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June 14 - December 30, 2024
palliative
Now, even more than in the 1920s, the garage advanced; the porch retreated, dragging down standards and safety for pedestrians.
For forty-five months, travel centered on getting soldiers to war on rail, and passenger trains were in the black for the first time in fifteen years. The railroad was a “vital war industry”—no longer the tool of robber barons.
Nonetheless, federal policies still sent resources away from cities toward fresh fields. Partly to avoid the possibility of attacks by German bombs, partly for diversity, partly to build more easily on clear land, the government meted out war contracts to the South, Southwest, and Pacific Coast. Shipyards and airplane factories brought some 500,000 new residents to live in Los Angeles, and the polynucleated region was born. A whopping $332 million in aircraft contracts swelled San Diego’s population. Boeing’s aircraft industry enlarged Seattle, while shipbuilding inflated New Orleans’s
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Heroes in an emergency, U.S. automobile leaders gained the wealth and credibility lost in the Depression, and the forerunner of the military-industrial complex was born. In what historian John Morton Blume called “the hardening pattern of bigness,” government grew bigger and bigger businesses got the bucks. Among them the biggest of all was the automobile industry. Washington handed out two-thirds of its $175 billion in contracts to the nation’s top 100 corporations, 8 percent to General Motors alone.
“No man who owns his own house and lot can ever be a Communist; he has too much to do,” was William Levitt’s contention. It was a Cold War update of Roosevelt’s view that “a nation of homeowners, of people who own a real share in their own land, is unconquerable.”
The Housing Act of 1949, designed by Congress to remedy city housing ills, initiated what would be called “urban renewal.” Descended from New Deal legislation to replace slums with housing through private enterprise and create “a decent home and a suitable living environment,” the act set the wheels in motion to clear the land.
In Europe it was otherwise. There, passenger trains were revived. Stockholm, Rotterdam, Rome, and Leningrad constructed underground subways. West Germany, England, France, and other European nations, nurtured by the Marshall Plan, began to rebuild their shattered cities with updates to old transit systems and with thirty-two new ones before 1970. Americans decimated what they had.
Wrote one commentator, “Motorists were never quite sure whether they were seated in an automobile, a land-based dreamboat or an earth-bound aircraft.”
cabal
the single-family house was all. Atomized, unwalkable, unneighborly, such developments supported few stores or services.
In one of the most vigorous fights to rein in the automobile, the citizens of Portland, Oregon, stopped a freeway from being built, instituted a light-rail system, saved downtown, and established a protective green space around the city.
“Gentrification,” a word imported from England, was used to describe a wave of urban rejuvenation.
esthetes,
Between World War II and the mid-1960s, the nation had spent a meager $1.5 billion for local public transportation, an average of $75 million a year, while doling out $51 billion a year to motor vehicles. Federal, state, and urban policies combined to swing the shovels to dig up the roads, remove the old rails, and send their customers outward bound.
By 1970, Penn Central, with only nine daily Metroliners each way, was in receivership. That same year, the federal government created Amtrak as the National Railroad Passenger Corporation. “Wards of the state,” Stephen Goddard summed it in Getting There. The public would cover costly passenger service while the profitable freight would be siphoned off for private operators under Conrail. It was little short of a hatchet job. Equipped with wretched cars from a ravaged system and severed from the profitable freight lines, Amtrak got short shrift. “Amtrak was intended to go gently into that good
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polemics
palliatives
Starved cities with dwindling tax bases from acreage lost to asphalt still watched while suburban homeowners deducted mortgage interest payments and property taxes.
parlance
thanatopsis”
Looking more broadly at the nation, however, the picture was gloomier. Between 1930 and 1980, the miles of railway track had halved. Only 4 percent of public transportation was by rail, in stark contrast to the 35 percent of Americans who headed downtown by rail to the thriving cities in the last year of World War II.
A decade later, subsidies had dropped. Passengers now paid for 80 percent of their train tickets, while drivers paid less than half of their costs.
cudgel.
opprobrium
boondoggles.
liturgy
In a house-poor nation—a nation with 75.9 percent of its elderly over sixty-five years of age living alone, a nation hard-pressed for affordable housing, a nation with dwellings too isolated for children to be independent—dense living is the geometry of humanity.
Jeffrey M. Zupan, coauthor of Public Transportation and Land Use Policy,
“To get one every half hour, it’s seven an acre, and for every ten minutes, it’s fifteen an acre.” That’s the number of houses—with their inhabitants—who will supply the needed riders to fill a bus at thirty- or ten-minute waits in residential areas. Downtown defines the mass needed for mass transit in terms of the commercial space that attracts these potential riders. “To get an hourly bus you need to have 5 to 8 million square feet of retail space in the retail district; for one to come every half hour, it’s 7 to 17; and for every ten minutes in the CBD (Central Business District) downtown
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Zupan’s measurements are formulaic, and in every case the formula is based on two things—land use and density, the pattern of building that pools people to live or shop in proximity to each other and hence to transportation services. The more we congregate, the more we fill our buses. The more buses we fill, the more we get. It is a chain. The more buses we get, the better transit works and the fewer cars we need. When we house fewer cars, density can rise—and the more we fill our buses and can insert rail.
William H. Lucy and David L. Phillips, professors at the University of Virginia, found that inner or older suburbs connected to downtown by the umbilical cord of good transit have prospered. Alexandria and Arlington, Virginia, which embraced land use policies that nestled shops and services and provided density around their transit stations more than a decade ago, now thrive along with Metro service to Washington, D.C.
Mass transit even won a vote for a sales tax, he says, and remains vital. “If we’re only creating $8 jobs and you have to buy a $15,000 car to get to an $8 job, how do you do it?”
Sit behind your computer, your phone, your fax, on-line, at home, say supporters of this solution. Peer out at the green grass through the window. This reduces vehicle miles. The car stays in the garage or vanishes, right? Yes and no. Futurists who project the rising number of telecommuters fail to acknowledge how small a number of telecommuters exist (3 percent of the population), how small a percentage of miles are traveled by the commuter, and, most important, how large a percentage of miles are spent performing errands in sprawling suburbs. So stay-at-homes still pass their days performing
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inviolate
bollard,
palliatives
Design of Cities,
indefatigable,
Would they share a car in a car co-op as Germans do, or devise an American solution?
