city-of-tomorrow
When I first visited Disney World with my family, I was amazed by the monorails. I’ve never seen anything like it. A highway in the sky that could take me pretty much anywhere in the parks. I didn’t need a car, I didn’t need a license, I didn’t need mom or dad to bring me, and I didn’t need to ride my bike on the shoulder of a highway, a perilous journey. All I had to do was walk to a nearby station and get on the monorail. For a boy from south Louisiana, it was my first experience with a well thought out public transit system, and I loved it. It was freedom.
It made me think about my grandmother, who lived in New Orleans at the time, and how we once took the streetcar, something that you did because it was a novel thing to do and not for practical reasons. A crumbling piece of history. She’d tell me stories of her as a teenager taking the streetcars around the city with her friends. It made me angry, since from my perspective I was under house arrest as a kid without a car. The monorail and walkability of Disney’s parks are one piece in a larger system that makes Disney a magical place. Walt Disney had an even grander vision for EPCOT, specifically. The monorail was going to be one piece of a larger transit system, built for people, not cars. Cars would be used for longer, extended trips, and roads in the city would be underground, leaving the surface for people.
It was going to be the city of tomorrow. The strange thing was that hearing my grandmother’s stories, and sitting on the monorail, in a futuristic city for today’s standards built in the 1970s, made me wonder what the hell happened. What happened to the city of tomorrow, I asked myself. Why can’t I go anywhere safely without a car?
American cities were originally built for pedestrians, given the fact personal cars weren’t owned by everyone. Neighborhoods had corner stores, restaurants, bars, etc., owned by families who lived upstairs, and people went to those stores because they were easily accessible. You’d cross paths on the street with your neighbor on the way to work and chat. City streets were designed to make it easy for pedestrians to get from point A to B easily, and many cities developed street car systems when walking or biking wasn’t practical.
Everything about the city’s planning was centered around the idea that it was going to be inhabited by people going from place to place living their lives. To many urban Americans in the 1920s, the car and its driver were tyrants that deprived others of their freedom. Having the requirement for our cities and towns to be walkable and dense naturally made them conducive to people having a sense of community. You’d have interactions with all walks of life on the city streets. Something that is a rarity today. I’d argue having less of these types of interactions has led to the the divisions we have in our country. Having walkable cities also meant exercise was built into our daily lives. A gym membership wasn’t a requirement to safely walk. You didn’t need a treadmill or track to exercise, going nowhere. It was just part of daily life. The lower rates Americans walk relative to other countries, is one thing attributing to higher rates of obesity and other health risks.
I think most people forget how much our environment plays a part in our happiness and wellbeing (unless you’re like an architect). We see it as something that is out of our control and just how it is. When in fact most of our surroundings in modern society are man made. We were already on the path towards Walt’s dream city of tomorrow, but as time went on in America we started going down another path. One where the car was going to be at the center. I’d argue having this car centric view of our environment, towns and cities, is a determinate to our society. When we started to demolish our walkable cities and neighborhoods to build our suburbs, highways and interstates that cut through downtowns, we lost some of the pieces of daily life that made life more enjoyable. We started creating minimum parking laws, requiring each business to take up more land and be less compact. We zoned areas so only single family homes, with lawns, could be built. And by the 1950s, we removed most streetcars in favor of personal cars. Today, in most American cities the only way to get anywhere is with a car, irrespective of distance. Our once walkable cities are now urban sprawls. Source material for memes. Our towns and cities lost a piece of their humanity.
Most pedestrian routes are now dangerous, requiring people to walk on or near roads with fast moving cars. Everything in a modern American city revolves around the car, and cars are ingrained into our culture as much as guns are. It’s a status symbol of one’s wealth and something we’re constantly told we need. Not just a car, but a car that fits your needs and lifestyle. It’s not that cars are evil. They’re amazing pieces of engineering that let us travel great distances easily, but I’d argue in most scenarios a 4x4 truck or an SUV the size of a tank, is not the optimal form of transport for most trips we Americans take.
By making them a minimum requirement to participate in modern American society, we also greatly increase the barriers of entry for everyone. It creates a chicken and egg problem: one must have a car to do the things required to survive, like get a job, but to get a job one must have a car. I was lucky like many Americans and my parents got me my first car, but everyone isn’t as fortunate. Owning a car isn’t cheap, too. The current average price of a new car is around $49,000 to $50,000, they have steep depreciation curves, and more than 80% finance these machines today. This is all to say owning a car is a liability. Not an asset. But it’s a requirement we’ve made for everyone. One might think: America needs to be car centric because it’s so big and we travel great distances. Though this has some truth, and some trips do require a car, the data doesn’t support this. The majority of car trips are less than 6 miles.
You could also make the claim that most cities do in fact have some form of public transit (usually a bus system), but the majority are so underfunded they’re unusable, and since they’re unusable no one uses them unless they absolutely have to. So, no one wants to fund them. Another chicken and egg problem. I’d argue that having taxes or other Government revenue streams to fund a good public bus system is more cost effective and ends up being cheaper for the average citizen versus everyone owning their own car, a liability. What happens is American cities end up investing billions into things like widening roads or building more, which has been proven to not improve traffic. Investment in public transit like buses provide better returns of tax dollars. Sure, most of us would still own cars, but it shouldn’t be a requirement for everyone. It should be a luxury item, not a necessity. We Americans like to always think we’re the best at everything, but when it comes to urban development and public transit, we’re far behind the curve. All you have to do to realize this fact is take a trip to a place like the Netherlands to see for yourself.
The thing is: this is a solvable problem. There’s no law of nature that says modern society requires cars for transport. All we need to do is change the way we think about our towns and cities, demand our local politicians prioritize urban planning, and realize that making everyone own a car to function in society is a misguided view of the world, which negatively impacts our daily lives and quality of life. The city of tomorrow should be a city that, as Walt Disney put it, “caters to the people as a service function.”