Replies

All such discussions are highly site specific, so generalizations are dangerous. I live on Capitol Hill, an older neighborhood, most of it built out after the Civil War and much of it built around the old trolley system. It is compact, walkable, and bikeable. The transportation threat to the Hill, and to many other older neighborhoods in older cities, has been the desire of the highway lobby to punch arterial roads through residential areas. I am frankly not much in sympathy with the suburban cowboys who want to live on a quiet cul-de-sac 30 miles from their jobs, and turn my tree lined streets into racecourses to shave a few minutes off their commutes.

The country overcommitted to the highway mania in the 1950's and 60's, which contributed significantly to the deterioration of the cities. We seem to have learned that lesson, and are doing a better job of respecting existing neighborhoods. This, by the way, includes mitigation and offset funding. If you want to take part of an urban neighborhood park to build a new off ramp from the interstate (to run more cut-through commuter traffic through formerly quiet residential streets), you had darn well better be prepared to offer something in return.

The opposite problem exists in newer cities and many suburbs that were build for the automobile from the ground up. As these communities have matured, many have reached the point at which they begin to realize that complete dependence on automobiles was a mistake. (This is often driven by increasing density and congestion.) It is good for children, teenagers, and the elderly to be able to get around easily. It is good for lower income people without cars to be able to get to jobs without heroic commutes. It is even good to get out occasionally and get some exercise, without having to hop in your car and drive to some designated yuppie dogtrot. But can you actually get anywhere worth going, without dodging cars?

Retrofitting and repurposing infrastructure gets expensive, and I suspect that's where most of the controversies arise. I'm not dogmatic about bike paths. In some places they work well, but many are only very lightly used. I am dogmatic, however, about sidewalks and wide shoulders, and frequent (pedestrian scale) crossings of arterial roads, so that highways do not become impassable barriers to the people who actually live in the neighborhood. Complete streets is a good idea.

Last but not least, I'll venture the guess that most of the time, sensible people find sensible solutions without it becoming much of an issue. My biggest pet peeve in the DC area is the lack of connecting side streets in so many places. Sprawling subdivisions were built around meandering, hilly tree-lined streets with few access points. That half-mile roundabout that you scarcely notice in your car is an obstacle to pedestrians and cyclists. I've grown to appreciate a regular street grid -- you know: city blocks, where all the streets actually connect -- which makes it easy to move a block or two over and avoid the heavily trafficked streets. It also drives me nuts when there's no way to get from A to B without getting out onto the arterial road -- which all too often has no sidewalk, and the shoulders were long ago turned into another traffic lane. Such roads become barriers. Heck, in Northern Virginia, it seems like half the parking lots don't connect. There are low cost solutions to many of these issues. Maybe road planners should be required to bunk down in a neighborhood for a month without a car before they can spend money building more amenities for automobiles at the expense of non-motorized traffic.