MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 26 May 2007
Expressways: How to Kill a City
Fayetteville's Downtown Master Plan (adopted in 2004) and City Plan 2025 (2006) represent a revolutionary break from unsustainable car-centered sprawl to sustainable human-centered planning. But we're still stuck with the dysfunctional remnants of sprawl, the relentless momentum of America's car culture, and a recklessly pro-growth mentality among most of the business community.
Our leading car-centered development catastrophes are Fulbright Expressway, I-540 through town, and the "greater mall"--the meaningless big-box and parking clutter of the mall and the area south of it.
Listen to urban designer Alex Marshall, in his celebrated book How Cities Work: " The car Éwould eventually kill the street. ÉHighways Éwould serve as giant antimatter objects, repelling everything around them. To be compatible with them was an impossibility for cities. ÉIt was not until the introduction of the raised, limited-access highway after World War II that the era of place, of urbanity and cities, was truly swept away. An interstate highway is incompatible with any form of street-based activity. ÉWe enter a world of pods placed off freeway ramps, the pods ranging from subdivisions to shopping malls and office parks."
For a lesson in how freeways destroy community, check out Los Angeles, the ultimate freeway city. Or imagine walking from south of Fulbright Expressway to anywhere north of it, or from east of I-540 (still known, laughingly, as "the bypass") to any of the sprawling suburbs west of it. These freeways wall off the greater mall and the west-side sprawl from the remainder of the city. For a nation mired in automobiles and airplanes, interstate highways might be a reasonable way to travel between cities, but they are disastrous when they cut through a city.
Here's
Vincent Scully, in Peter Katz's The New Urbanism, a bible
of the new urbanist movement that informed both of Fayetteville's recent
planning revolutions: "The
automobile was, and remains, the agent of chaos, the breaker of the city, and
redevelopment tore most American towns apart to allow it free passage through
their centers. ÉThe automobile
created the suburban shopping mall, which sucked the life out of the old city
centers everywhere."
We
see, in the absence of consumer business around our square, the wreckage caused
by the greater mall. You'll search
downtown Fayetteville in vain for ordinary items such as a pair of socks or a
screwdriver. Happily we still have Colliers drugstore and the IGA grocery store
in the middle, so people can pick up prescriptions or a bottle of milk without
driving to the suburbs. I don't
know how our many car-less people manage to live here.
James
Kunstler, another leading new urbanist, writes in his classic The Geography
of Nowhere: "The
new superhighways created tremendous opportunities for land development in the
remote hinterlands of big cities.
ÉBusinesses of all descriptions fled the decaying urban cores and
relocated on the fringe, as close to the on/off ramps as they could get. The cities, of course, went completely
to hell. The superhighways not
only drained them of their few remaining taxpaying residents, but in many cases
the new beltways became physical barriers, 'Chinese walls' sealing off the
disintegrating cities from their dynamic outlands."
Following
this car-centric model, we've planted the greater mall on the far north side of
town miles away from the city's heart, and then walled it off on three sides by
some eight lanes of highway, an expressway, and (further west) an
interstate. And
now—surprise!—comes the same business community that promoted all
this, complaining that there's insufficient access to the greater mall. The proposed solution? You guessed it: more highways, complete with an
L.A.-style "flyover bridge."
The
problem seems to be that traffic engineers are out of touch with the new
urbanism that inspired the recent planning revolutions in Fayetteville.
Fulbright
Expressway is the most poorly conceived roadway in town, and that's saying a
lot in light of North College Avenue and Archibald Yell Boulevard. It was inspired by the traffic
engineer's impossible dream:
smooth and rapid traffic flow.
But there is no reason why drivers should expect to travel through our
town at interstate speeds. As my
wife, Marie Riley, and I were driving near the greater mall a couple of years
ago (we avoid the place whenever possible), she suggested that Fulbright should
really be a normal city street with stop lights and cross streets. I thought it was a great idea then, and
I still do.
If
you want the greater mall to actually be part of our town rather than a
disjointed pod of consumption, Fulbright Expressway needs to become a
"parkway" or "boulevard" and the area south of the greater
mall needs to become a grid of city streets. Fulbright Expressway needs to be crossed by about four
north-south streets. Where
Fulbright runs into North College, the L.A.-style tangle of dangerous curving
freeway merge lanes needs to be ripped out and replaced with a signaled T
intersection. I don't know what
this would cost, but it would repair our biggest highway mistake, and help make
Fayetteville whole.
I
asked Robert Smith, the "Gridlock Guru," whether the city had
seriously considered this notion, and he responded in the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette a couple of weeks ago that
indeed the city had considered this and found it wanting because intersections
on Fulbright Expressway "could create traffic bottlenecks."
Heaven forbid that we should ask cars to stop for cross-traffic as they come into our town. It's against everything that America's car culture stands for, and it violates the traffic engineers' mantra: "keep 'em flowing."