Comments on Traffic, Cars and Suburbia

This is not a phillippic against economic development; it's a plea to consider people first and the lifestyle we wish to promote, as well as the natural and urban environment in which we want to live, before we start gutting the tattered remnants of our social and environmental fabric and pander to that insidious invention, the Car.

One of the most remarkable catastrophes in urban non-planning is a city like Washington, D.C. From a Canadian perspective, Washington is a city overburdened by highways, 5-6 lane "roads" and endless parking lots, yet no amount of new roads are enough to serve the urban sprawl. More and more territory is turned over to transportatoin and highways, but with everyone driving, it's never possible to serve the entire population without levelling the city altogether and replacing it with one massive asphalt tarmac. Carmakers produce commercials showing free-spirited drivers of lone cars on empty roads in a beautiful wilderness setting, but this is just an insidious marketing lie.The reality is poisonous, choking exhaust, faceless and unspeakably ugly neighbourhoods, highways and endless puffing seas of bumper-to-bumper traffic. Cars were supposed to be tools for urban liberation, bringing freedom in the form of travel. Instead, they've become outrageously expensive steel-caged prisons, whispering hopes and lies into our ears as we drive by the ruins of once-great cities.

Cities have always been densely populated, vibrant and alive, each acting as a social nexus for the development of new ideas and concepts as people were obliged to interact and grow. They're places where diversity and difference are, if not always accepted or encouraged, then at least unavoidable, and thus social change was initiated and new ideas incubated by a melody of human voices brought together in common interest in urban centres. Archaeologists often define the concept of "civilization" as beginning with denser population centres, such as cities.

When sewage systems and electricity were introduced, it seemed as if we were ready for an urban golden age, and when we realized that manufacturing pollution had to go, it was almost as if the true heyday of The City was upon us. Instead, we signed a deal with the Trojan Horse itself, and the car invaded our lives. With all the forethought of a child's temper tantrum, we abandoned city life, and in service to the car demon, we've chosen not to build cities any more. We build places which have houses and sprawling concrete apartment bunkers, huddled together to protect themselves from the concrete highway chains spreading thier fungal mycelae through our de-urbanized rotting civic corpses, each suburb more faceless than a graveyard. They're not communities in any meaningful sense of the word. People don't interact. Our suburbs have no character, they're interchangeable, ugly, empty. We've mass-produced inhuman environments and convinced ourselves that this is somehow natural and how we were meant to live. When people complain, they're led to believe that suburbia is simply unavoidable. This is what the public wants, they're told. Do people really want the worst of city and country worlds? They get downtown micro-box houses on small plots of bad land, instead of country estates, and these badly built homes are all located half an hour's car drive from any service, isolated and set apart from urban life and from their neighbours. Though we have the ability to control our urban worlds on large and minute scales, politicians are as wedded to cars as their voters. They surrender the control we've entrusted to them to developers who lust after profits and can't be bothered to care about the diseased blight they spread wherever they touch the land.

These suburbs aren't even well-built. The good soil is carted away, the trees are felled, the natural environment is levelled in the name of landscaping so that it looks exactly like every other suburb and loses its local character. The new houses are built with the least amount of attention possible, so they have shorter useful lifespans than any ancient house in the city centre. The image of newness and clean living is just an illusion. Suburban life is a pasteboard pastiche of the rural idyll, and at that only a crude one. When these cancerous suburbs are examined, even the least critical among us can't help but recognize the tragic reality lurking behind the identical clapboard homes, dead, sterile lawns and remorseless landscaping. Even homebuilding has succumbed to the car. Instead of presenting stately faces, announcing the presence of humans behind windows and doors, housefronts have retreated behind massive two-door garages, thrusting gaping maws into the street, ready to devour exhausted commuters before they belch them back onto highways the next morning. It's easy to see why suburbanites never notice this simple fact: even if a developer bothers to install sidewalks, no-one ever uses them.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, two centuries of progressive de-urbanization and depopulation engulfed Britain. Isolated serfs lived in perpetual bondage to their lords in the agricultural countrysides, as the old Romano-Celtic cities fell into ruin. But when villages, towns and finally cities developed again, there was a saying among the serfs who left their lords in the countryside for urban social oases: "City Air Makes Free". Once the serfs arrived, they couldn't be forced back to rural serfdom, an acknowledgement that city life changed people and that cities were somehow set apart from the empty countryside, as engineered worlds designed and conceived by humans. City walls served more than a defensive function. They defined an urban realm, in which social definitions were different. The power of this symbolic border can't be underestimated. It's still visible in Indonesian cities and towns, where the ancient, female-controlled communities of batik-makers continue to resist assimilation to the male-dominated Indonesian mainstream, safe behind their walls in densely populated quarters reserved just for them.

We always had the power to develop cities as we saw fit, to use our collective will to change our environment. We can't control nature, but we can at least create a world for ourselves. There are no unseen forces directing how we develop our cities. Our actions and imaginations constantly create and re-create them. Collectively, we have the power to make choices. Our elitist economic ethic denies the existence of communities, in order to isolate us and render us passive and malleable, powerless to resist the wish of the powerful and the rich. This denies us the ability to make communal decisions in the public interest, which includes deciding how we're going to live in cities of our own choosing.

The car has invaded and destroyed any semblance of urban living. Many areas of our "cities" are entirely dead of human activity. They're nothing but an endless ocean of houses stretching off into the barely imagined distance. They're dangerous, because of the social isolation and the fact that there's never anyone outside, and their crime rates, at least in Canada, are usually much higher than any downtown core because of this. It's a catastrophically inefficient waste of land: we build the lowest possible density housing over the largest possible area. Priceless natural environments and farmland are obliterated. Cities are bankrupted because the tax base is too small to support basic services. Pollution kills thousands of people every year, in addition to the tens of thousands killed in accidents, and bad air can make city life unbearable. Whole regions come to resemble alien landscapes of highways and concrete, where nothing lives but rust and trash. People need to drive to perform the simplest daily tasks, and spend hours every day on the road. We actually subsidize this by not charging tolls for roads, building and repairing roads at the public expense, not investing in other forms of transportation like light rail, and giving vampiric suburbs, which can't pay for services, huge subsidies sucked from our efficient, well-populated urban cores.

The more roads we build, the more cars there seem to be. The problem's never solved. While this is going on, new development considers cars first, so yet more cars are added to the problem. It's a never-ending spiral. Eventually, we end up with "cities" like L.A., which are monstrous, polluted, road-rage driven suburban blights. Anyone who doesn't think this can happen here need only took to the history of communities across the United States, which have been sucked dry of human life and ruined by the car. L.A. and Washington were once dense, lively centres. Now they suffer under the blight of suburban rule.

It's ironic how many people complain about these things-- traffic, congestion, long commutes, driving and pollution, and don't connect their daily activities with car-driving. Many people consider public transit beneath them; many resent paying taxes to support public transit; many people want the freedom to drive their car regardless of the cost to anyone else or the public weal. They hate the high levels of pollution downtown, yet don't realize that they're the pollution's cause. It's a "Tragedy of the Commons", a situation in which everyone ruins what should be the common good of all because of unfettered, rank selfishness and carelessness. We have to stop being selfish. We've got to stop building suburbs and force drivers out of their cars and into transit, or our cities' fate will be similar to that of Washington, as shown most tragically in the articles that follow. Do we honestly want to live like this? Do we want the Scarborough-Markham-Vaughn-Brampton-Mississauga choke collar to squeeze the life from Toronto altogether?

2000/02/04: Traffic Special on Washington, D.C.

2000/05/21: Invading the countryside in Washington, D.C.