Nightmare on Wheels

book review by Renee Kjartan

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, North Point Press, New York City, 290 pages, $30

About 50 years ago suburbs began to spring up in the US. What started out as ideal living, touted by Frank Lloyd Wright and others, has turned into numberless same-looking bedroom communities, endless lines of cars, and roads gobbling green spaces.

The authors of "Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream" explain exactly what is wrong with the burbs-- and how cities are turning themselves into dead downtowns ringed with graveyards of parking lots slashed with ever-widening roads, which the authors call "traffic sewers."

The authors have been bringing the battle cry of the "new urbanism," or "smart growth" around the country. Their pleas for denser housing, narrower streets, and mixed-use city planning are slowly--too slowly--taking root. "Our public realm is brutal," they say, and they show what works and what doesn't.

Architects and city planners Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck say the following elements make urban areas work:

1) Each neighborhood has a center for "commerce, culture, and governance."

2) Everyone lives within about a five-minute walk to where they need to go.

3) Blocks are short, organized in a connecting network, not dead-end cul-de-sacs, as in the burbs.

4) Streets are narrow and "versatile," used for parking and transit.

5) Downtown has mixed uses: offices, housing, shopping, restaurants.

6) There are special sites for special buildings, such as plazas for civic buildings.

The authors say the following five components of the typical suburb don't work:

1) Strict zoning for housing, where there are only single-family residences.

2) Shopping centers exclusively for shopping. These are usually single-story and surrounded by parking.

3) Office parks are isolated in the middle of green acreage, usually off a highway, and meant to be reached by motorized transit only.

4) Civic institutions such as churches and schools are located not as easily accessible community focal points but usually as unadorned single-story buildings "surrounded by parking and located nowhere in particular."

5) Roadways: needed "to connect the other four disassociated components."

Strict zoning enforces single-use areas in the suburbs, but "since daily life involves a wide variety of activities, the residents of suburbia spend an unprecedented amount of time and money traveling from one place to the next. Since most of our motion takes place in singly occupied automobiles, even a sparsely populated area can generate the traffic of a much larger traditional town."

In fact, the authors say the average suburban house generates 13 car trips every day. Because every trip passes through a collector road, it quickly becomes congested.

The suburbs' isolated "use-pods" make it nearly essential for every denizen to own at least one car. This engenders the traffic messes and the endless road-building which they say "consumes land at an alarming rate."

In fact, they say, cars dominate. In urban areas, up to half the land is "dedicated to the driving and parking of vehicles," and "[o]ne's role in this environment is primarily as a motorist competing for asphalt." Moreover, suburban homes, with their multiple garages in front, seem to proclaim "cars live here" rather than people. The authors conclude that the final aim of suburban planning seems to be "to make cars happy."

Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck excoriate roads, declaring they constitute a subsidy to the auto industry and a "violation of the free-market principle" to the tune of about $7 billion a year. Continual road widening only brings more traffic, they point out, subjecting communities to "death by a thousand cuts."

Successful urban areas, by contrast, have narrow streets. "The less space and asphalt wasted, the more valuable the real estate," they write. In their view, good traffic design would have room for only three lanes of traffic-- two occupied by parking on either side, and one lane of traffic in both directions, so cars must slow down to pass each other.

But cities also commit, and enforce with codes, anti- pedestrian designs. An example is the requirement that large buildings provide their own parking. When there is business-provided parking, people park in the garage near their store, and have no need to use the sidewalks or go to nearby businesses. Buildings should have no parking requirements, they say, and parking lots should be public, with careful placement decided by the city.

Thus, in Seattle, no doubt the authors would say that the several levels of new parking contemplated at Seattle Central Community College should be opposed. Students would then be able to zoom into the bowels of SCCC, attend their classes, and return home without ever using the sidewalks.

No doubt the authors would approve the fewer parking requirements at the Pine/Pike redevelopment. Instead of requiring 1.4 units of parking per household, one parking space will be required for every two units-- a big victory over car-centric construction. In addition, many living units will be affordable.

The only problem with this book is its brief command to "expect growth," and to accommodate it with dense development. With the world's population topping 6 billion, surely the authors should at least mention population reduction as part of their program for livable communities.

"Suburban Nation" helps the reader understand the frustrating reality that after 50 years of building suburbs, this country needs to go "back to the future" of smaller, mixed-use communities where there are way fewer cars. People should read it and politically get active for livable communities and road deconstruction.