Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars

by Samuel I. Schwartz

They weren’t kidding. Throughout the 1920s, motor vehicle crashes in the United States killed more than twenty thousand people a year—more than two-thirds of them pedestrians.

A Conflict on the roads. Up until now, roads had been hared between pedestrians, tradesmen and buggies. With the rise of the automobile, shared era comes to an end. 2/3rds of fatals in accidents were pedestrians.

Because one of the objectives of trolley lines was to bring shoppers into the commercial centers of American cities, they tended to be laid out like the spokes of a wagon wheel; all routes inevitably led downtown, which is one reason that central business districts grew so rapidly during the peak trolley years.

PG6. Trolleys were urban rails serving as commuter rail. Operated on hub-spoke model. Had to own land, pay taxes. Depended on franchises from local Gov. Holding Prices steady w/ecomimic uncertainty.

It’s not too much to say that the streetcar industry was on life support by the 1930s, when the combination of a new federal law and an illegal corporate conspiracy administered the coup de grâce.

7. Streetcars which were subsidiaries of public power were allowed to run at loss. Consolidation of the power industry led to Rayburn-Wheeler Act. Now Trolley & public companies were limited to geographic area and can't subsidize unregulated transit.

Those new-and-improved roads looked a lot different outside cities than inside. One reason was that the rise of automobile culture tracked, almost exactly, with the beginnings of the movement known as American Progressivism, and the first automobiles were embraced as a Progressive solution to the widely accepted notion that cities were basically incubators of immigration, crime, and tenements. To Progressives, cars provided an escape from cities,

Mumford was right in his criticism but not in his reasoning. It wasn’t a love for cars that brought limited-access roads into American cities. It was love of money. To local politicians, the clinking sound of the Highway Trust Fund paying ninety cents out of every road-building dollar was sweeter music by far than the sound of any V8 engine roaring down the highway. A $100 million highway for $10 million? Or, sometimes, since state governments offered their own subsidies, only $4 or $5 million? With hundreds or even thousands of new construction jobs in your district?

Pg 20. The money aspect of the rise of streets. New streets are construction jobs, and free money.

But there were special reasons for the 1950s explosion in suburban emigration that took the Cohen, Politik, and Pepper families out of Bensonhurst. The same GI Bill of Rights that educated the engineers who built the IHS also provided, through the new Federal Housing Authority, low-cost housing loans to veterans. But since the law was explicitly drafted to promote employment in the building trades, qualifying families could get thirty-year loans for purchasing new, single-family housing, but only five-year loans for repairing or renovating existing structures.

21.Local politicians needed space to build roads, so pushed out folks w/ no political clout. White flight due to the rise of new-dev suburbs in GI Bill Law made it cheaper than rent. New suburbs had no prev-connections, and cars dominated.

But it wasn’t really inevitable at all. The revolution that transformed America’s roads, the one that really got under way in the 1950s, was the result of a sequence of decisions—to draft the Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance, to pass the Rayburn-Wheeler Act, to collude in the National City Lines conspiracy, to build the Interstate Highway System, and to fund the suburbanization of America through the GI Bill—that pushed an entire country in one automobile-rich direction.

The average distance for both had been on an upward slope for decades. In 1960, when the United States had 64.6 million full-time workers, 9.4 million, or 14.5 percent of them, worked outside the county in which they lived; by 2000, 128.3 million were employed, and 34.3 million worked outside their home counties: 27 percent. Average commuting times inched up to more than fifty minutes a day. Because of induced demand, there was no engineering fix to this problem: no matter how many roads we built, or how well, people weren’t getting from point A to point B any faster, partly because points A and B were getting further apart,

It’s not that they stopped traveling. While Millennials made 15 percent fewer trips by car, they took 16 percent more bike trips than their same-age predecessors did in 2001, and their public-transit passenger miles increased by a whopping 40 percent. That’s 117 more miles annually biking, walking, or taking public transit than their same-age predecessors used in 2001.

68. Driving Habits Millennials are driving less miles than predecessors. Opting for "alternative" transit. Bike, Public + Taxi Why?

The only time there had ever been a substantial drop in VMT was during world wars, depressions, and fuel crises, and in each case, once the cause disappeared, a jump in VMT followed. Not this time.

Then is single driving too expensive? Frustrating?

Even more revealing: Millennials earning $70,000 a year or more in 2009 used public transit for twice as many miles as their affluent same-age predecessors did in 2001, they biked more than twice as many miles, and they even walked 37 percent more.

Well, maybe cost isn't the reason, unless the rich have made that value evaluation.

The Internet, and the spectrum of technologies that have been developed to exploit it commercially, have changed everything from the way we buy groceries to the way we find romantic partners. It is no big surprise, then, to find that it’s changed the way we get from place to place, too.

73. Why drive when internet can ship goods to you, buy goods to your into community. Walmart Plus and other home delivery services really bring down the barrier to living in urban core without acess to supermarkets.

One thing the Internet does unambiguously well is to make information that used to be expensive and scarce now cheap and abundant. You don’t have to spend ten years learning the commuting ropes to know whether the train or bus you’re on is an express or a local, or even when it’s going to show up. You just need a smartphone.

75. Internet reduces info barrier to transit. Reducing barriers is key to consumption, just a click away.

This time I decided to follow my father’s footsteps. In 1951, he had moved us from Brownsville to Bensonhurst to be within walking distance of his grocery store. In 2002, I did the same, moving to an apartment in Greenwich Village, eight blocks from my office on Houston Street. There were seven different ways to walk from my home to the office, one for each day of the week. Every day I’d pick a different side street and always find something new. Depending on the wait for the elevator, the entire trip took between ten and eleven minutes, and I wasn’t anxious or rushed for a single one of them. As a boy, I had been a bit discomfited by the fact that my father walked to work, while most of the other fathers drove. Now I knew my father was the wisest of them all. He picked his home to minimize travel.

92. I have kind of done the same, but for transit. Just like his father, the author decides to move within walking distance of work. He had previously written how weird urban life is. It used to be the poor. Now it's the affluent who can afford to pay more in rent, bit the living expenses are less, in transit and acess to entertainment.

A study at Duke University compared a brisk thirty-minute walk three times a week to taking the antidepressant Zoloft. Walking worked at least as well.

95. This at least somewhat tracks, expecially if the walk to work or the busstop is particularly inspiring. As a tall building enthusiast, I love the walk to work.

When subjects were shown four different ambiguous videos—a girl texting from a park bench, for example—the ones who saw the incident as it would have appeared from the front windshield of a car rated the actors as more threatening, less considerate, even less educated than subjects who saw the video from the viewpoint of a pedestrian, a cyclist, or a bus rider.

98. when subjects were shown 4 vids, those with car pov saw it as more threatening. Driving removes peripheral vision, makes for neg. snap judgements. see Disney "Monster Mania".

Social cohesion and trust are improved just by living in a place with less traffic.

99. Where people can live without fear of being run-over, builds oxytocin. Social cohesion and trust are downstream of traffic.

The results weren’t unexpected, but the degree of difference was still startling: residents on the street with the lightest traffic had, on average, three close friends living on the same block; those on the heaviest, less than one.

100. Residents of streets where traffic is light have nearby friends, kids see neighbor house as opportunity to play (101)

Which is exactly what happened with the GI Bill’s requirement that government-guaranteed home loans go only to new construction, or the Eisenhower administration’s decision to build forty thousand miles of heavily subsidized highways. The relative advantage of car-dependent suburban living didn’t come from the impersonal forces of the market in action, but from a sequence of decisions made by fallible human beings, decisions that could very easily have gone in an entirely different direction.

103. old walkability lost due to new, cheap, subsidized construction in GI Bill, out in cheap land suburbs.

As you’ve already figured out, the 85th percentile rule virtually guarantees that one car in seven will be exceeding the speed limit at any time.

123. Drivers got the speed limit under the 85th percentile rule. Slow them down via street design, narrow lanes, medians, refuge islands.

In any case, while making walking safer (both actually safer and perceptibly safer) is a necessary requirement for maximizing active transportation, it isn’t really the entire story.

124 Sidewalks along don’t encourage walkability. Need quantity/quality, destinations. When destinations decrease, beautify to attract new ones. (125)

Plazas, for example, convert underused street space into public areas furnished with tables and seating. Parklets are smaller versions of the same idea: liberating two or three street parking spaces, and transforming them into twenty-foot-long (or longer) spaces, each the width of a parking space, complete with benches, planters, tables, and even shade trees or umbrellas. Bike corrals use the same footprint as parklets for bike racks, which encourage cycling, and preserve sidewalks for walking. All of the People St initiatives remake LA’s streets and punctuate the city’s sidewalks with potentially hundreds, or eventually even thousands, of spaces for people-friendly seating.

130. Blur public- private spaces. Parklets turn parking spaces to Shaded seating,bike corrals into bike parking, LA great streets project.

Typically, transportation engineers assume that, for most trips, people will forgo traveling on foot for distances that are longer than a quarter- to a half-mile, or by bicycle when they have to travel more than two miles. This is a powerful argument for as much density as possible, in order to maximize the potential number of such trips, but it’s impossible to imagine a transportation future in which every trip (or even most of them) will be short enough to be completed on foot or bike. Whether it’s just for a weekly trip to a supermarket or a daily commute to work, for the foreseeable future, most people will need access to modes of transportation that are powered by something other than muscle.

The Radburn plan, in all its incarnations, was well intentioned: an attempt to protect pedestrians from automobile traffic in the places where they lived. Its results, however, were the opposite of multimodal. In the Radburn version of the English garden city, the only way to get from your house to anywhere that wasn’t your neighbor’s house was by car. Access to any other form of mechanized transport, whether trains, trolleys, or buses, was severely compromised. Since straight lines are the shortest distance between any two points, all other lines are longer, which means that travel is considerably less efficient on curvilinear streets than on gridded ones.

152. Radburn plan protected peds by discouraging grids, favored cul-de-sacs. Now the only way they can get around was by car. Curvilinear is not efficient or hospitable for transit.

The “frequent network” replaced the meandering routes that converged on downtown (now home to less than 25 percent of the region’s employment) with a high-frequency right-angled grid that gets most transit riders to an employment cluster with a single transfer, at most.

172.Transport (allocate vs commute) With limited resources and time for riders, place stops further apart, focusing on end destinations with one max transfer.

Before and after their week of auto deprivation, the study’s participants were interviewed in depth about their experiences. Two-thirds of them reported that the absence of a car exposed them to new experiences. They felt more connected to their communities. Many felt literally claustrophobic when they returned to driving after the deprivation experiment.

188. 2/3rds of those who went a week without a car felt more conn. to community, got over experience gap. Bigger resistance to transit is feeling "autonomy." Can tech make transit riders feel free and in control? Frequency? If there's enough frequency as 3 min or so, did you even wait for a ride.

Think of it this way: Ever since the architects and builders of the first cities started roughing out their plans on clay tablets or papyrus scrolls, they’ve faced the same kind of problem, which is that their transportation corridors, whether roads or rails, needed to be built to accommodate peak demand. By definition, therefore, during every time of the day or year when demand was below the peak, the systems had a lot of surplus capacity, what we in the trade call over-engineering. As cities grew, so did peak demand, and, for a long time, the only way to satisfy that demand was by increasing capacity: More (or wider) roads and rails. More over-engineering.

206. Engineers built infrastructure for peak demand. When not in peak- excess capacity. Can ITS leverage this excess to be useful? Contraflow, auto bus/HOV lanes, incentivize off-peak travel and parking?

readers that as far back as 1953, Esther, the poorly paid magazine intern who is the heroine of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, took cabs everywhere in order to avoid the smelly, dirty, not-for-nice-girls subways, especially when dressed for an evening out.

This is the biggest gap, can we associate public transportation with class?

because great public transportation systems are expensive, they only get fully funded when they’re used by both the well-to-do and the not-doing-so-well.

The nation’s poorest families spend more than 40 percent of their take-home pay on transportation, including cars.

Harkens back to the earlier poinjt, how did we get to the point where the old tenements essentially became modern "luxury living" complexes. It is expensive to live in a place with good acess to transit.

To my delight they agreed. Today, not only do two New York City bus lines stop right at the front of the store, so does an IKEA-financed free ferry to and from Manhattan, as do free buses from nearby subway stations. The result is a little discombobulating: a hugely successful branch of IKEA has a parking lot that is always half empty.c

If only more companies would realize this. A lot of customers come via bus, if you can incentivize a bus stop, you will have more, smaller trips, but on bigger margin items due to the weight penalty to buy groceries and transport via bus.

BRT system are served by smaller buses on perpendicular roads to the main grid—and they are free, in order to make certain that the city’s less affluent are able to benefit from it.

Good Cities: Skilines Idea

ever since 2000, on the first Thursday in February, the entire city, rich and poor, goes car-free.

This, make car-free a tend, an event.

Salt Lake City and Oklahoma City. Despite that, as we’ve seen, both cities recognize the critical importance of building the elements of a Street Smart transportation system, from walkable downtowns to multimodal grids.

Frankly, I'm surprised there is still little representation of urbanists in conservative circles. Wasn't that the whole point of the old conservatives, the rockefellers, rober barrons, the art-deco future. One that honors God and keeps us in community together, the social cohesion, the advanceent of thought and the arts.

the average driver pays about $9,000 a year to own a car. Saving a few hundred bucks a year on gas won’t change the financial decision tree much.

This was the biggest factor in me getting rid of my car. Insurance and registration, plus maintenance, not necessarily gas prices.

11 percent of the total—are “structurally deficient,” they mean that they are in imminent risk of collapse. Few actually are, though. Most of the structural deficiencies are part of normal wear and tear,

functionally obsolete. This is another engineering term that just means a particular bridge isn’t wide enough, or robust enough, to carry the maximum amount of traffic, including the biggest trucks, under conditions approaching free flow.

capital expenditures. That is, I had the equivalent of the entire municipal budget of a city the size of Spokane for building bridges, but next to nothing for painting or repairing them.g

The Morgantown campus of the University of West Virginia has a similar system,

Morgantown PRT Mentioned! I always say the Tom Scott video influenced me to be a mountaineer.

All those successful test drives have been performed using a dedicated vehicle that preceded the autonomous car on the route in question,

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Teslas and Waymos solved the issues mentioned by the driver. They're no better or worse than human drivers who get faked into falling for a robberry.

A group of simulated driverless cars negotiating a typical urban intersection at the same (slow) acceleration of a commuter train increases the time needed to cross the intersection by anywhere from 36 percent to more than 2,000 percent.

If anything this will always be a strong argument against cars, even if autonomous driving takes off. Still would like a PRT for dense urban cores that don't have 24/7 transit when less than clockface intervals don't make financial sense or hard to navigate terrain like WVU.