Is Car Centricity Permanent?

What is the "in" for disrupting the sprawl-car cycle?

I saw this interesting tweet the other day:

I once had a friendly Twitter argument with this fellow (we follow each other) about density and bus service in recent, car-oriented suburban neighborhoods. That is, places built on the suburban road hierarchy: local roads, collectors, and arterials; the kind of strictly residential-only neighborhoods where two houses whose properties touch each other might be several minutes apart by car.

I see no reason why, at least in theory, such places couldn’t see increased density via “missing middle” housing types: duplexes or townhouses, for example, mixed in or in very close proximity to the detached houses. And I see no reason why buses could not become worthwhile to run, stopping in certain spots and being within quite a short walk of potentially hundreds of people. In other words, sort of like school-bus routes.

Others, however, feel that the land-use pattern is so dependent on individual car trips—the densities are too low, the roads are too winding and lacking in connectivity—that they can never really grow into being more transit-friendly, walkable, or urban places.

This is in contrast with classic streetcar suburbs, which are outlying communities that have retained almost all of the “design DNA” of traditional cities. At least they were once outlying; many former streetcar suburbs are now seamless parts of urban cores, such as the Woodley Park/Cleveland Park corridor in Washington, D.C. and other communities along the same road and transit line (Connecticut Avenue.)

So is riding an e-bike really fundamentally like driving a car? Is it really a problem to travel to discrete places via separate trips rather than to ride transit to a shopping district, or whatever the other alternatives are?

First of all, if is true that modern suburbia is essentially unfixable from a transportation point of view, then replacing car trips with bike trips should be a priority, shouldn’t it? Frequently a shopping center is only a five-minute drive away. The raw distance is manageable, but the walking or biking experience is unpleasant or even dangerous. Nobody should be forced to ride a bike, but it would be relatively simple and inexpensive to make it a much more attractive option. All those roads, often quite wide, have plenty of room for a bike lane.

And then, I guess, there’s the lifestyle question. As much of an urbanist as I am—which you’ll know if you’ve been following this newsletter for awhile—I still bristle at the idea that trips should not be specific and distinct. I like running to the store, or the post office, or to lunch, when I want to, via the route I want to go.

Making these trips more environmentally friendly, where it can be done, isn’t “enabling” sprawl as much as acknowledging it. For probably 90 percent of America, taking transit and shopping/running errands in nodes or along corridors is effectively impossible. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. How do you crack that nut, or interrupt that cycle, of car dependence which enables sprawl, and sprawl which forecloses any option but the car?

There’s an idea known as “suburban retrofit,” where properties or “stroads” (commercial highway strips, basically) are redesigned in a more “urban” direction. But usually this doesn’t get into the residential neighborhoods with their corkscrew roads. Many of these neighborhoods, furthermore, are under HOAs which generally prohibit multifamily housing even where zoning might permit it.

So for these late-suburban landscapes, what is the best way to improve them around the edges for everybody?

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Related Reading:

What If I Want to Walk?

A Different Take on Suburban Parking Lots

More on “Commercial Density”

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