If you live in New York City’s Harlem, you can get to the southern tip of Manhattan by walking a few blocks and taking either the No. 1, 2 or 3 subway. The 8-mile ride takes 18 minutes.
In Northwest Arkansas, transportation isn’t so easy. If you want to travel conveniently, you’ll need to drive. So you’ll need to cough up an average $9,000 per year for a car, endure whiteknuckled freeway driving and not be young, old, poor or disabled.
Northwest Arkansas made a historic wrong turn last year when Washington County voters rejected a sales tax for expanded transit and in 2011 when the Benton County Quorum Court refused to even hold a popular vote on the tax. We made another wrong turn last year when Arkansas voted for a half-cent sales tax for highways, including expansion of Interstate 540. Unlike transit, which is a truly general public service, highways should be funded by users.
One of my favorite recent reads is “Straphanger: Saving Our Cities And Ourselves From The Automobile” by Taras Grescoe. Journeying to many cities, Grescoe chronicles a transportation revolution by studying worldwide transit systems. He focuses on rail, without ignoring bicycles, sidewalks and buses.
The book has many lessons. Chinese cities are learning the downsides of automobile expansion. Air pollution is the world’s worst, killing more than 600,000 every year. Congestion has turned Shanghai’s doubledecked Inner Ring Road into a six-lane parking lot. But Shanghai, along with most Chinese cities, now has a successful subway that is the fastest way to get around town.
According to Gresco, “By diminishing public space, the automobile has made once great cities terrible places to live.” However, “By investing in development that includes well-conceived transit, we can create more sustainable and, crucially, more civil (Grescoe’s emphasis) communities.”
Grescoe reports the promise of North American cities as good places to live is being revived because many people have the courage to oppose further highway expansion and even to tear down highways in favor of communities, aesthetics and transit. We are fi nally building our cities for people, rather than cars.
Los Angeles is probably irredeemable because Angelenos have never really wanted it to be a city. Today, it’s only a random distribution of car-oriented suburbs. The automobile industry destroyed its (and many other city’s) streetcars during 1930-1950. The outcome is the city is built along a thousand miles of urban freeways that function as ersatz city streets — like Northwest Arkansas’ Fulbright Expressway.
Phoenix is “a nightmare, the antithesis of any city I could imagine living in. … A centerless city.” The city is so sprawled by automobiles its 20 miles of light rail cannot begin to reach the people, so the system is little used. Entire outer subdivisions seem empty.
Looking abroad, Grescoe glowingly describes the Paris Metro that, by preserving the city’s historic integrity, saved the city. The hero of Copenhagen is the bicycle, “the most decentralized, affordable and eft cient mode of mass transit ever invented.” More than half (55 percent) of the city’s residents get to work or school by bicycle, and the number is rising. Copenhagen has waged “a quiet war on cars.” As a result, when sociologists undertake international surveys of life satisfaction, the Danes consistently come out on top.
Moscow is crushed by congested highways, but partly redeemed by fast, cheap, comfortable subways. Tokyo’s trains keep the city working smoothly. Bogota, Colombia, was declining until forward-looking mayors introduced modern “bus rapid transit” with passenger loading that’s similar to subway stations.
Back in North America, Grescoe studies Portland, Vancouver, Philadelphia, and Montreal — all hopeful examples for this urbanizing world. I’m proud to say Philly, my birthplace and boyhood home, is the most hopeful of the four. Grescoe calls it “the next great city,” largely due to its long history of rail-centered growth. The eftciency of transit translates to an enormous economic advantage for transit cities such as Philadelphia. This is largely because transitproximate households in the U.S. devote only 9 percent of their income to transportation, compared to 25 percent for car-dependent households.
Straphanger is a reasoned, beautifully written, entertaining, instructive read. Although it studies only larger cities, its lessons apply to Northwest Arkansas’ metropolitan area. It should cause us to ask about our transportation choices. Will we continue moving toward the freeways of Los Angeles and Phoenix, or will we switch to the transit of Portland and Philadelphia? As Grescoe repeatedly notes, once a city moves far in the freeway direction, the more civilized options vanish.
ART HOBSON IS A PROFESSOR
EMERITUS OF PHYSICS AT THE
UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS.