Conscious Choice: Reclaim the Streets

June 1999 | Citizen at Large

Reclaim the Streets

by Jay Walljasper

The "Reclaim the Streets" movement has finally hit America, the land where for many decades there was nothing in the world we would not do to promote widespread use of the private automobile. We carved up our cities with motorways, and blanketed our suburbs and countryside with vast stretches of car parks. Millions of trees have been chopped, tens of thousands of houses torn down, and thousands of communities ripped apart, all to meet the needs of the ever-escalating volume of traffic. But citizens are now rising up to show politicians, corporations, and bureaucrats how continued road-building is diminishing our safety, sanity, and serenity.

Recently, right here in my hometown of Minneapolis, a battalion of six hundred police descended on an encampment of 36 people. These three dozen souls were protesting a highway expansion on land sacred to Sioux Indians and graced with a beautiful grove of oak trees. It was the largest police action in the history of Minnesota. News reports said authorities felt the need to stage such a swift and massive attack because the protest was beginning to gain national attention.

One of those arrested was the 14-year-old son of a member of the Minneapolis Park Commission. The commissioner said he was proud of his son, adding, "this is a pretty impressive show of force to put a road in just so people can save three minutes going to the airport." Strong-arm tactics like this might push through this particular road, but publicity in such cases is influencing more and more Americans to question the need for new roads. Indeed, one group based in Arcata, California, the Alliance for a Paving Moratorium, headed by former oil industry analyst Jan Lundberg, is challenging whether we need any new roads at all.

For most of this century, traffic has been seen as an inevitable by product of modern progress. The calm and quaintness of life before the automobile might be mourned nostalgically, but most Americans seemed thrilled at the possibility of going more and more places in less and less time. Over the past fifty years, building new and faster roads has become the major preoccupation of our federal, state, and local governments. We’ve spent billions — and billions more — to widen and straighten streets and highways in almost every urban neighborhood and rural township throughout America.

A whole new profession — traffic engineers — has grown up to accomplish this work, and they now wield far more influence over how our communities look than elected officials, business leaders, or citizens’ groups. Yet they have just a single goal in carrying out these decisions: what will enable cars to move faster through our cities and countryside. Little else figures in their planning.

Traffic engineers invariably invoke the issue of public safety in their proposals to create newer, wider, smoother streets. They cite numerous studies proving that wider lanes and four-lane roads prevent traffic accidents. But the safety issue cuts several ways. A growing legion of road opponents (dubbed the "Asphalt Rebellion" by Governing magazine) points out that many street and highway upgrades make travel far more dangerous for bicyclists and pedestrians — especially children and old people who have trouble crossing wider streets with faster traffic. (In New York City, the leading cause of death for children aged five to 14 is being hit by a car.)

And asphalt rebels question whether designing streets to accommodate drivers traveling well above the posted speed limit, as most traffic engineering guidelines dictate, ultimately promotes the safety of motorists. Indeed, a new study shows that narrow streets are actually safer. The city of Longmont, Colorado — a booming suburb of Denver — looked at 20,000 accidents on local streets over an eight-year period and found, "as street width widens, accidents per mile per year increases exponentially." These findings fly in the face of the conventional wisdom of the traffic engineering profession, which views narrow streets and traffic congestion as safety hazards that must be remedied.

Many communities across North America are rethinking traffic issues. Eugene, Oregon, which once required that all streets be at least 28 feet wide, now allows some to be as narrow as 20 feet. Wellesley, Massachusetts, faced with a plan to widen its congested main street, chose to narrow it instead and expand the sidewalks to encourage walking as a form of transportation. Even in auto-happy southern California, the cities of San Bernardino, Riverside, and Beverly Hills have narrowed major commercial streets.

The asphalt rebellion is even beginning to win a few supporters from within the ranks of traffic engineers. Walter Kulash, a traffic engineer from Orlando, Florida, who has become a leading voice for rethinking how we design our streets, points out, "The difference between real bleakness and a vibrant urban atmosphere is a matter of seconds. When you ask the public,‘Would you rather take twelve more seconds to get where you’re going and have this be a tree-lined wonderful street?’ the answer is always,’We want it to be vibrant and beautiful, not fast and ugly.’"

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