MODERN TIMES
by Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 24 June
2006
THE PROBLEM WITH
HIGHWAYS
My
friend Robert Sharp, a local architect, gave me a good book recently. It's "How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not
Taken" by Alex Marshall, journalist and a recent Fellow at the Harvard
University Graduate School of Design.
It's fascinating reading, and the best analysis I've seen of how
transportation relates to cities.
Marshall's
central point is that cities are shaped largely by their transportation
systems. He notes that three
primary forces drive the development of any human settlement: economics, transportation, and
politics. A city exists because it
creates useful products such as steel (Pittsburgh), education (Fayetteville),
etc. That's the economic
part.
A
city's shape and lifestyle are determined mainly by its transportation
system. "How we get around
determines how we live." The
difference between a great city such as New York and a failed city such as Los
Angeles is their transportation systems.
Marshall believes that Americans have not sufficiently grasped this
principle.
And
politics determines the shape of the transportation system and the operating
parameters for the economic system.
Marshall believes that Americans have been apathetic in not using the
power of government to actively shape transportation systems and influence
civic form. The result is
grotesque cities such as Los Angeles, Detroit, and Dallas, where downtowns are
generally deserted after dark and on weekends because nobody lives there.
For
thousands of years, cities were built around transportation on foot and
horseback. The industrial
revolution introduced steamships, railroads, streetcars, elevated trains, and
subways. All of these transformed cities,
but they did not displace the street built around pedestrians as the bottom
line. The car, on the other hand,
eventually killed the primacy of the street. The automobile's demands for space spread the city out,
reduced density, and inhibited walking.
But so long as cars remained confined to city streets, or to highways
between cities, the damage was manageable. It was the development of limited-access, interstate-style
highways between and within cities that would eventually kill nearly every central
city. Only a few discerning cities
such as New York and Portland, Oregon, survived the onslaught.
Big
highways are utterly incompatible with the small streets, high density, and
connected grid pattern needed for pedestrian, bicycle, and mass transportation. Thus, one of America's great mistakes
was the Interstate Highway Act of 1956.
The single-minded focus on interstate-style highways as the main means
of transportation between and especially within cities has wreaked untold
destruction. Think of the
difference it would have made if at least half the money going into interstates
since 1956 had been spent on a network of fast trains that today would get you
to downtown Little Rock or Kansas City in a little over an hour.
But
it's the highways within cities, rather than the connections between cities,
that cause the most damage.
Although it's slower, more land-consuming, and far more dangerous than a
train, I-540 from Alma to Fayetteville does provide transportation without
actually damaging any cities. But
where it touches Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers, and Bentonville, it creates
the meaningless sprawl that kills cities.
Development around freeways needs lots of open land for giant parking
lots, for vast commercial developments, and for huge highway
intersections.
The
monumental shopping centers under construction along I-540 in southwestern
Rogers are the clearest regional example of this kind of monstrosity. But here in Fayetteville we have our
own piece of freeway nonsense in the Fulbright Expressway that acts as a kind
of Chinese Wall between the Mall area and the rest of the city. The Mall and the car-centered
commercial sprawl south and east of the Mall, with their plastic franchise
eateries, big box stores, unending parking deserts, and ten lanes of highway
that no pedestrian would dream of crossing, are the most depressing and
blighted part of our city, like a page right out of James Kunstler's insightful
book "The Geography of Nowhere." One of the adjoining highways, North College Avenue, is
another Chinese Wall, and Joyce Street isn't far behind.
Rather
than simply facilitating more and more traffic in outlying areas,
Fayetteville's planned roads program needs to fix things like the mess around
Fulbright Expressway and the Mall.
Fast highways are killing the city, and what's needed is to replace them
with slower, saner, smaller streets, along with mass transit. As I've written before in these pages,
Fulbright Expressway should be converted to a boulevard with cross streets and
stop lights and a right-angle intersection with North College, while removing
the sweeping freeway-style turns.
In addition, the shopping glut around the intersection of Joyce and
North College should somehow be transformed into a grid of smaller streets. Our city can co-exist with the car, but
it cannot be healthy when separated by such barriers as I-540, Fulbright
Expressway, North College, or even Joyce Street.
A
big part of the problem is that Fayetteville is growing rapidly and unnaturally,
the way a cancer grows. It's
changing so fast that we don't have time to comprehend it. Northwest Arkansas is transforming
rapidly into a single unplanned and sprawling city with no central transit
system, like a mini-Los Angeles.
We need to stop talking about widening the highways that are pulling us
apart into an unstructured mess, and start talking about a train that will draw
us together into real communities.
We need to talk about ways, such as higher impact fees, lower building
heights throughout the entire city, growth boundaries, and a growth moratorium,
to slow or stop growth.
We need to take political control of our city instead of letting money, developers, highways, and rampant growth determine the future.