Where the shoe leather meets the pavement...

Thinking Globally; Acting Locally

With local actions, without spending more, we can:

What's the Problem?

All of the possibilities/problems mentioned above are products of how we design towns. Before 1950, we designed towns so pedestrians could coexist with cars. Now, cars alone rule, from a design standpoint. Every single trip of any significance must be taken in a car, by design! The culprit is a type of urban planning called "suburban sprawl." The solution is a return to traditional town planning (also called "Smart Growth" and "New Urbanism").

How do pedestrians do everything from reducing crime to boosting culture?

Crime: Pedestrian-friendly streets are not so uninhabited that criminals feel free to take advantage.
Pollution: If people can walk, transit can work. Without pedestrians, transit fails.
Health: Even moderate exercise is helpful. If you walk as little as ten minutes a day, you will have significantly fewer late-life health problems (a University of Mass. study says). The debate about healthcare costs is just now beginning to consider the simple preventive of designing that walk into our communities.
Free time: Commuting one hour each way to work amounts to 600 hours a year stolen from your free time. If you're in a single-occupant auto rather than transit, you can't even read or converse with your neighbor.
World Peace: Suburban sprawl requires autos, and autos require gas. The U.S. has not produced enough petroleum domestically to meet domestic demand since before 1971--and that's the year our oil production began an inexorable decline. What we don't produce, we must import. What we import embroils us in endless overseas conflicts.
According to the oil industry itself, domestic production will continue to decline even if the massive oil finds like East Texas and Alaska's North Slope are discovered more frequently than they have been historically. Therefore we are not just dependent now, we are going to be increasingly dependent on foreign oil.

Questions of global warming and acid rain aside, this does not mean the world running out of oil. Proven reserves worldwide are growing 10% faster than demand. The trouble is that those reserves are being discovered in politically unstable places like Azerbaijan and Tajikistan.

Oil crises accompany every recession since 1973.
Interruptions to Middle East oil flows came regularly since before that recession. Regional turmoil has interrupted our Middle Eastern imports an average of every six years since Nasser closed the Suez in the 1950's.

Before 1973, we could produce enough oil domestically to compensate for the shortfall caused by these interruptions to oil imports. Since 1973, however, we've been unable to do that. (The price of a barrel of oil in 1971: $1.75!)

When the 1973 Arab embargo interrupted roughly 3% of the world's oil supply, the price soared virtually overnight, reaching a high of $42 a barrel in 1982. Recession, and inflation ensued. (Source: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, by Daniel Yergin) Yergin calls this the greatest peacetime transfer of wealth in the history of the world.

Social security's troubles would not exist if we'd maintained our pre-1973 economic growth rate.

The beginning of the oil crisis occurred when a bulldozer accidentally breached a Syrian pipeline, during a Nigerian oilfield workers' strike. These events led our country to a very bad recession (the worst since the Great Depression).

The Big Question:

Why do we continue building our towns so we increase reliance on such an unreliable, imported commodity as petroleum? This question applies equally to non-petroleum-related concerns: Why are we continuing to build a pattern that has so many other harmful effects?

Consider some other related issues:

Compulsory Commute "Taxes": The most regressive "tax" we have is the requirement that everyone of driving age own a car (because our cities are designed so you must commute to shop, work, or otherwise participate in society). If you have to drive to every significant destination, the poor as well as the very young and the elderly are denied access to civic amenities. Poor people have to buy cars, and the young and elderly either have to get a chauffer or a babysitter.
Boost Culture: The loss to culture is the most hard-to-define, yet tragic. Who can say how our lives might have been had we not been watching TV in our suburban sprawl homes? The tragedy is not just that there is no cabaret culture; there's not even a neighborhood hangout to visit because sprawl prevents it (hence the power of TV). Yes, we have malls, but they are commercial public spaces--to which we must drive! In sprawl, even colleges are not centers of discussion, they're centers of parking. How many conversations and other human encounters have we missed by having to commute? Suburban sprawl is notoriously devoid of culture--because its inhabitants cannot walk to cultural gatherings, work, school, and so on.
Any Objections? Your may say, "Most of my town is within a few square miles, and I've walked and/or biked to work and shopping, so what's the problem?" (Never mind that it would be illegal by most such town's current planning standards to build the older section of their downtowns now.)
Generally speaking, the issue is not whether someone who is young, and healthy can walk or bike to work occasionally. A really determined commuter could swim across a lake to work every day--but such commuters are rare. The real question is whether walking (transit requires walking) is probable, not just possible.

A design that invites pedestrians, not just extreme athletes, needs two things: First: mixed use. Residences, commerce, and offices (even some light industry) must be within a walk of one another. "Within a walk" means within roughly a quarter mile. This is the plan of older sections of town everywhere--basically, neighborhoods designed before 1950. It is also the (original) plan of Sacramento's newer Laguna West development and traditional neighborhoods in the Sacramento Region like McKinley Park. Such neighborhoods can look like anything from the low-density McKinley Park to the very high density Union Square.

Because of the variety in mixed use neighborhoods, there are real, inviting destinations for pedestrians--destinations within a walk for even the very young, or very old. Auto traffic being supplanted by pedestrians for short trips means two things: First: We can eliminate the 80% of hydrocarbon emissions that come from the first five minutes of driving (the catalytic converter is not warmed up). Second: We can really cut driving generally. One traffic engineering report shows traditional neighborhoods cut vehicle miles travelled (VMT's) virtually in half. The traditional neighborhood had 55% of the VMT's of the sprawl.

All ride-sharing and the other palliatives offered by sprawl can do is a fraction of this.

A commuter travelling an hour each way to work spends the equivalent of 15 40-hour work weeks in his car annually.

The second pedestrian encouragement required is a pedestrian-friendly street space. This consists of many small ingredients, none of them more costly or exotic than we currently build in sprawl.

For example, pedestrian-friendly streets are typically narrower, with wider (4-5' rather than 3') sidewalks, separated from passing traffic by onstreet parking and a mower strip. Sacramento County's standards for sprawl neighborhood streets are an absurd forty feet wide, even for a street that serves only a low-density residential neighborhood (not a "collector"). The forty feet consists of two 8' parking lanes and two 12' travel lanes. The travel lanes are the same width as freeway lanes, and frequently look wider because the parking lanes are seldom used (there's lots of off-street parking space).

These wide streets are such an invitation to drivers to speed that current public works standards require them to bend every 1,000 lineal feet. This is the origin of "spaghetti" streets in the suburbs. The streets are so wide they'd be unsafe, otherwise--drivers would mow down the kids foolish enough to skate or bike on them.

The street lights in pedestrian-friendly areas are about 75' apart on 10'-14' poles. Sprawl's lights are farther apart, on 22'-35' poles, making a glaring, uncomfortable night-time walk anything but inviting. Sprawl is also more dangerous for pedestrians at night for this reason. When the streets are uninhabited, criminals can take advantage...Never mind that you can't walk with a companion side-by-side to converse. Three-foot-wide sidewalks mean you must travel Indian file.

In traditional neighborhoods, walks are continuous, set back from the street, and straight, not meandering. In sprawl, you'll often see discontinuous walks--they end and you're unceremoniously required to walk through brambles, or next to fast-flowing traffic on a road's shoulder. Sprawl also often puts walks directly adjacent to the flow of traffic, even on large, busy streets. Walking next to rapidly moving cars feels unsafe to pedestrians, and if such a sidewalk is present at all is unlikely to be much used. The meandering walk itself is an odd phenomenon--you can walk for no reason, but you wouldn't meander if you had a genuine destination.

Without these invitations to walk, cyclists and pedestrians stay away and will continue to do so--with the occasional hardy exception. Transit (about which there's a great deal more to be said) is hobbled by sprawl restrictions. Potential passengers, discomfitted by the numerous design hindrances to their quiet enjoyment of the sidewalk, shun such transit. Transit never works in sprawl, it is alway a second-rate, subsidized boondoggle. Without a traditional streetscape at least around transit stops, transit will always require substantial subsidy, and will do little to fulfill its promise.

"But doesn't consumer demand determine what's built?" No. The truth is that when they are available, these pedestrian-friendly design principals have been welcomed by consumers. Consider the premium paid for a nice, old neighborhood in Sacramento--McKinley Park or Curtis Park, for example--compared to what is paid for new homes. The Sacramento Bee cites McKinley Park as the highest priced homes per square foot in the region. Remember, the older homes are typically smaller, and less convenient--but they still sell for prices that are often greater than newer homes.

What can you do to make a difference? In federal elections, it's likelier you'll die on the way to the polls than that your vote will make a difference. This is really a local issue. Your vote counts. Your letter to local leadership and consumer actions count more.

What you can do:

Educate yourself. You can't be fooled if you know about this.
Don't simply oppose all development, offer pedestrian-friendly mixed use as an alternative. That means when developers or civic leaders suggest widening roads, demand that they also promote mixed use. When a big-box sprawl store is proposed, suggest a second story (or third!) of apartments or offices.
Most important: Write your supervisor or city councilperson to support "Smart Growth" planning, and the Regional Blueprint process promoting Smart Growth. (Sacramento County has a web page with e-mail addresses for the Supervisors). SACOG's Blueprint website has more information.
Write your congressman or the President too. Federal financing guidelines encourage sprawl.
Accommodate the risk takers: Although the idea of revising our development standards have been around for a while (elements of this are in the--largely ignored--1993 Sacramento County General Plan), the prevailing view is that they are "new" and "untried"--despite the history of their success in Sacramento and elsewhere.
Builders and developers manage enormous risks, and if they fail with the conventional sprawl pattern, at least they have the consolation that everyone has failed, conventionally. If business decision makers fail trying something "new" like pedestrian-friendly mixed use, then they risk job loss because they took a risk. Because of this "conspiracy of mediocrity" everyone is waiting for someone to lead, and potential leaders are hesitant. We will all need to work together, builders, civic leaders, and citizens, if any genuine change is going to occur.
The World Resources Institute estimates we subsidize autos $300 billion annually.

What you can look forward to if you do nothing: SACOG (the Sacramento Area Council of Governments) studied the effects of standard, sprawl growth on our transportation system. If growth continues at its present rate, and I-80 were twice as wide, traffic would average 30 mph between our northern suburb (Roseville) and Sacramento during rush hour.
SCAG (The Southern California Association of Governments) did another study to see what would decrease their congestion and pollution. After considering everything up to and including double-decking their freeways, they concluded that only mixed-use development offered them any genuine relief.

So what have we got to lose here? Sacramento has the fifth (a decade ago, the seventh) worst air pollution in the U.S. I hear the population of the Central Valley is slated to triple over the coming decades. How much worse does it have to be before we do something different?

(Incidentally, air quality has improved in Sacramento in absolute terms. However, this has nothing to do with local government actions and everything to do with the newer anti-pollution technology on autos entering our region's "fleet" as people buy new cars. Our national ranking is a more accurate indicator of how poorly we're doing locally in terms of land use planning.)

For Further Study:
Links to related Websites January 2008