This essay is part of Streetsblog's "Car Harms" series, a package of stories designed to remind policymakers and the public of the hidden costs, dangers, inefficiencies and just plain old sadness that come from building our city around the needs of drivers. Auto-dependency has undermined the joy and beauty of our great urban spaces, and that must change. Click here to read the full series.
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I’m a drummer who owns a few old snare drums. Every so often, someone sends me an ad for another vintage kit. Obviously if I kept buying and storing drums around the house, other things would have to give way. I could tell myself, “These drums are practical because I’m a drummer,” but I’d still have to make judgment calls about other items that take up space, like chairs, tables, appliances, food, clothes, books, and art.
The average American is unwilling to make that same connection to city-building: The magical thinking is that 10 pounds of Motordom can fit in a five-pound bag.
I don’t care what type of vehicles you own or operate to get around your rural or suburban town. But in cities, there isn't enough physical space for every single household to store its fleet of personal vehicles in front of the home, nor is there space for everyone to drive at the same time.
Yet being duped into magical thinking about space, communities across the country have been engineered into oversized automobile storage centers. Again, I’m not making a value judgment about driving — I’m pointing out that building a city around this one space-hogging form of travel is a fool’s errand.
Every time a road is widened to “improve traffic,” pedestrian space shrinks. Sidewalks become token strips of concrete squeezed between travel lanes and storefronts. Crosswalks are stretched longer and longer because intersections balloon to fit wider roads. Every time a new parking structure is built, valuable land that could have housed people, parks, or businesses is locked up for vehicles that sit idle 95 percent of the time.
This isn’t just inconvenient; it’s wasteful. The land devoted to parking alone in American cities is staggering. Some cities are built to accommodate 30 parking spaces per resident. And despite all that prioritization for the automobile, drivers still complain about not having enough lanes or enough space to store cars directly in front of their home, their office, local shops, and schools. Americans have been conditioned to think that cities are intended to be places of abundant housing for vehicle fleets.
The alternative to designing for cars is designing for people. Cities are places to exchange goods, services, and ideas — and this happened long before the automobile, when cities were more crowded because of all the exchange taking place. Designing for people means making use of limited space in a way that serves people, whether they stay in the city 24/7, travel to other places, or are visiting from morning rush hour to evening rush hour. That involves spatial analysis, prioritization, and trade-offs. Designing for people incorporates technologies that improve human flourishing, yes, even including the automobile. But just like my snare drums, it’s silly to think a city must prioritize its space for one bulky item that sits idle for 95 percent of its life.
Every block in a city has value, and right now, too much of that space is dedicated to road hogs that diminish or eliminate other uses that people need and/or enjoy. Thoughtful urban design can take cues from interior design, prioritizing the household residents over objects, catering to daily habits and movement. It’s a city builder’s job to balance function, safety, beauty, and so on.
Here are three practical and proven ways to approach planning and engineering like a good interior designer within your city walls:
1. Stop forcing developers to build car storage
One of the biggest contributors to car dependency is the devilish rule hidden in planning departments: minimum parking mandates. These regulations force developers to build a set number of parking spaces for homes, businesses, and offices, with no thought to the context of a multimodal city.
For example, a city requires 1.5 to two parking spaces per unit in a new apartment building, meaning that even a modest 100-unit apartment complex must include at least 150 to 200 parking spots. It doesn’t matter if the building is located near high-frequency transit in a bike-friendly city. Rules are rules, and the rules favor road hogs.
Remove the required minimum parking and allow developers to decide how to maximize value. Encourage them to provide housing for people since you already have plenty of housing for cars.
2. Expand your view of pedestrians
The primary role of a city bus is to serve local trips. Think of city routes as part of the sidewalk network. You might choose to walk several blocks, or you might hop on the “express sidewalk” if your legs are tired, the weather is crummy, or your bag is heavy. Ideally, people don’t need to check a bus schedule because the next express sidewalk is never more than a few minutes away. Think of a bus rider as a pedestrian who’s moving a bit faster than others.
One key to a robust network of sidewalks and express sidewalks is to get the bus out of traffic jams. Look for opportunities to rearrange city streets where general purpose traffic is still allowed, but where the bus gets priority. That means dedicated lanes for buses and traffic signal timings to keep buses moving, regardless of the number of personal vehicles driving through the city.
3. Make bike rides pleasant
Bicycles can replace car trips for short and medium distances, reducing congestion and making streets more pleasant for everyone — and e-bikes expand this potential, erasing hills and making a little wind, rain, or snow less of an inconvenience.
We’ve all seen examples of cities that made bike riding comfortable for people of all ages. Your city can do the same. Connect your bike plan to local development projects. Developers would see an immediate return on investment when providing space-efficient parking for bikes instead of motor vehicles. For the extra bold, start incorporating areas to secure and charge electric cargo bikes at places like grocery stores and shopping centers.
In the end, making better use of city space isn’t punishing car owners any more than limiting an instrument collection is punishing a musician. The question is: do we keep letting cars hog the road in our cities, or do we start designing cities that actually work for human flourishing?
