Thoughts on Density and Distance

Car-oriented landscapes can feel very different from each other.

About this time last year, as it became clear that the pandemic was going to be not an acute crisis but a long semi-crisis, I found myself thinking about my grad school years in College Park, Maryland. That was the first time I had a car and lived in a different state from my parents. The excitement of being surrounded by things and being free to just drive somewhere was nothing really remarkable, but for me it was exhilarating. 

I guess I was thinking about this because of the stark contrast between the early pandemic-related closures and capacity limits and this unencumbered freedom I’d felt just a few years earlier. In some ways, I feel like the pandemic kind of closed the curtain on that phase of my life, and even when things are back to normal, I’m not sure I’ll ever feel quite as carefree and autonomous again. 

The other reason that’s behind me is that my wife and I moved to Virginia after school, out to Reston where the traffic is lighter, the Metro’s Silver Line is newer and more reliable than the older lines, and where she has a very short commute to the Reston Town Center (which is one of the best examples I’ve seen of the “fake downtown” style of development; I will probably do a post just on that!)

We like it in Reston a lot, and the very large network of public walking trails through the forest pretty much saved us, from both boredom and weight gain, when everything was closed last summer.

At times, though, I find myself missing the close proximity of things that I enjoyed in Maryland. Despite the fact that a lot of this density manifested as crowded suburbia rather than as traditional urbanism, it was still meaningfully different from the sparser, more spread-out development around Reston. (In Arlington and the eastern and southeastern parts of Fairfax County, things feel a little more like my old Maryland stomping grounds.) There’s a big difference between a 20-minute car trip and a 30-minute car trip, much more than it feels like there should be.

The Hillandale shopping center in eastern Montgomery County

And it certainly did feel like I was in the car longer in Virginia than I was in Maryland, so I mapped and compared some of the places I used to frequently visit in Maryland with the equivalents in Virginia, to see how different the trips really were. I got these results, in minutes from my home in each state. (Yes, I really like both my thrift stores and my buffets.)

Maryland:
Massive thrift store: 11
Great Chinese buffet: 16
Architectural salvage store: 14
H-Mart: 21
Great Wall Supermarket: 28
Giant: 5
Target: 6

Virginia:
Massive thrift store: 21
Great Chinese buffet: 38
Architectural salvage store: 10
H-Mart: 16
Great Wall Supermarket: 21
Giant: 5
Target: 9

The average of all these trip times comes to 14.4 minutes for College Park, and 17.1 minutes for Reston. On paper, that looks like the time equivalent of pocket change. But it’s actually close to a 20 percent increase.

None of this even occurred to me until I became interested in urbanism, the built environment, and our overreliance on cars. I suspect most people don’t really think about it on a conscious level. But even car-oriented landscapes can be quite different from each other. Much of Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties were built before houses and shopping centers were super-sized, and so the overall feel of the development is a little more compact and fine-grained.

Density and urbanism are not the same thing, and many people perceive “crowded suburbia,” basically what most of Maryland’s D.C. suburbia is, as the worst kind of land use: the traffic and the crowding of a city, but the aesthetic ugliness and car dependence of sprawl.

Having lived now in both more and less tightly developed suburbs, I guess I kind of appreciate the “crowded suburbia” landscape more than I did before, even more than I did when I lived in it. It’s far from perfect, and it’s not very pleasant or safe if you don’t have a car to navigate it, but it isn’t all negatives. I’d like folks who’ve only ever thought about this stuff in terms of traffic and congestion to think about it a little differently.