Everyone hates traffic. It’s the kind of subtle stress that gnaws at your soul: the unavoidable, marginal, erosion of peace. It’s easy to throw your hands up in exasperation because it feels so inevitable—especially in most US cities.
The large cities have other options, but the mid-size ones often don’t. If you don’t drive, you’re hopelessly left out of every sector of life or helplessly dependent on those who do. Online social relationships can fill a temporary gap, but there’s nothing like genuine human contact. Ironically, even those who can drive in suburbia are time trapped by their driving and don’t even realize it.
You can’t build community from the dashboard of a car.
This week is the Strong Towns Gathering and Congress for New Urbanism. It’s a week of “old is new again” in terms of the design and structure of communities. These are walkers, bikers, and it is vibrantly, incandescently alive. It’s my favorite conference of the year—I go even when I’m not speaking.
At breakfast today, I met a lady from Atlanta who looked up from her dashboard and wanted a different life. She uses her e-bike to get to work now and hasn’t looked back. Yes, it can be dangerous. It can also be freeing. It’s not for everybody, but frankly, neither is driving.
A community that supports walking and biking doesn’t have to be such an exclusive, unattainable goal. The speaker yesterday, Birkha Patel took her lonely position as the sole traffic engineer for a city of 1/4 million and parlayed small bets into big wins, turning the tragedy of a child fatality into a catalyst for community wide change. Her bike lanes get kids using them and she makes sure that the next generation gets trained and supported every step of the way. A walkable future for them has meant honoring their ethnic communities and their history with dynamic, thriving sane streets in the cores of their communities—streets that are safe for everyone.
That may feel like a pipe dream in the suburban south. I’ll admit, it’s going to take more work—she had a strong network to start with and although her transit system wasn’t ideal, it was at least functional. If insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, we’re caught in a truly insane feedback loop. I believe we can change things. Where the network is available, the change can happen pretty quickly. Once a community’s leadership decides it’s the right thing to do, it can happen in a decade or less. It may take a generation for the squirrelly suburbs to catch up, but even they can change, given enough will.
So how do we get there?
I’ve spent the last 5 years studying driver behavior. I wanted to know how to build something that would change the way people drive. I was stunned beyond words when I discovered the secret my data was showing me:
It’s not about what we build. It’s about the interaction with the people in the environment.
You can build the most beautiful place, with the best facilities and they WILL NOT GET USED. I use this picture in every presentation:
You can’t find a prettier road anywhere, but it is still a road. There’s no way any of us are going to use it at 25 mph—and no good reason to do so. Yes, there’s an occasional jogger. So what? They’re not ever going to be a threat to themselves or the driver on this corridor.
Ellen Dunham-Jones has been cataloging suburban retrofits for decades now. The one continuous thread that runs through nearly all of the projects she has documented is a shift in the land use. You can provide good facilities, but if there’s nowhere to go, no one will use them. If no one uses them, there’s no one for the driver to interact with. No interaction, no behavior change.
Land Use First
That means if you want to change your driver’s behavior, you have to start by improving the mix in your land use. Remember, Amazon has pushed local commercial to fix this for you already. Local uses are shifting to a 1 mile catchment area and that means it’s possible to walk or bike it.
Once that happens, providing walking and biking facilities that are safe for children will induce the demand. We forget that induced demand (which is real) is all about meeting needs and connecting with people—but induced demand is no codependent lover. If you make them feel unsafe, they will walk away without a word. If you truly want speed management, that means you need to get the corridor width down and get land use facing right on the corridor.
Then, and only then,
when you have people there every 3rd or 4th time drivers go through
when they see them crossing at the crosswalks that you have so carefully placed in the locations they are needed
When they see them standing in the bulb-outs
When they see them coming and going from doors facing out directly on the corridor
They will slow down and engage.
That means that you’re going to have to give them shelter until you can get the land use in each block to shift its orientation and the roadway narrow enough to behave. That may mean you need to put the peds and bikes on a parallel roadway. That may mean you need to make a parallel roadway—in the back loading dock if necessary.
That is what it will take. Anything less will not get you what you need.
Up next:
In the next few weeks, I’ll be doing a series on the specific design rules that the mental frameworks imply, but I may do pictures from DC next week—there’s always something cool to see when I’m out and about. I’m so excited.