Cities are for Cars
“Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.” Jane Jacobs
“High speed auto travel has no place in urban areas where the cost of development demands a complex neighborhood pattern with a mixing of uses, multiple modes of travel and a public realm that enhances the value of the adjacent properties. High speed traffic destroys value within our neighborhoods. It drives out investment.”
― Charles L. Marohn Jr.
Columbus Avenue has its own kind of monotony—endless stores and a depressing predominance of commercial standardization. In this neighborhood there is geographically so little street frontage on which commerce can live, that it must all be consolidated, regardless of its type or the scale of support it needs or the scale of convenience (distance from users) that is natural to it. Around about stretch the dismally long strips of monotony and darkness—the Great Blight of Dullness, with an abrupt garish gash at long intervals. This is a typical arrangement for areas of city failure.
Some of the more blatant manifestations of this phenomenon were well described, back in 1952, by Douglas Haskell, editor of Architectural Forum, under the term "googie architecture." Googie architecture could then be seen in its finest flowering among the essentially homogeneous and standardized enterprises of roadside commercial strips: hot-dog stands in the shape of hot dogs, ice-cream stands in the shape of ice-cream cones. These are obvious examples of virtual sameness trying, by dint of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different from their similar commercial neighbors. Mr. Haskell pointed out that the same impulses to look special (in spite of not being special) were at work also in more sophisticated construction: weird roofs, weird stairs, weird colors, weird signs, weird anything.
Every device—arterial highways, belts of park, parking lots—severs these projects from the working downtown, insures that their juncture will remain an abstraction on maps instead of a living economic reality of people appearing at different times on the same streets.
Lack of wide ranges of concentrated diversity can put people into automobiles for almost all their needs. The spaces required for roads and for parking spread everything out still farther, and lead to still greater uses of vehicles.
Having said this, I shall bring up a final category of uses which, unless their location is controlled, are harmful in abundantly diversified city districts. They can be numbered on one hand: parking lots, large or heavy trucking depots, gas stations, gigantic outdoor advertising* and enterprises which are harmful not because of their
18 Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles
Today everyone who values cities is disturbed by automobiles. Traffic arteries, along with parking lots, gas stations and driveins, are powerful and insistent instruments of city destruction. To accommodate them, city streets are broken down into loose sprawls, incoherent and vacuous for anyone afoot.
And so, each day, several thousand more acres of our countryside are eaten by the bulldozers, covered by pavement, dotted with suburbanites who have killed the thing they thought they came to find. Our irreplaceable heritage of Grade I agricultural land (a rare treasure of nature on this earth) is sacrificed for highways or supermarket parking lots as ruthlessly and unthinkingly as the trees in the woodlands are uprooted, die streams and rivers polluted and the air itself filled with the gasoline exhausts (products of eons of nature's manufacturing) required in this great national effort to cozy up with a fictionalized nature and flee the "unnaturalness" of the city.
