Car-Centric Design Is A Real Thing
An absurd example of something we've gotten very used to
This is my local Popeyes, where I just bought one of their frozen, pre-cooked Cajun turkeys for Thanksgiving dinner:
You might not notice anything odd about it, but here’s a wide-angle view:
The entrance is completely moated behind the drive-thru lane! Obviously a lot of fast food restaurants require you at some point to cross the drive-thru lane, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one where that was so striking.
This is the sort of thing we urbanists mean when we say “car-centric design” or “car-dependent” or things like that. Yes, one dimension of that is simply the distance between things being scaled for car trips. But this is the other element: where the building or property itself is designed in a way that makes it unpleasant or hostile for someone outside of a car. Countering that “the cars have people in them” doesn’t really apply to this part of it, because even people driving, parking, and walking in have to cross the lane.
In fact, this one is so poorly designed that the first time I went in—the entrance is on the right, under the most right-hand awning in the photo—I didn’t even realize I was walking back to my car in the middle of the drive-thru lane! I thought the lane was just a weird giant sidewalk, or something. If a crazy driver had sped up through the lane I wouldn’t have had a lot of time to jump out of the way. This is how car-centric design sets up situations where people doing normal things can result in injury and death. Or as Charles Marohn put it in his book critiquing the traffic engineering profession, we’ve designed our built environment such that the costs of ordinary human error are far too high.
Another example of car-centric design is the entrances to large shopping centers and the placements of the buildings. Often, the only entrance that feels correct/official/etc. is the car entrance. Here’s a Walmart shopping center in Fairfax, Virginia:
If you were entering the center from the main road on foot or on a bike, you’d have to basically walk/ride between cars and then get through the deep parking lot. Putting store behind parking lots makes them relatively inaccessible. There’s one little sidewalk at the back where people who live in these houses surrounding the shopping center can walk along the side of the building and to the front.
Of course, you could enter the property anywhere it’s physically possible. But in terms of the design—what the builders are telling you you’re supposed to do—there’s only one perfunctory way all the people who live a stone’s throw away from these stores are “supposed” to access them. The expectation, either by the builders or inferred from the design, is that a customer is going to be a motorist.
If you do always arrive at these kinds of places by car, this is invisible to you. Until I got interested in all this stuff, it was invisible to me. If you’d asked me about “car-centric design” a few years ago, I probably would have said, “Yeah sure, but who’s going to go to a Walmart or a strip mall except in a car?” Well, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
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I found the same situation in Rutland, Vermont, walking from a car dealer to Panera Bread on Main St. The driveway and drive-through completely encircle the building. I had to walk along and between cars at the drive-through to get back to the municipal sidewalk. It was quite striking.
I hadn't thought about this. As a walker and bus rider, I'm simply accustomed to walking a quarter mile through the narrow lanes parking lot and dodging cars.
Older stores were directly on the street, but car-centric people didn't appreciate this. My mother was purely car-centered. She never walked anywhere, always drove. She lived right across the street from Roy's, an old-fashioned human-friendly grocery store. When I visited there l just walked out the front door of the house, crossed the street, and walked directly into Roy's. My mother couldn't imagine doing that. Instead, she walked to the garage, started the car, backed out of the narrow driveway, pulled a T-turn in the street, and pulled into the front parking of Roy's.