I was at the front of a line of cars today here in suburban Philadelphia when the traffic light turned green, but there was no place for me to go. The lane I intended to turn into was backed up into the intersection where I sat.
It was my first experience of gridlock – so many cars there is no place left for them all to go – and it wasn’t even rush-hour yet.
That bottle-necked intersection I’m sure is under study by a traffic engineer who will recommend yet another lane, or a wider road, or an underpass or overpass or something that will allow even more cars to share this section of historic Route 1, a highway that runs from Maine to Florida.
And that’s the problem with roads and cars.
Since the advent of the automobile, we have widened or built new roads to accommodate more cars. With more road space and places to go, people buy more cars and more people choose to drive. And the cycle continues.
It’s crazy and self-defeating and it’s glaringly obvious in and around cities from Sydney, Australia to Concord, Mass. In my hometown neighborhood in Media, Pa., it’s evident in a dramatic change of landscape. Our subdivision of small, tightly arranged houses was built with driveways long enough for two cars. Many families, like ours, had just one.
Today cars are the neighborhood’s most dominant feature. Driveways are full and the street parking is so tight that motorists squeeze through a narrow lane with cars parked on both sides. A safe place for children to right their bikes – like we did on those streets all the time – isn’t clear.
Cars have won, and we have lost. As a nation, we are overweight and stressed out by traffic and we spend more time than ever behind the wheel. Car exhaust is a leading factor in the slow suffocation of our planet. But the cycle continues.
Our slow death by automobile has many roots – decisions decades ago to abandon meaningful public transportation, subsidization of the auto industry with taxpayer-built road systems, the rise of suburbs and two-income families, U.S. foreign policy bent on providing cheap fuel, etc. And there are as many intangible ones. Much more than getting rich, driving a car represents an attainable prize of the American dream, providing a simultaneous experience of independence, freedom and gratification.
An environmentalist friend of mine says there are some easy ways people can save the environment: Have fewer kids and drive a smaller car. That would be a start. But it’s obvious that even electric cars won’t save our urban places. Cars need to start going away. The answer to gridlock isn’t expanding roads or making driverless cars, but building and incentivizing commuter train lines and lanes for buses and carpools.
Old European cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen provide living examples of how pleasant cities become when car traffic is limited. U.S. urban planners have understood this for a long time. Nothing in this essay is new information.
The question – as it is with so many changes needing to be made – is whether we have the will to break out of old, comfortable patterns in order to improve our day-to-day lives and the environment that sustains us.
Or must we wait until the pattern collapses on itself, when driving becomes so damaging to our physical world and happiness that we have no choice?