For all my bicycle commuting friends out there, James Howard Kunstler recently discussed the role of bicycles as a viable transportation form on his own “KunstlerCast.” A caller requested that he talk about ways we can better (or actually) facilitate bike transportation in the U.S. in the future. This caller had lived in the Netherlands for a time, and describes how pleasing and safe his biking experience was there (in contrast to much of the U.S.), even in their suburbs. Kunstler discusses how, of course, the biking experience here in most U.S. cities is far less safe and far less positive, because we clearly have not had the same kind of good planning and accommodations, nor has, as he says, “the automobile been highly disciplined” as it has been in some European cities. 

Anyone who has ridden a bike around a car-centric city or urban area in the U.S. will likely relate to the conversation that follows. Kunstler talks of his own experience getting hassled by cops for riding his bike on his city sidewalks, but then later, when riding on the street instead, getting told by a trucker at a red light to, “get off the street asshole!”

I decided a while ago to share the road with automobiles when biking around my city, and have certainly experienced the latter verbal abuse or the angry honking of a horn a few times as a result. And that is a terribly sad thing. For me it suggests the tragic and insidious side of our urban/suburban attitudes and priorities that have centered largely around a destructive and self-centered automobile bias. Whenever I hear of people displaying hostility toward bicyclists in the road, I want to remind them of two things: 1) the roads are public spaces to be shared (with the exception of the interstate highways) by all vehicles – motorized and nonmotorized alike - and pedestrians. And 2) back in the late nineteenth century, early bicyclists were actually the first to move for paved roads as public goods. So how about some respect and a willingness to share these goods, hmm?

There is a connection from all this to Kunstler’s Ted Talk I referenced in the last post, particularly his comments about what our built environments communicate to us about who and where we are as a culture. That resonated with me, because what the suburban area I grew up in now largely communicates to me is a general sort of “we don’t really care” as an end result of large-scale atomization and disconnection – built around excessive and burdensome car dependence – that nonetheless masquerades as liberated freedom of choice and mobility. In turn, the amounts of energy, waste, and individual and social burdens such sprawling suburban places require are obscured as people live in ways that make it difficult to internalize the inevitably of sharing goods and interdependently effecting all people and things around themselves.

Now, publicly creating transportation and development alternatives to this in our urban and suburban areas would require different thinking about planning and funding priorities for communities, greater understanding and opportunities for participation, and various adjustments in zoning laws and land-use regulations, if not the wholesale replacement by other kinds of guidelines altogether.

But it seems when alternatives in the form of public planning and public effort are discussed, things can all get very touchy and seemingly threatening to the individual liberty mystique that holds sway over many Americans. Many conservatives, libertarians, and otherwise “free market” minded folks, for instance, who you might think would constantly be decrying the “market distortions” surrounding suburban sprawl (some, in fact, do), often tend to instead voice a default response along the lines of, “Down with central planning! Let people live how they want and buy whatever they want with their money, and let the market determine what is viable and how to best allocate the resources.”

Now, some of these folks, rather than being in support of the current sprawl per se, seem to contend that lessening or fully removing the rules and restrictions currently in place and letting things develop naturally in line with market forces instead will inherently bring about more sensible development. It may be the case that simply removing zoning laws and having less restrictions on what can be built and how and where it can be built would result in a more efficiently built environment in some areas at many levels, but there certainly aren’t any guarantees and a lot of variables, conditions, and vastly interconnected social costs and concerns to consider. As a result, I tend to lean more toward the view that the remedy for our bad planning and regulations is not removing the planning and rules altogether. Rather, we should work toward more awareness, participation, and hopefully new and better planning and rules with respect to given areas and populations, while, granted, perhaps we should loosen up some restrictions on land-use as well.

Also, in general I find the common language of individual consumer “freedom” and “free market” platitudes to just be problematic on many levels, whether we are talking about how things are (wherein it is largely an illusion), or how things could be (wherein the promotion of the “free market” is very obscure toward any certain sort of end or full consideration of the consequences of such an arrangement, to say the least). But, of course, it’s most obviously problematic in the present situation, because, when we are talking about things like people fueling up their cars, hopping on major roads and interstate highways, driving down to that house in the suburbs and exurbs, or driving from there to that job in some other town and/or county, we are not talking about merely free, autonomous individual choices that are the result of some kind of “free market” phenomenon.

In truth, as with so much of what we do and will always do, such choices are social in nature and socially derived to a great extent; they have a definite social impact; and they are quite often even socialized to some degree or another, as they rest upon collective goods. In other words, the above options – these “individual choices” – are made possible because of a large amount of social effort and cost. In this particular case, the costs of these choices have been subsidized, externalized, or otherwise obfuscated in various ways for quite some time now. And, with the encouragement of public and private forces, individuals have widely chosen (or been limited to choose) in favor of sprawl en masse to such an extent that alternate choices of transportation and subsequent living have been severely constrained. To put it another way, amidst all our supposed choices, the choice to be free from depending on cars to reach virtually every local destination is not much of an option for much of the population. So if anyone happens to become defensive over their “freedom of choice” and say “you can’t tell other people how to live!” when met with desires to counter car-centered sprawl publicly, the irony (beyond all the public support and cost behind their choices of course) is that, in the case of transportation and urban living in the U.S., most of us have actually been left with a significant lack of choices collectively.

With that in mind, all the “free market”/”let people do what they want” talk surrounding this issue seems most problematic when it comes from people who, out of token opposition to public options (unless they benefit the car apparently), seem to strongly defend the status quo instead. Consider, for example, this recent post by Randal O’Toole at Cato, wherein he comments approvingly on this column by George Will in Newsweek. Here, both Will and O’Toole seem to more-or-less stand in support of our sprawling, car-centric status quo as they complain about President Obama’s Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood. They are convinced LaHood wishes to follow in the footsteps of cities like Portland by enacting policies that would favor alternative forms of transportation, public transit, and higher density development. The problem, according to O’Toole, is such policies are designed to make driving torturous and thus, “coerce people out of their cars.” 

Well, if O’Toole wishes to look at it in this negative way, we could conversely say that what we’ve been doing in large part instead, publicly and privately, over the last 60 years or so has long been coercing people into cars, whether they realize it or not. But I imagine there are many people who are fine with this situation, if not even prefer it (though many do not seem to see it clearly), and are ok with low density suburbia and their life of driving, just as I imagine many people in cities like Portland love that they have good alternatives to automobile dependence such as reliable public transit, walkability, and good bicycle accommodations. 

A big problem for us, though, is, there are several cities and metro areas that seem to be stuck in a kind of density/transportation limbo – relatively dense, and yet, the automobile has been allowed to almost completely dominate the scene, or, as Kunstler might say, has not been very disciplined at all. Places such as these could greatly benefit from different planning that better facilitates transportation alternatives and more healthy and diverse public spaces.

Encouraging such alternatives, and even “disciplining” the automobile doesn’t mean forcing people out of their cars, because there is big difference between being free to drive cars (just as we are generally “free” to walk and ride bicycles) on the one hand, and the dominant favor for the car, on the other hand, that has resulted in making driving as unimpeded as possible in many places, often at the expense of the attractiveness, safety, and viability of nonmotored transportation and other alternative ways of getting around. As long as the car continues to be the main priority, what incentives there are to utilize alternatives to driving are greatly discouraged, if they are even still realistically available. And you have to think, at the least, we’ve been doing something very wrong and terribly spoiling some drivers when they get angry at the presence of bicycles in the street in a dense downtown, where all means of getting around well without a car should be highly encouraged, and indeed, should be one of the great, built-in perks of living in such an area.