IN AMERICA, ALAS, THE CAR IS STILL KING

Heaven help the pedestrian in shopping centers like this one—
which unfortunately are typical across the nation.

A few blocks from my office, there’s a dreary, ten-year-old strip mall fronted by literally acres of unrelieved parking lot.  Though it has no fewer than five separate entrances for cars, God help anyone who dares to approach the place on foot. To reach its quarter-mile-long phalanx of storefronts, you can either negotiate the single paltry thread of sidewalk the developers saw fit to provide, or else try to cross a vast sea of dirty asphalt on foot, with cars flashing carelessly past on all sides and bearing down behind you unseen.

One of the many exasperating tenets of postwar planning was the assumption that nobody would ever want to walk anywhere, anytime. Shopping centers, not to speak of downtown streets, were laid out mainly to suit automobiles and not people. Seemingly, the only time a human was expected to walk outdoors was enroute to the driver’s seat.  

In an environment designed for
and dominated by cars,
pedestrians are just in the way.

Yet many people do walk, and hopefully many more will do so in coming years. What with traffic snarls, interminable waits at signals, and the inevitable battle for parking, it’s often quite literally faster to walk three or four blocks than it is to drive that far. And mind you, I say this as a lifelong motorhead. 

Given all the bad things we’ve found out about designing cities around cars instead of people, modern planners are doing their best to bring pedestrians into this creaky old equation. It’s a fine idea in theory, but in practice, wherever cars and pedestrians mix, the cars invariably win out. The reason is obvious:  Since a car weighs twenty to thirty times what a person does, any contest between the two will not end up in the pedestrian’s favor. Hence, we’re psychologically conditioned from childhood to subordinate ourselves to those big bad cars.  

Self-driving cars are not going to change scenes like this—
they may even make them worse. The problem is
in the cars, not in who's driving them.
(Image: Bill O'Leary, The Washington Post)

Less obvious, but just as problematic, a car also takes up about thirty times as much space as a person on foot, resulting in vast areas of our cities that have no function whatever but to store our four-wheeled friends. All told, we pave over about forty percent of our cities solely to accommodate motor vehicles (in Los Angeles, the figure is said to be closer to sixty percent).  This autocentric environment extends right into our own homes, one-quarter of which we happily devote to garage space. 

For decades, the rhetoric of New Urbanist planning has promised to reverse these twisted priorities. More recently we've heard utopian predictions about the benefits of self-driving cars, but these, too, will not address the root problem—driverless or not, they are still cars, and will still dominate public roads at the expense of those who'd rather walk. 

In my town, you'll find this lovely shopping street—
but rather than making it a pedestrian mall, traffic engineers
decided to let cars go barreling down the middle of it.

Much has been predicted, but little has actually changed on the ground. I recently stopped in at yet another shopping complex not far from my office, this one barely two years old. Unlike the stupefying strip mall mentioned earlier, this “retail village” employs many of the latest New Urbanist planning ideas--varied building facades, happy little plazas, pretty paving, and the like.  

For hapless shoppers, alas, these potentially lovely surroundings are completely co-opted by the constant stream of cars that go barreling right through the heart of the place. That’s right:  For some inexplicable reason, automobiles weren’t barred from what might have been a charming little shopping lane.  

So far, neither New Urbanist rules nor Silicon Valley tech have been enough to change the game.  Those big bad cars are still winning it.