We thought the highway meant freedom, but it only led to dependence. The first step in kicking our car habit is to hoof it back to the city.
The Honorable Gordon Price, a conservative member of the Vancouver City Council, is greeting passersby in his neighborhood, the West End, on a wet winter Saturday. But this is not politics as usual. "We're standing in the middle of the street," he observes, "in the middle of the highest-density residential area in western Canada, and we're not even thinking about traffic." The narrow road is lined with parked cars, leafy trees and shrubs, wide sidewalks, and closely set buildings, both tall and short. There are no moving autos, but plenty of people on foot.
Price does not own an automobile. His peculiarity reflects that of the neighborhood, a square mile of apartments, condominiums, offices, and shops nestled between downtown Vancouver and Stanley Park, just to the west.
"When I am walking or jogging in the West End, I usually count ten pedestrians for every moving car," notes Price, for whom the ratio is more than a perk of residence in this small chunk of Vancouver. He believes that the West End, once just another urban concrete jungle, provides "one of the only real answers to the quandary of creating a sustainable and environmentally sound way of life."
The private benefits of automobiles are enormous and well understood. Yet their abundance makes them the source of a disturbing share of social problems. They are, in fact, the proximate cause of more harm than any other artifact of everyday life on the continent. Traffic accidents kill more people each year than gunshot wounds or drug abuse: more than 40,000 in the United States and Canada died--and 2.3 million were injured--in car wrecks in 1993 alone. Traffic deaths mirror gasoline prices: when fuel gets cheaper, so does life.
Motor vehicles, and the industries that build, fuel, repair, and support them, are the nation's worst air polluters. And dirty air kills roughly 50,000 Americans each year by inducing asthma attacks, worsening respiratory diseases, and causing lung cancer. In most major cities, you can track air quality from data on hospital admissions: bad-air days send children with asthma and seniors with lung conditions gasping to the emergency room. Auto emissions are also a leading contributor to global warming, second only to electric power plants nationwide as a source of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas. Each car on the road emits its own weight in carbon annually in the form of CO2.
To these direct impacts, add the damage to waterways from crankcase drips, oil spills, and the great wash of toxic crud running off roads, driveways, and parking lots. Add the damage to crops stunted by air pollution on farms near cities. Add the fragmentation of every type of wildlife habitat caused by lacing the United States with 3.9 million miles of public streets and highways.
"Transportation," says Price, "is a means, not an end. The end is access." People want to have access to things--services, locations, facilities. They want to stop at the health club, pick up some groceries, drop by a friend's, get home from work at a reasonable hour. Most of North America has sought to provide this access through greater mobility. The West End has provided it through greater proximity.
In the Pacific Northwest, as elsewhere on the continent, access through mobility has involved incredible numbers of cars. In 1994, there were nearly 11 million motor vehicles in British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. The motor vehicle fleet was growing faster than the economy, and almost twice as fast as the population. Indeed, vehicles were steadily gaining on humans, with four vehicles for every five people. Vehicles have outnumbered licensed drivers since the late 1960s. If all the drivers in the region today took to the roads at the same time, there would still be a million parked cars.
After 1983, the amount of driving increased even faster than the number of autos. The average vehicle in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington covered 11 miles per person a day in 1957; by 1993 the figure was up to 25. People were driving longer distances, but most of the increase was due to people getting in their cars more often. In fact, they were driving on 90 percent of the trips they took, a figure that had been rising for decades at the expense of trains, bicycles, buses, and travel by foot. And the reason for this shift was sprawl. The share of people in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington who live in suburbs has risen from just 7 percent in 1950 to 30 percent in 1990--a change that parallels national trends. Northwest suburbs overtook towns in population in the 1960s. They passed cities in the 1970s, and exceeded rural areas in the 1980s. In Washington, 70 percent of the residences put up between 1960 and 1990 were on the urban fringe.
This mass migration was made possible by the automobile; now it has made the automobile indispensable. People who live in sprawl lack alternatives: people in typical households in Northwestern suburbs own one car per driver and get in their cars ten times a day. Per person, suburban dwellers drive three times as far as those who live in pedestrian-friendly urban neighborhoods such as the West End. They are, in transportation lingo, "auto dependent."
Price's concern is not to fight cars but to fight auto dependence. If he had a car, his bumper sticker would probably read, "Sprawl is the problem. Cities are the solution."
The West End is an eclectic, urbane, somewhat upscale enclave of high-rise and low-rise buildings. To the eye, there is nothing "environmental" about it. It is simply a place where things are close enough together that rubber soles transport people better than steel-belted radials do.
Price answers most questions about automobiles by discussing the minutiae of architecture and urban design. Access through proximity succeeds or fails, he argues, in the details of design--the sizes and arrangements of buildings, lots, streets, sidewalks, alleys, crosswalks, parking facilities, and parks. Good design, Price contends, can create a public realm that is safe, inviting, and conducive to community. Bad design creates a menacing and sterile public realm.
The West End is a model of good design, and Price is happy to show it off. On a stroll through the neighborhood, he aims his umbrella toward an intersection. Cutting it diagonally is a raised concrete planter, landscaped with trees and shrubs. A traditional street grid broken with such diverters provides smoother traffic flow--foot, bicycle, and even car--than the sprawl model of cul-de-sacs, feeder roads, connector roads, and highways. Price points to the West End's small blocks and narrow lots, which not only "make walking more interesting" but slow traffic, as drivers tend to adjust their velocity based on available road space, not posted speed limits. Parked cars in the curb lane, Price says, make pedestrians feel safe from traffic; a row of street trees and grass, and landscaping between the sidewalk and buildings, further encourage walking. He gestures at the buildings, apartment structures of every size sitting close to the street, and observes that "small setbacks give human scale." Buildings far from the street create yawning, empty spaces that walkers find unwelcoming.
Price looks out through the rain at the public waterfront that rings the city and comes to the crux of the matter. "Of course, none of these details of zoning or design works without a sufficiently concentrated population." Well-designed, mixed-use neighborhoods with few inhabitants per acre do little to lessen auto dependence. "If we're going to handle growth on a limited land basis, one way or another we're talking about the D-word: density. We're in a massive state of denial in the Pacific Northwest about that."
Density--population per acre--is the most important determinant of how dependent citizens are on their automobiles, according to studies of major cities worldwide conducted by Australian researchers Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy. As population density increases, transportation options multiply and auto dependence lessens. But if we accept that density must increase, how do we make it happen? The city of Vancouver is showing the way.
More than a century ago, the West End held the two- and three-story mansions of the well-to-do. By the early 1900s, these structures had been divided into flats, boarding hotels, and tenements. It was a working-class neighborhood from which laborers could get to their jobs on foot, bicycle, or streetcar. In 1956, the city council rezoned the area for multifamily residences, and by 1962 a building boom took off. Towers went up left and right, filling with renters as quickly as they could be completed.
Then the citizens of Vancouver brought construction to a screeching halt. Offended by high-rises, they shut down new building in the city's residential neighborhoods. Of course, this did nothing to stop development. Population was growing fast, the number of households even faster, and demand for additional floor space was growing fastest of all. The building boom was shunted beyond city limits, and the metropolis expanded up the Fraser River Valley.
On the city council, Price has fought back against sprawl by helping to approve ambitious development plans for two other areas on the fringe of downtown, plans that will double the residential population of the city's central core. He has also been instrumental in expanding Skytrain, the city's elevated-rail transit system. More important, he has pushed hard and successfully for aggressive development around the stations.
"The West End is full," he explains. "We have to create new West Ends."
British Columbia has historically been less enamored of the auto than have its U.S. neighbors. Canada never built an interstate: the country has a quarter as many lane-miles of urban freeway per capita as the United States. British Columbian drivers pay higher taxes on vehicles and fuel than other Northwesterners and more for auto insurance. They use a road network a couple of notches less developed than that south of the border, and so cannot drive as fast. Consequently, cities--while still far from compact enough for sustainability--are less sprawled. Vancouver has fewer auto-dependent residents, more multifamily dwellings, more use of transit, fewer cars per person, and less driving per person than nearby Seattle or Portland. In the 1980s, greater Vancouver converted less rural land to urban uses for every additional thousand residents than any other Canadian metropolis. And it sprawled at one-third the rate of Seattle, despite comparable population growth.
While these lessons are beginning to take hold in the region, the road to sustainability remains long and bumpy. Vancouver's population is growing by a West End's worth each year, and much of that growth is still taking place outside the city. Close to two-thirds of workers in the metropolis now commute from one suburb to another, rendering the urban core less relevant. Exemplary as Portland's downtown is, its suburbs sprawl over hundreds of square miles. And greater Seattle, despite a statewide growth-management act and a comprehensive land-use plan, has sanctioned the development of 400 square miles of rural land by 2020.
But sprawl is not inevitable. As Henry Richmond, former head of 1000 Friends of Oregon, and Saunders Hillyer of the National Growth Management Leadership Project in Washington, D.C., write: "Sprawl was not decreed by God. To a great extent it has been shaped by public policies." Those policies, of course, have often been determined by forces with little or no concern for the public interest. But governments can give us something better--if we demand it.
The choice is ours. If we choose wisely, we will create cities with vital economies, safe and secure neighborhoods, diminishing impact on the global environment, and flourishing communities. Downtowns will once again be ringed with dense middle-class neighborhoods, with low- and high-income housing mixed throughout rather than concentrated in pockets. New development will be mixed-use rather than monocultures of homes, shopping palaces, or office parks. Streets will be designed to accommodate pedestrians, bicyclists, buses, and trolleys as well as private cars. Express buses and rail transit will knit the city together internally and connect seamlessly to intercity train stations, bus terminals, and airports. Each transit station will be surrounded by tightly clustered workplaces, shops, and apartment buildings, moving outward to town houses, and finally to detached houses on small lots. Minibuses will circulate from each transit station, further strengthening the sense of community. Telecommuting, teleshopping, and videoconferencing techniques will make mouse-and-modem the preferred vehicle for some trips.
We will, if we choose well, create cities where, with almost no one even noticing at first, the number of automobiles declines--not because cars are less useful, but because they are less necessary.
Alan Thein Durning is the Executive Director of Northwest Environment Watch and Author of "This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence," (Sasquatch Books, 1996) from which this article is adapted. No portion of this article may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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