City Traffic & Pedestrians
I am reading Jane Jacob’s book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” for the second time. The first time I read it was during architecture school. It is interesting to see how much my thoughts and opinions have changed as I’ve evolved as an practitioner of the built environment and city dweller.
I now see and understand the depth and gravity of the book’s message. This book is a must read for anyone in disciplines relevant to the built environment. Along with the book “suburban Nation”, these books are critical in developing a starting point for challenging city functionality and growth.
Speaking about the impact of vehicular traffic and the automobile’s interaction with pedestrians, Jacobs says: “to think of city problems in oversimplified terms of pedestrians versus cars, and to fix on the segregation of each as a principal goal, is to go at the problem from the wrong end. Consideration for pedestrians in cities is inseparable from consideration for city diversity, vitality and concentration of use. In the absence of city diversity, people in large settlements are probably better off in cars than on foot. Unmanageable City vacuums are by no means preferable to unmanageable city traffic. The problem that lies behind consideration for pedestrians, as it lies behind all other city traffic difficulties, is how to cut down absolute numbers of surface vehicles and enable those that remain to work harder and more efficiently. Too much dependence on private automobile and city concentration of use are incompatible. One or the other has to give… one of two processes occurs: erosion of cities by automobiles, or attrition of automobiles by cities.”
The text goes into further depth describing the erosion and attrition.
”The erosion proceeds as a kind of nibbling, small nibbling at first, but eventually hefty bites. Because of vehicle congestion, a street is widened here, another is straightened there, a wide avenue is converted to one-way flow… an expressway is cut through yonder and finally whole webs of expressways. More and more land goes into parking, to accommodate the ever increasing numbers of vehicles while they are idle.”
Jacobs continues: ”no one step in the process is, in itself, crucial. But cumulatively the effect is enormous. And each step, while not crucial in itself, is crucial in the sense that it not only adds its own bit to the total change, but actually accelerated the process.”
What makes this statement, and book, so remarkable is that Jane Jacobs wrote it in the late 1950’s-early 1960’s. When her writings are viewed chronologically and compared to our planning and execution of elements in the built environment, we can see that little has changed. At this rate, society, and its inability to shift and adjust because of a unrelenting reliance on convenience, will consume itself to destruction. Eventually, the errors we make in city building will be irreparable due to the soaring costs to remove and replace elements that stunt productive and sustainable city development.
