Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (28 page)

First We Shape Our Streets, Then They Shape Us

A white male living in Midtown (
left
), near Atlanta’s downtown, is likely to weigh ten pounds less than his identical twin living near Mableton (
right
), a sprawling suburb. This is partly owing to road geometry and land-use mix: a ten-minute walk from a home amid the traditional grid in Midtown will get you to grocery stores, churches, schools, bus stops, restaurants, cafés, a dry cleaner, a bank, and the glorious lawns of Piedmont Park. But the spread-out and homogeneous system of Mableton pushes destinations beyond walking range, which means residents are likely to drive whether they like driving or not. (Each bullet represents a school, church, grocery store, dry cleaner, bank, day-care center, police station, transit stop, or hospital. If restaurants, cafés, bars, and other services were included, the Mableton map would not change, but the Midtown map would be sprayed with dozens more bullets.)
(Erick Villagomez, Metis Design Build)

Our responses to distance are quite predictable. Most of us will walk to a corner store rather than climb in and out of the car if it’s less than a five-minute walk—about a quarter mile—away. We won’t walk more than five minutes to a bus stop, but we will walk ten to a light-rail or subway station, partly because most of us perceive rail service to be faster, more predictable, and more comfortable. This is the geometry perfected by streetcar city developers a century ago. It’s now being rediscovered by planners who find that simply introducing regular high-quality light-rail service can alter the habits—and the health—of people nearby. Less than a year after the LYNX commuter light-rail line was installed in Charlotte, North Carolina, people living near the line had started walking an extra 1.2 miles
every day
because the system changed their daily calculus. People who switched to the LYNX for their commute lost an average of six and a half pounds during that time.

Kids move by a similar calculus. Frank found that if there is a park or some kind of store within a half mile of their home, school-age youth are more than twice as likely to walk. If destinations are farther, they wait for a parental chauffeur. Think of the implications: a community with one central mega–sports complex with several baseball diamonds and soccer fields can actually be bad for children’s health if it replaces small parks scattered every few blocks. In the finer-grained community, instead of begging Mom for a ride to a league game, a teenager might find it easier to organize her own game at the local park.
*
Nearly two-thirds of parents say there is no place for their children to play within walking distance of home. This is part of the reason that American children now actually gain weight during the supposedly leisure-filled summer break.

“The way we organize most cities actually encourages individuals to make choices that make everyone’s life harder,” Frank told me. “The system fails because it promises rewards for irrational behavior.”

Put simply, most people do not walk in American cities because cities have designed destinations out of reach. But they have also corroded the experience of walking. Road engineers have not even bothered to build sidewalks in many Atlanta suburbs. Try a Google search for directions near, say, Somerset Road in Mableton, and the map engine will offer a warning you would not expect in a first world city: “Use caution—This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.”

Aesthetics matter. We walk farther when streets feel safe and interesting. People who live in central New York or London typically walk between a third to a half mile to go shopping. That’s a four- to ten-minute stroll. Even in Montreal, with its freezing winters and sweat-soaked summers, people reported walking about a third of a mile (six to eight minutes) between shops, bags in tow. The numbers are almost as high for people arriving at enclosed shopping malls, which mimic the downtown experience, at least once you’re in the building. But dump us in a vast parking lot surrounded by big-box outlets, and our inclination to walk evaporates. Even when people are equipped with shopping carts, they won’t endure so much as the three-minute stroll between retailers. Researchers observed that a third of the shoppers at one Canadian power center actually parked their cars three or more times during one visit. They just hated trudging across the asphalt desert. It felt ugly, uncomfortable, and unsafe.
*

You might speculate that these studies merely demonstrate the city’s power to sort people by their preferences: maybe Manhattanites walk because they are walkers, while Atlanta’s big-lot suburbanites and Canada’s power center pilgrims drive because they prefer the air-conditioned comfort and storage capacity of the family minivan. In other words, just because urban designs correlate with travel behavior, it doesn’t mean they cause it.

Do Not Walk

Walk

Shoppers in power center environments like this one near Washington, DC (
top
) don’t make even the two-minute walk between stores, while people shopping in traditional market environments like this one in Toronto (
bottom
) typically walk six to eight minutes to destinations.
(
Top
: Brett VA/Flickr;
above
: Charles Montgomery)

This view is partly true. People do self-sort in cities. In Atlanta, for example, Frank found that people who said they preferred to live in car-dependent neighborhoods tended to drive pretty much everywhere, no matter where they lived. Not surprisingly, people who both liked and lived in lively, walkable places drove less and walked more. But the suburbs were full of people who, like those teenagers I met back in Weston Ranch, wished they could walk places but couldn’t. Nearly a third of people living in Atlanta’s car-dependent sprawl wished they lived in a walkable neighborhood, but they were mostly out of luck because Atlanta had gone nearly half a century without building such places.

When Atlanta builds differently, people do change their movements. Proof sits on the edge of a tangled freeway interchange three miles north of the city center, where the 138-acre site of a former steel mill has been redeveloped into a dense mix of offices, apartments, retail stores, small parks, and theaters. Despite the fact that much of Atlantic Station, as it is known, sits atop a three-level parking garage, people who have moved there since 2005 have shaved a third of the miles off their driving. Instead, they walk, because some of their destinations have suddenly fallen within the range of a pleasant sidewalk stroll.

Only the Brave

If distance alone determined how we move, then the calculus should be different for cyclists. Seventy percent of American car trips are shorter than two miles, which translates to about an easy 10-minute bike ride. Even a casual rider travels between twelve and twenty miles per hour, which means that she can cross more than five miles during the twenty-five minutes it takes the average American to get to work.
*
Yet the travel mode rated the most fun, efficient, and joyful has been avoided by all but a tiny fraction of North American travelers, even in dense, connected communities.

For most people, the prospect is unthinkable. Urban cycling is just too scary, and cycle enthusiasts are partly to blame. Beginning in the 1970s, transportation planners and cycle advocates in the United States worked to convert everyone who used a bike into what has become known as a “vehicular cyclist”: someone who navigated the streets of the city as though she were driving a car. According to this philosophy, the properly trained vehicular cyclist should play the role of hero rather than victim. She should never jump to the sidewalk or cower near the gutter. She should instead claim a whole lane between the cars and demand respect! The philosophy was like a religion, especially among bicycle advocates who saw it as a matter of asserting their right to the street. It found its way into the bible of American traffic planning: the Federal Highway Administration’s
Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices
, or
MUTCD
. Following the vehicular cyclist mantra—and with the support of hard-core bicycle advocates—road builders avoided creating safe, separate paths for bicycles, in part so cyclists would not be treated as second-class travelers.

The problem is that the vehicular cyclist is almost as rare a creature as economic man. Most people are simply too scared to ride bicycles in traffic. This fear is entirely logical. Nearly half of people struck by cars moving at thirty miles per hour die, and the mortality rate just keeps going up with velocity.

Some say the bicycle helmet is a solution to this reasonable fear. They are dead wrong. As a safety device, the helmet may actually backfire. Ian Walker, an English traffic psychologist, put his body on the line to make this discovery. Walker fitted his bicycle with an ultrasonic distance sensor, then pedaled around the English cities of Salisbury and Bristol to see how close motorists would come when overtaking him. He found that drivers were twice as likely to come dangerously close when he was wearing a helmet. In fact, Walker was struck by a bus and, later, a truck, during the course of the experiment. He was wearing a helmet both times.
*
It takes a rare hero, someone like Robert Judge, to see hostile conditions as a call to adventure rather than a warning to stay safely behind the wheel of a car.

The Worst Journey in the World

In the last few years, pundits and lawmakers across North America have fretted about what seemed to be an epidemic of dangerous behavior on roads and highways: namely, the habit of texting while driving. A flurry of anti-gadget-play laws resulted, but not before
Wired
columnist Clive Thompson noted, “When we worry about driving and texting, we assume that the most important thing the person is doing is piloting the car. But what if the most important thing they’re doing is texting?”

Indeed, the act of driving one’s own vehicle has become a serious impediment to our ability to text, tweet, post Facebook updates, watch mobile TV, or get work done. Marketing analysts suggest that this conflict is one of the reasons that young people just aren’t as interested in driving or even getting their licenses as they used to be. Almost half of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds say they would choose Internet access over owning their own car. And the number of young people applying for driver’s licenses is plummeting. But the second we hop on a bus or a train—at least in a favorable wireless environment—the problem disappears. This is one of many compelling reasons to use public transit. It’s usually cheaper than driving, and it erases the hassle and worry of car storage. Transit riders travel free from the stress of navigating through traffic. From this narrow perspective, public transit should be a natural and popular choice.

In most cities, it is not. Surveys in the United States and Canada reveal that transit riders are the most miserable commuters of all. American transit users—the bulk of whom rely on buses—are the most likely to feel that their trips take too long and the most likely to be depressed by their journeys. It’s not that the experience of public transportation is inherently miserable. It’s just that decades of underinvestment mean that the typical transit journey is crowded, slow, uncertain, or uncomfortable. When you starve a system of resources and consistently place it behind other mobility priorities, the experience of using it is bound to disappoint.

Transit riders aren’t much happier in train-dependent Britain, where one in five British trains are late. But at least British train commuters can expect a relatively speedy journey. In the United States and Canada, most transit users take double or more the time drivers need to get to work. Bus riders have it the worst. They are generally forced to endure the congestion caused by car drivers, but unlike drivers, they have almost no control over their fate. They experience the stress of uncertainty with every minute of waiting by the side of the road and with every transfer, not to mention the discomfort that comes with unmediated social proximity. There is nothing quite like the beer breath, scowl, or touch of a total stranger to get you thinking about purchasing a car. In cities where transit is meant only as a service for the poor, riding the typical urban bus can be hell on your self-esteem. General Motors actually ran newspaper ads in Canada characterizing bus passengers as “freaks and weirdos” who smelled bad. But transit systems actually go out of their way to ensure the drabness of their infrastructure. The inside of most North American buses and subway cars tends to have all the charm of prison toilets. Planner Jeffrey Tumlin, author of
Sustainable Transportation Planning
, told me that administrators typically choose the most utilitarian-looking materials for bus interiors and stations—even when attractive finishes are no more expensive—simply to avoid the
appearance
of having wasted money. The result are systems that repel wealthier commuters and depress those who have little choice.