Mental Maps and Routes

Mobility and perception

A few weeks ago, I attended the annual fall get-together held by Greater Greater Washington the other week—this year’s incarnation of the event I wrote about here.

It’s always really nice to get out and meet people who do the sort of work I do, or adjacent work. And really, just to see people in general. As I wrote last year, being self-employed on the internet can be isolating. I caught up with a bunch of acquaintances, and met some new ones.

One of them was a GGWash intern, who moved from a small-town setting in New England to Washington, D.C. We were talking about what got us interested in this stuff, and I noted how even though I’ve always lived in the suburbs, I consider myself an urbanist. And, what’s more, I actually think a lot of the “urbanist spirit” in the D.C. area is in the suburbs, not the city proper. This isn’t true everywhere. I think our suburbs are kind of special.

She thought that was interesting and probably at least partially accurate, but she noted that without owning a car, it was hard to explore the suburbs enough to sense it firsthand. The kind of granular observations I can make of these places—anywhere, in any direction, within a half-hour or 45 minutes of the urban core—is closed off to you in a lot of ways if you rely on transit.

Some would take that to mean that owning a car is superior, and that it makes you more mobile, or even in some sense more cultured or mature or worldly. I think that’s nonsense. But I want to make a different point.

It never really occurred to me that urbanites without cars are constrained in where they can go, and what this means for the sense of a place. Poor or insufficient transit—whether of the service or the networks or routes—closes off a lot of what actually exists to breezy, casual access. My friends without cars only go to the suburbs for reasons. I often have no particular reason for driving somewhere. For someone in the city without a car, the outer reaches of the suburbs might as well be “here be dragons.”

I have always had this same feeling of certain places being sort of closed off, being places you only go for particular reasons. But they’ve always been cities. Why? Because having a car narrows your perception of the places you can go, too. Growing up where I did, visiting either New York City or Philadelphia by train or bus was itself an event. We didn’t have transit out in central Jersey; we had commuter rail and bus. So visiting the city effectively meant driving into the city, or parking in Jersey City and using rail for the final trip. It was enough of an effort that it taught me that cities are not places you can just casually visit.

Being near a Metro station in the D.C. area has changed that for me, to be sure. But I still judge a place by the ease of driving and parking. I wrote about that here, about forgetting that a new supermarket had opened nearby because it didn’t have a very easy oversized parking lot. The lack of easy parking literally took it off my mental map:

The Facebook comments on a news item about the supermarket were flooded with complaints about the cramped, overcrowded parking garage. And that was that. The supermarket might as well not exist. There are lots of new developments with supermarkets integrated into apartment buildings around Northern Virginia. I look at them with this hint of curiosity. I don’t think I’ve ever visited any of them.

There’s a mental block here that, obviously, I was susceptible to, but which I now recognize. The simple fact of limited parking, which is a pretty small inconvenience all told, creates this invisible mental wall—this feeling that this is a place you’d better shy away from. Or even, that it’s not for you, or it’s off limits.

For many years I had that sort of feeling about big cities. To this day I feel a little nervous feeling passing a big city on the Interstate, knowing that if I were to pull off, I would not be able to stop easily. I always want to get off I-95 and stop in Philly’s Chinatown to bring some Chinese food home. But the parking situation makes that a major project, so I never do it.

My sense that I should be allowed to bring a car into a downtown with no friction or inconvenience always appeared to me as the city’s vague hostility to me. The city was imprisoning me in my car when I wanted to stop and get out wherever I wanted.

I realized at some point that I had inherited a sort of ideology of suburbia, which merges cars with people and stuff. In Catholicism, a piece of bread becomes the body of Christ. In suburbia, a human being becomes a car.

I can’t really imagine what a mental map looks like that doesn’t center on the suburbs, with the cities sort of there but almost incidental. Not economically, of course. But in terms of daily life.

It never occurred to me that urbanites have a corollary to this. Really, an inversion of it. I think a lot about how transportation and land use can play with our perceptions. How each one of us, in a city or suburb or region, inhabits a subtly or dramatically different world.

Ideally, both land use and transportation should work together to reinforce the reality and perception that we do share one region, together. No place that’s right there should feel closed off.

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Related Reading:

The Train Not Taken

When I Say “City,” You Say...

Taking Off the Car Blinders, Opening Your World

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