside a road full of cars that spew smoke into your face. From updated building zones and car-oriented roads to the very economic model of towns and cities, the entire country has been reshaped to accommodate car transportation instead of pedestrianism. Such outstanding car dependency was built from scratch in an astoundingly short period of time, and it is easy to say that the rise of the automobile is the most momentous urban change to ever happen in America.
Is this the American narrative of progress? After all, we walked everywhere in the past and subsequently built cities around walking. Now, we simply drive everywhere, and it is only natural that our society becomes built around driving. If, in the future, we invent hovering cars, our cities will obviously make way for hovering cars. We are following the path of improvement, the path of opportunity and prosperity. Such is the sensible development of human life and technology!
In reality, the narrative of progress is little more than a fanciful tale-- there was change, but we cannot call it progress until we are sure that it won’t blow up in our faces. That seems to be a more impossible future by the day, because we keep finding that our car-centered communities will, in fact, blow up in our faces.
Cities before the automobile were extraordinarily similar in design despite having been built on different continents by different cultures around the world. Through trial and error, these distant societies all refined and optimized the art of urban planning according to their social, cultural, and financial needs. This slower, incremental approach creates what is possibly the most important quality of a city: resiliency.
Mass growth is the opposite of slow. Concurrent with the rapid advent of the automobile was a plethora of major technological and social changes. Cheap fossil fuels. Advancements in communication technology. Mass production. This was an era of great change, and it was with the same fervor that people attacked the problems of the traditional city. In the span of a mere two or three generations, we developed different building types. Zoning codes. Financing mechanisms. Even an entirely new system of regulation to replicate this pattern!
For most Americans, this is all they have ever known, and it seems like it could last forever.
Now in its third generation, the auto-oriented suburban experiment is lauded for allowing the country decades of rapid development. But it is clear that this system is one of the most large-scale social, cultural, and financial experiments in the history of the world, not the next wheel. The rapid transition to car dependency has sacrificed resilience for growth; the designs of these towns were plans advanced in academia and meeting rooms, not forged steadily through time, and they are not stable in the slightest. Cities and states around the country now struggle to find a way out of debt. Simple infrastructure maintenance jobs find themselves inadequately staffed. There is no money for basic functions.
As our communities shifted from the residential and commercial mixing pot of the downtown, we have given up reliable sources of municipal revenue in exchange for big risks with little gains. There is a lot of investment in peripheral big box stores like ShopRite, but they rely on public infrastructure and pay even less back to the community in taxes. In a side-by-side comparison, we are actively losing money by erasing the traditional, pedestrian downtown. Simple six-story buildings contribute more revenue to the community than an entire ShopRite complex, while they just take up a fraction of the space. What’s more, the actual logistics of car-facilitated division of residential and commercial zones requires everybody to drive for access. We have big box stores in our towns and cities because nobody wants to drive to a little store -- but, in the first place, this problem arose from the fact that walking is no longer an option.
Residents experience a startling lack of supportive infrastructure for transportation other than driving. There are parking lots in front of every store -- the expectation being that consumers will drive there -- both using up massive amounts of space and concrete and fostering neglect for, say, bike parking or safer walk-paths to this destination. Because why would you do that if nobody will use it? What’s more, people are coerced into owning a car and spending money on gas and insurance, whereas traditional pedestrian walking had always been free.
We discovered that making all of the changes was the easy part -- maintaining it socially and financially is the hard part. Car-centered suburbia cannot continue because it simply cannot sustain itself. The switch to driving to shiny big box stores on the periphery is costing the city money, and the way commercial centers are being built around cars is creating a dangerous, inefficient, and financially reckless model of development. The suburban pattern is proven to need more growth and more debt to keep itself solvent. Towns all over America are already experiencing the consequences with the constant lack of money for essential city services. More rapid growth is not the antidote to fraying budgets. America desperately needs a different development pattern altogether, because in an analysis of resiliency and financial productivity, one can see that the age of the automobile -- and the changes it wrought -- has fundamentally broken America.
What did you learn?
What changed as a result of the automobile’s rise in the 20th century? The traditional, walkable downtown shifted to encompass a more sprawling web of roads suited for the massive car that one now has to use to do something as simple as buying a can of beans. Big box stores like ShopRite and Walmart often lurk on the periphery of American towns because of those exact reasons, and they contribute less back to the city while using more of the town’s public infrastructure by necessitating the drive there. All of this creates a financially insolvent and residentially hostile development pattern.
Why does rapid change incur instability? While looking at world history, it’s clear that societies around the world had intriguingly similar settlements because they all developed their cities through the slow, traditional, trial and error method. A pattern of slight change might be inefficient in the short-term, but it ensures that any weaknesses in the system are rooted out and creates a stable society. Rapid change, on the other hand, is not particularly built on the wisdom of time, and because of its time frame, it is likely to be planned in a meeting room rather than tested out in certain areas to certify its productivity. When you implement massive changes with such an origin all at once, you will likely not expect and negate many flaws of your ideas before their consequences hit you in reality. The developers of the American suburban pattern did not get to see a long-term timeline of the cities they planned because they both planned and carried it out in a mere three generations, and subsequently they did not expect the pattern of financial insolvency they received either. Rapid change is always a risky investment.
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