Car-Free in America?
By The Editors
roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com
A New York Times article this week described efforts in Vauban, Germany, a suburb of Freiburg, to go “car free.” The story mentioned attempts in some American communities to achieve something similar. While walkable communities have become common all over the United States in the last 15 years, going car-free is another challenge altogether. Is this a realistic goal in a car culture like ours? We asked some urban planners, developers and other experts to comment.
* Witold Rybczynski, professor of urbanism
* D.J. Waldie, author of “Holy Land”
* Dolores Hayden, professor of architecture
* Christopher B. Leinberger, real estate developer and author
* Alex Marshall, transportation columnist, Governing magazine
* J.H. Crawford, author of “Carfree Cities”
* Marc Schlossberg, professor of public policy
Going Semi-Carless
Witold Rybczynski is the Martin & Margy Meyerson professor of urbanism at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania and a professor at the Wharton School.
New urbanist communities in the U.S. are walkable, but hardly carless. For one thing, they are not nearly dense enough.
There are only six American downtown districts that are dense enough to support mass transit.
There are only six American downtown districts that are dense enough to support mass transit, which you need if you’re going to be carless: New York City (Midtown and Downtown), Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco. That’s it. The breaking-point for density and mass transit feasibility seems to be about 50 persons per acre, which means families living in flats and apartments, rather than single-family houses, even row houses. Not necessarily high-rise apartments, but at least walk-ups.
Since most Americans still prefer living in houses, this is a problem — at least as far as carlessness is concerned. A more realistic goal for most Americans would be a semi-carless community, that is, one that is walkable within the neighborhood for convenience shopping, school-going and errands, and drivable for weekly shopping, consumer purchases and so on. A combination of twins, townhouses and low-rise apartments. Think of it as a halfway house.
‘Smart Growth,’ Built in 1949
D.J. Waldie is the author of “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.”
I live in Lakewood — the Levittown of the West. Except, unlike Bill Levitt, the developers of Lakewood in 1949 laid out a community of 17,500 homes along principles that are — 60 years later — still “smart growth.” Why? Because Lakewood was built with the expectation that each household would have no more than one car, and it would be driven by dad to the plant while mom raised the kids at home.
With the expectation that a car would not be there to be driven, Lakewood’s neighborhood retail — a dry cleaner, a hair salon, a dentist, a drug store, a liquor store — was located no further away than a quarter-mile from any home, even those homes deep within a tract. And an elementary school was still no more than about half a mile away.
I can’t drive. And I daily benefit from these planning choices. But few Lakewood residents make as much use of Lakewood’s walkable, bike-able grid as I do. Good design is a requirement for letting go of your wheels, but only a partial requirement.
When Expectations Were Different
Dolores Hayden, professor of architecture, urbanism and American studies at Yale, is author of “Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000.”
Elisabeth Rosenthal’s front page article, “In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars,” mentions some of the ways that Vauban, Germany, is combining new apartments with car-free streets, remote garages and a tram to Freiburg. The key to this is not encouraging bicycles for every family member, but in building the tram to an urban center. Public investment in reliable, efficient public transportation is essential to reducing the use of private automobiles.
Can the majority of Americans, who live in suburban places, begin to imagine life without cars? The answer lies in imagining new suburbs with better land use as well as better public transportation. Existing American suburbs often isolate single-family houses built by private developers from other types of activities. Land uses are separated rather than integrated around daily neighborhood needs. Public transportation is minimal or missing.
The New Deal-era designers of Greenbelt, Md., did not assume that every adult owned a car or a house.
New suburban neighborhoods that might be less reliant on cars would need to include varied types of residences, good schools, parks, playgrounds, convenient shopping, a variety of jobs and public transportation. Indeed, they might resemble the kinds of places Americans planned back in the New Deal era, the 1930s, when Greenbelt, Md., was built by the federal government as a model suburban town, complete with housing, town center, schools, recreational facilities and parks.
The designers of Greenbelt did not assume that every adult owned a car or a house. They emphasized rentals and mixed small townhouses with apartments. It was a walkable community, somewhat denser that a typical privately developed suburb of the post-war era, such as Levittown on Long Island, built in the late 1940s. Levittown was built as thousands of houses to show maximum profit for the developers. Greenbelt was organized to demonstrate that long-term neighborhood quality could be achieved by investing in public infrastructure along with housing.
Unhappily, at the start both communities were accessible mainly to white, male-headed families. Race and gender discrimination prevailed in the rental policies at Greenbelt and the sales policies at Levittown. Federal policymakers, mortgage bankers and developers did not perceive that a racially integrated community with a mix of different household types and incomes might be desirable and necessary for a democratic society. Today Americans need to review the complex history of housing types and suburban development patterns in this country if we are to improve upon them, physically, socially, and economically.
Bottom Line: It’s Cheaper
Christopher B. Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and professor at the University of Michigan, is a real estate developer and author of “The Option of Urbanism: Investing in the New American Dream” and “The Next Slum,” a March 2008 article in The Atlantic.
This country is in the middle of a structural shift toward walkable urban way of living and working. After 60 years of almost exclusively building a drivable suburban way of life, which the market wanted and we in real estate built, the consumer is now demanding the other alternative. That alternative is for places where most everyday needs can be met within walking distance and cars are not a necessity for every trip out of the house.
This market demand has redeveloped many downtowns and downtown adjacent places in this country over the past 15 years. But perhaps more profoundly, it is transforming the suburbs into a variety of walkable urban places.
Metropolitan Washington, D.C., has more walkable urban places per capita than anywhere else in the country. Of the 30 emerging or existing walkable urban places in the region, 70 percent are in the suburbs: like downtown Bethesda, Md., Reston, Va., and the string of places along Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, Va., including Ballston, Court House and Clarendon.
The monster in Virginia that is known as Tyson’s Corner, 44 million square feet of drivable-only commercial development which is universally hated, is seeing four new Metrorail stations built and has community support to increase its size to 100 million square feet … but it will evolve into a walkable urban set of places.
There are a number of steps that need to occur to give the market what it wants, including:
• More rail transit and bike and walking infrastructure
• Legal permission to build higher-density, multiuse projects (generally, walkable urban development is illegal in the U.S.)
• Management of these places to insure cleanliness and safety, and promote festivals and infrastructure
• Affordable housing programs to insure inclusiveness since these places tend to be the most expensive places to live and work on a price-per-square-foot basis.
American families who are car-dependent spend 25 percent of their household income on their fleet of cars.
There are many reasons to encourage this market trend: social cohesion, environmental sustainability, public health, lower public sector costs for infrastructure per square foot.
But the bottom line is household economics. American families who are car-dependent spend 25 percent of their household income on their fleet of cars, compared with just 9 percent for transportation for those who live in walkable urban places. That potential 16 percent savings could go into improved housing (building household wealth), educating children or that most un-American of all activities, saving.
Mandating only one way of living and working does not fit a huge segment of American families. Walkable urban development is not for everyone but it is time that American communities offer choice.
Pure or Puritanical?
Alex Marshall is the transportation columnist for Governing Magazine and the author two books about cities.
I love the idea of carless towns or cities. Most of the successful ones I’ve heard about though, are vacation communities. I remember a friend from France telling me about summering every year at an island in Brittany that had no cars on it, and which was so peaceful and quiet.
Cars have gone from being instruments of freedom, to being pests, much of the time.
It does seem that cars have gone from being instruments of freedom, to being pests, much of the time. I remember an ad that New York University was running for a while. It showed a young woman with words like this above her head: “I’ll never be bored, and I’ll never have to drive a car.”
What a change. Can you imagine that flying in China, where the emerging middle and upper classes are hungering for driving? Here, as the ad shows, cars are something we are escaping from.
Still, I have my doubts about a car-free neighborhood, town or city that is a year-round community, where people have to get to jobs and work and such. Sure, most trips can be handled by bicycles and mass transit. And of course walking. That’s how people live in Amsterdam, or even in my own Brooklyn.
But there will still be a need for some trips by car, and completely excluding cars strikes me as a little obsessive. I’m always fearful of strivings for purity, which not incidentally rhymes with puritanical. Better to have mostly walking, bicycling and streetcars, and still a few private automobiles on the street, then to exclude what is still an integral part of the transportation network.
No Half-Steps, No Cars
J.H. Crawford is the author of “Carfree Cities” and “Carfree Design Manual.” He publishes Carfree.com.
Proof is essentially mathematical that car-free cities are possible in the modern world (as if the existence of Venice and Fes-al-Bali in Morocco were not sufficient proof enough). We can offer a high quality of life at a far lower cost to the Earth’s ecosystems. It would also save plenty of money.
The energy savings are large and come not just in motor fuel. Heating and cooling require much less energy because buildings share common walls. Much less water is required. Far more land is left untouched.
I support the New Urbanism but strongly prefer the pure car-free solution.
I support the New Urbanism but strongly prefer the pure car-free solution, as the advantages are even greater. Once the last car disappears from the street, it becomes a playground for people of all ages. This can be seen any day in Venice or Fes. Peace, safety and tranquility settle over the street, and a rich and vibrant social life takes the place of the stink, noise, and danger of cars.
Local shops and services are essential. Good public transport is required except in the small cities.
Rail systems offer the best service. Bikes will be important in most cases. Walking is the mainstay, and routine shops and services, including schools, must be within walking distance, say five minutes.
All of this requires moderately high density. Anyone who has visited Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, Madrid, Lisbon or Siena already knows what this feels like. Boston’s Beacon Hill and Back Bay neighborhoods could readily be made carfree. Washington Mews in Manhattan is a tiny slice of carfree life right in our midst.
Streets are quite narrow, buildings are about four stories tall, and, in the best practice, there is a large green courtyard in the heart of each block.
We don’t yet have car-free cities in North America. This is mainly a failure of imagination. Americans are so used to driving everywhere that the mere thought of being without a car is terrifying. But life without urban cars is not only possible, it is delightful.
Focus on Small Design Changes
Marc Schlossberg is an associate professor of planning, public policy and management at the University of Oregon and an associate director of the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium.
The goal should not be car-free, but car-appropriate. The car was a wonderful invention: door-to-door travel, in relative comfort, at the time of one’s choice. The costs of using the car for every type of trip, however, are finally apparent, from their contribution to global climate change, the national obesity epidemic from loss of daily physical activity and the 40,000 deaths per year on the roadways, to the social isolation and neighborhood fragmentation that the roadway system creates. The way forward is not to eliminate cars, but to relegate them to the tasks they do well.
Driving makes sense if there is an easy place to park your car. So reducing the available parking is key.
To reduce car use in the suburbs, the focus should be on land use, connectivity and parking. The first prerequisite for walking is to have somewhere to walk to. Suburbs generally fail in this regard because residential, commercial and office space are often segregated from one another. Once there is something within walking distance, it is important to have a way to walk there.
By design, the street network in many suburbs is isolated and designed to drain neighborhood roads on to major automobile arteries. For a pedestrian or bike, this means a quarter-mile trip becomes a mile-long one along roads buzzing with cars.
Once the land use and connectivity environment are addressed, the disincentives for car use need to be addressed starting with the excessive availability of parking. Driving makes sense if there is an easy place to park a car at the destination. So reducing the available parking is key. (In this spirit, minimum parking requirements should be outlawed.)
In suburban communities across the country, there are urban centers with high-density, multifamily housing, often directly adjacent to commercial areas. Planners, architects and developers need to take advantage of this fact and promote it instead of always trying to segregate housing from commercial zones. With some small design guideline changes, these urban centers can form the basis for the suburban transformation that is needed to reduce — but probably not eliminate — the use of cars as the only available and rational transportation mode in the suburbs. |
