For close to a century, the automobile has so boldly seized Americans' imagination — sparking the economy, paving the continent, designing...
By Neal Peirce
. . .
High gasoline prices are prompting millions of us to think again about how often, and how far, we drive our cars. Recent months have seen total vehicle miles driven nationally fall off sharply — a radical reversal of decades of increase.
Across the country, there's pressure to reclaim city streets for the city's own people. Fueling this pressure is the alarm raised over high accident and death tolls from pedestrians struck by autos and trucks.
The "complete streets" movement — urging that city and neighborhood streets be made as welcoming and safe for pedestrians and cyclists as they are for autos — is gaining attention, now backed up by legislation pending in Congress.
Public-transit use is enjoying a banner year across the country.
A vanguard of cities is banning cars from public parks.
There's increased effort — lead cities range from Seattle to Buffalo to New Haven — to tear down ugly motorways that divide neighborhoods and occupy valuable space near city centers. (Demolition of a Milwaukee freeway in 2003 helped unify the city's downtown and sparked hundreds of millions of dollars of new development.)
Bike stations — quick ways to rent a bike, cruise around a downtown — are being proposed across the country.
A new "Walk Score" Web site (www.walkscore.com) lets users type in their home address and discover its "walkability" score — from 0 ("must have car") to 100 ("walkers' paradise").
A few cities are starting to charge true market costs for parking on public streets. Example: fees of up to $40 for four hours near the new baseball stadium in Washington, D.C.
. . .
So are today's auto-curbing efforts simply wisps in the wind? Possible — but not likely. Our once world-dominating automakers are teetering economically. "Peak oil," mounting energy scarcity and climate change are realities.
Of course, autos and trucks won't disappear; they're a key to modern nations' economies. But one senses a new genie out of the bottle — a demand for streets, urban and town roadways that enhance peoples' lives, restraining motor vehicles, not eliminating them. Every agenda from health (better air, less obesity) to aesthetics, energy-saving transit to quality of life, demands it.
And just think that our population will grow by 100 million by 2040 or so. Do we have the stunning amounts of steel, asphalt and public space to accommodate them as we've been living? We're dangerously behind maintaining the vast but overtaxed roadways we have. Realism says this century simply can't be a repeat of the heavily motorized 20th.
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And a radio story on rising train usage in the Northwest is here
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