I probably risk getting a bit polemic if I do more than simply link to This story. As it goes to one of those forehead smacking obvious problems in society. The solution to which is very simple, helps the environment, helps our kids grow up to be responsible adults, as well as keeps them from leading sedentary car dependent lives. (The link, by the way, comes from this very good blog Which is the companion to this very good book.) Said solution, will of course, never happen. Seriously, I risk going all Penn and Teller if I keep going. (NSFW)
The short of it is, since the 60’s VMT (vehicle miles traveled) tripled. This, of course, leads to a crap load of traffic, congestion, and pissed off drivers. What is interesting is that adults commuting to work miles traveled has only increased about 36%. The other miles come from parents driving their kids all over tarnation. And at the same time parents are driving their kids all over tarnation schools are clamping down on kids doing for themselves. (In one case, I’m not kidding, a kid had his bike impounded and got detention for the audacity of riding his bike to school on bike to work day this year. What makes this even dumber is, he rode to school with his parent (who, by the way was then forced by this asinine school to go get the car so they could drive the bike home) If the parent thinks it’s safe enough to ride to school what the hell is the school doing getting in the way of that? And the reason the school thinks it’s unsafe for johnny to ride his bike? Why all the parents driving their kids to school of course!)
Of course parents are driving kids everywhere because as we all know crime is at or near record low levels at the moment… Wait, record low? Yes low. A kid is less likely to be abducted and or molested by a stranger today than the 70’s, 60’s or you know, really anytime in US history. So obviously it is vitally important to smother children.
This whole things goes to two of my pet peeves, one is stupid transport policy. The other is parent’s smothering their kids. Seriously folks, you don’t need the baby is learning to walk helmet (perfectly safe for work as long as you can control laughter), you just don’t.
The short of my point is, perhaps if we let kids walk together, or ride their bikes together to sports practice or to their X lesson we might have happier kids that are in better shape, and that have a feeling that they can legitimately fend for and take care of themselves. Perhaps they might even run about and engage in unplanned ad hoc fun. Your first experience of these things should not be college or getting your drivers license. Of course in most cases our communities are not particularly well suited to this kind of life style. Which goes back to pet peeve one, stupid transport policy.
New York’s Time’s Square gives a wonderful example of this. Before the “street closure” experiment 300,000+ daily trips through Times square were accomplished on foot. Approximately 50,000 daily trips were accomplished in cars. So can you tell me which transport mode was alloted over 75% of the available space in Time’s square? Obviously it is cars as they are more important and move more people… Oh wait. The street closure moves the needle so it is about 50/50 now. And it turns out the crowds of people move a lot more smoothly through the area now. And the crowds moving more smoothy means that car traffic is moving more smoothy. In fact traffic problems in the area have gone down. Better for the pedestrians better for the car drivers. Clearly the experiment will be shut down, hopefully I’m just being pessimistic but taxi drivers seem to not like the move and motorists are complaining even though they get through the area faster.
Apologies for the rambling, hopefully better discussion will come from it.
The idea of kids walking to/biking to practices, piano lessons etc. is incredibly impractical in a lot of locations though. I rode my bike to piano lessons for awhile because it was close enough, but just about all my sporting events the practice field was not within easy/safe biking distance. This becomes even more true for competitions. In addition depending on the time of year by the time the practice is over its at or near dark and riding/walking becomes that much more dangerous, especially if you have to cross super busy streets.
I do agree that when possible walking/biking should be encouraged, its what I did for getting to both elementary and middle school, but there are times and places where bikes just aren’t practical.
So David, what you are saying, in a nut shell, is that we can’t change the status quo because it is the status quo?
No, i’m saying that the status quo exists in many places for a very good reason. Simply disliking the status quo doesn’t do much if you can’t come up with something that improves the situation and is practical or at the very least is a slight drop off in quality for increased benefits elsewhere.
In short, its fine to push for improvements where they make sense, but its stupid to decry things that actually DO make sense given the circumstances. It makes the person arguing look like a mindless zealot if you aren’t willing to accept that there may be circumstances where the car is the best/only option.
Ahh, so you are saying we should continue to support poor planning by supporting the status quo because it may be difficult to change it?
It is only in the last 50 years or so that the car has become central to transportation in the United States. The result has been both expensive and destructive. And the car continues to be destructive and some how serves as an excuses for horrendous behavior.
Unfortunately, as we currently do things is unsustainable and untenable. We are going to have to do something else because we simply cannot build roads fast enough to handle their increased use. There isn’t the construction capacity or the space much less the money. Without even getting into questions of fuel consumption and dangers of global warming the status quo is untenable without those issues—electric cars and hybrids are not going to fix the long term problem. Simply building more roads is like going to see the taylor because you’ve gained weight. It’ll keep working for a while, but eventually you are going to have to do something about the underlying problems. (I can’t take credit for the quote, I read it in Traffic, but I can’t find the attribution at the moment.)
But for thousands of years we managed to do a heck of a lot with things that are a lot slower than cars. Heck, things that are slower than a bike. Then in 50 years we changed completely what a city was and how we thought about moving people through that city. Cars have a place, but when it comes to cities and communities? We are going to have to do something different than what we are doing. And I have no doubt we can do it. The point is we need to focus on people and not their cars.
Our new neighborhood is built around the idea that you should be able to walk to most places and I definitely walk a lot more here than I did in our previous apartment. The town was planned this way and I love it. But I don’t think it’s feasible to change towns that were built without a walking mindset to magically make them more pedestrian and biker friendly without incurring enormous costs. And there are still issues. Even if your kid’s ball game is only a mile away, sometimes you have to haul so much equipment, other children, activities, mats, chairs, toys etc, that you would need a donkey to haul it all if you wanted to walk.
The point isn’t that we do everything all at once. We can’t. It took a while to get into the mess it will take a while to get out. What it comes down to is that we move in the right direction. And choosing more walkable communities is an important step in that direction.
No Dane, thats not what I’m saying at all, and its hard to have a serious conversation when you are going to take such a ridiculous position that is complete NOT what I have said and NOT what any reasonable person would take from what I have said. Let me know when you are interested in that serious conversation and I’ll gladly have it, until then enjoy your one dimensional argument.
David, honestly it sounds like you are saying what a lot of people like to say. Public Transportation is the great for all those other drivers. And what I’m trying to say is we can’t just keep doing what we’ve been doing. Like Becky said they’ve made the decision to move to a livable community. And as more people make those decisions and as planners make more livable decisions over time we will move in the right direction. But the only way we can do it is if people stop blindly defending the car as the be all end all solution. Yes there are places were cars are needed, and places were trucks and SUVs are needed. but they are not needed for everything.
You know, I think Dane and David are saying the same thing here. David is just pointing out that some already built communities make walking difficult and dangerous (because they were built on the assumption that the car would make parks and commerce accessible. I know, I used to live in one. We can’t go back in time and rebuild the communities. My take is that we need to support walkable communities, and support measures that make unwalkable ones more walkable.
Hmm, and that is why we have comments…
Thats pretty close to what I’m saying B. Minich.
Basically Dane is coming across, at least to me, as “All cars are evil and if you use your cars to take your kids to activities you are dumb, they shoudl walk and ride there bikes!” Without acknowledging that there are very real, very good reasons why this hasn’t happened.
I whole heartedly agree that traffic congestion is a problem and we can and should be trying to come up with ideas to improve the situation. But arguments and responses like he was using above come across as all or nothing ones, when in reality, its hardly ever an all or nothing situation.
As you point out there are many communities, in fact I think the vast majority of communities in many parts of the country where children walkign to and from such activities is impractical for a number of reasons. In some cases they can be fixed by creating bike lanes, new parks, etc. In many other cases there is no good solution at the moment to eliminate such obstacles or they would require vast amounts of money and resourcse which are simply not available.
Dane, you also claim that people need to make the choice to move to a more liveable community and planners need to build more of them. Well, thats possible, but I think its also important to remember that a vast number of communities that people move to and live in allready exist. Cities, towns, etc. are very seldom planned, they grow like slime molds as time goes on. A truely planned community might be great, but there are few opportunities to actually do them in many places.
In addition, the choices that people make on where to live involve many different priorities, a great many of which probably take precedence over how close little Johnny and little Suzie’s soccer practices are going to be. These choices in clude things such as:
– housing prices
– proximity to places of employment
– safety of neighborhood
– quality of schools
most of these are rather static at the time of choosing and have some but not great chances of varying on a year to year basis.
On the other hand, lets take the activities that kids participate in that you are talking about wanting to eliminate driving for:
– sports
– music
– arts
Sports is a great example of why what your talking about is going to be largely impractical. In any given year your child is going to be on any given team. The chances of remaining on the same team that practices in the same location and plays games at the same place is actually quite small. In addition the locations of competitions is by necessity going to be spread out. Any location large enough to host multiple teams is going to be large enough that the distance between competition and practice venues is probably going to necessitate at least SOME car travel. If you live in smaller communities, then by necessity the competition is going to have to span multiple communities. While each individual community may be conveniently designed for its local residents, the residents NOT of that community are going to have to travel a non-trivial distance to get there.
Absolutely we need to think about ways to reduce our use of cars for a variety of reasons. Carpooling, mass transit, good planning, those can all help. But teling everyone to walk or bike instead of driving, regardless of the actual circumstances involved is, frankly, stupid. And criticizing people who bring up the fact that there are legitimate reasons why car travel is the best option, as people who someone think we should only stick to the status quo, is needlessly antagonizing people who you want and NEED to agree with you about the parts that can be done.
I wasn’t trying to say we HAVE to stick to the status quo, I wasn’t blindly defending driving cars until we all choke to death, and if you hadn’t been so reactionary to my very resonable concerns raised about your proposal, maybe you would have noticed that.
Instead you made yourself look EXACTLY like the people in the Pro-Life debate who call anyone who disagrees with them a baby-killer. Its not a very effective or accurate way of arguing a point.
In a longer form of what B. Minch is saying, Dane, I think you are running the risk of extrapolating from a limited data set to points where the underlying reality is different.
Now, I say this as someone who walked essentially everywhere until I learned to drive at 25, and who still walks a lot of places others would drive. On days when I know I basically won’t be able to park on campus due to the football games, I walk the 5 miles along the river trail in each direction to get from my house to my lab. But, really, how practical walking is varies a lot from one community to the next.
Urban areas which were initially developed before the widespread ownership of cars tend to be relatively densely packed, with a larger number of smaller organizations offering redundant goods and services spread around, so that there’s one relatively nearby from just about anywhere. The also tend to have narrow streets where bike lanes are a luxury not often indulged in because there is already not enough space for cars on streets designed for horses. The same is often true for first-ring suburbs, though with wider streets and more bike lanes and/or sidewalks wide enough to accommodate both cyclists and pedestrians. Outer-ring suburbs, and even moreso rural areas, are quite different–I have a friend, for instance, who grew up over a 2 hour car ride away from the nearest *hospital*. In such locations, motor vehicles are pretty essential to daily life.
Similarly, urban areas which were primarily developed after the widespread ownership of cars were designed with the assumption that people would have cars, and thus could drive to where they needed to be. You lived in LA for 4 years yourself; surely you can see why virtually everyone in LA has a car?
It also matters what needs to be brought to/take home from a given errand. Getting to and from piano lessons on a bike is a different thing that getting to and from hockey practice–the latter has far more equipment that wouldn’t be feasible to wear while riding the bike, and the former won’t leave you physically exhausted at the end of it. Grocery shopping is even more extreme. In my years in northern CA, I walked 1.5 miles to the grocery store at least once a week, and lugged my purchases home in a backpack. I was a single adult, with a pitifully tiny kitchen that pretty much negated any possibility of making too much and wasting food, and it was still a struggle to get enough food for a week home at once–my only liquid purchases were pints (or the rare half gallons) of milk for cooking, and I ate a whole lot of rice and pasta which have the advantage of being sold dehydrated. Very few people are going to be willing to deal with such problems, and that’s not unreasonable. Throw in a couple of kids, and you’re pretty much going to need a car to deal with grocery shopping, as there wouldn’t be space for you and your 6+ bags of groceries on the bus. I can tell you that in my current community, a car really is essential for grocery shopping even as a single adult–I live over 2 miles from the nearest grocery stores, along a route that lacks sidewalks for much of it. To get to a grocery store along a route with a pedestrian walkway would take over 3 miles in each direction. Or I could take at least 45 minutes to get there by bus, with a transfer involved, and have to deal with trying to handle multiple bags of groceries on an overcrowded bus where I would be expected to give up my seat because of my age and gender.
While I agree that some people are too dependent on a car for transportation when they really could get there other ways, it’s also true that there are many places where a car is truly essential for far more than just commuting to and from work.