Getting There: Building Healthy Cities

[Excerpt From Chapter Nine]

Of all the public decisions that go into place-making, the most important is what type of transportation systems to use. They will determine the character of the city and much of its economy. Do we pave roads or lay down tracks? Do we fund buses or subsidize cars? Do we lay down bike paths or more highway lanes? Do we build airports or high-speed train lines?

What is transportation for? That’s the essential question Lewis Mumford asked forty years ago.

In the first place, it’s for building the economy of a city. A city’s external links to the outside world, its freeways, train lines, airports, ports, and others, will determine the potential of its industry and people. The big links a city has to the outside world determine its economic potential, something most people do not grasp. Thus, people should think hard about, and usually be ready to fund, the new airport, the new train lines, the new port, and even the new Interstate if it actually travels somewhere new, though this is not likely these days.

As these external links are established, attention can be paid to the internal transportation network. We should recognize that the internal transportation serves a different purpose than the external transportation systems of a city. The layout of a region’s internal transportation will determine how people get to work, how they shop, how they recreate, how they live. The standard choice today of lacing a metropolitan area with big freeways for purely internal travel means we will have a sprawling, formless environment. Simply getting rid of the freeways–forget mass transit–would establish a more neighborhood-centered economy and dynamic. But we don’t have to forget mass transit. Laying out train lines, streetcar tracks, bus lanes, bike paths, and sidewalks–and forgoing freeways and big roads–will mean a more place-oriented form of living. Both the drawbacks and the benefits of such a style dwell in its more communal, group-oriented form of living. You will have the option of not using a car. But to get this option, you have to accept that using a car will be more difficult.

Transportation is not the only public decision. Policies on growth and development can help implement a transportation policy. Such policies are far less important than usually thought, however. The major transportation systems dictate the pattern and style of developments. Once those are established, ways will be found over and around zoning and land-use laws to build the type of development that fits with a big highway or train line.

But zoning and other land-use laws can be used to facilitate or support the type of development that goes along with a particular style of transportation. The best way to do this would be to move away from zoning and go back to actually designing cities. Governments would actually lay out street systems on paper, and then private or public developers could build them as needed. This would give a coherent structure to a metropolitan area. It would also mean better coordinating the relationship among states, metropolitan areas, and smaller localities.

Growth control laws and boundaries are a wonderful tool for shaping development. Conceptually they are great because they help the public and the planners focus on where they want growth to occur. But growth boundaries are misleading because they give rise to the perception that without them, houses and shopping centers would magically pop up like mushrooms after a good rain. They would not. In reality, development only occurs after the public has made a decision about where to lay out roads, train lines, sewers, and other public infrastructure. Growth boundaries are as much about inhibiting public development as private. They are lines that tell government, beyond this point, go no farther with your services. A better way to think about growth boundaries is that they are lines that demarcate to what point the public is going to extend its blessings, both in the form of transportation and in things like educating children, police services, and libraries.

But growth boundaries are not possible usually without addressing the tangled political structures of our cities. Which leads us to our third rule of thumb.