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Volume 115, Number 133 - Tuesday, March 2, 1999
Cars and communities: a marriage going bad?
by John Friedlander
I've written enough about Main Street for a while. So today I'm going to wreck your marriage.
Not the marriage you started at the altar.
I'm talking about the marriage you got stuck in when you bought your car.
Our culture overflows with images of our "love affair with our cars," and our "romance with the open road." Problem is, our co-dependent relationship with our cars is more of a life sentence than a honeymoon.
Following marriage like a trailer behind a truck, another popular cultural icon is the "awful mother in law." An almost universal symbol of the hidden strings attached to an otherwise desirable partner, the truth about our mothers in law is never as simple as the cliche would have us believe. In much the same way, roads are the strings attached to the mechanical mates we sometimes imagine our cars to be. But the truths about roads are usually far uglier than the myths about them would have us believe.
Whether they appear in advertisements for the latest absurdly over-priced sport utility vehicles or in the official platitudes of a Department of Transportation road-widening proposal, myths about roads permeate our thinking like the sooty, oily grime that goes along with them. Let's flatten a few of the misconceptions these myths roll on, shall we?
"Open road." I beg your pardon? The roads most of us drive on are so jammed with other drivers that the only open space is between our front bumper and the brake lights a few feet in front of us. Popular images of roads seem to fall within three major categories: roads on which we are the only driver, roads on which all other drivers own inferior vehicles, and roads so congested we need a brawny truck to survive on or escape from them. TV ads often use all three images, showing us in an invincible near-tank, escaping urban gridlock to a barren wilderness with no other motorists in sight.
Apparently this cliche strikes a powerful emotional chord, since sales of pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles now outstrip car sales, though few buyers ever actually use the rugged features of these vehicles. Next time you're stuck in traffic on the way home from work, notice how many of your similarly motionless immediate neighbors are toughing out the rigors of the highway parking lot in fancy four-wheel drive rigs. The romance of the open road? If ever there were a fantasy-based love affair, this is it.
Another myth is that more or bigger roads increase our mobility. But when was the last time you didn't go somewhere because there was no road to take you there? Most new roads these days lead to new housing projects -- destinations only for those who live there. Widened roads don't increase mobility, they just fill up with more people going the same places they always have. I define increased mobility as the ability to choose more different ways to get more places, not the ability to get stuck in traffic on bigger roads to the same old places.
Now let's get personal.
The Middlefield and Middletown Route 66 widening proposal is an example of a conflict between road myths and community values.
Citing congestion and safety problems -- as it always does when it wants to push a road expansion project through -- the Connecticut Department of Transportation wants to widen and realign the stretch of Route 66 between the end of I-691 and the Agway in Middlefield. The myths being invoked are that traffic inevitably increases, it must be accommodated no matter how heavy it gets, and that wider roads are safer.
Highway engineers use traffic projections as the basis on which to create plans that accommodate ever-increasing traffic. It seems logical at first to use past data to try to predict the future, then build enough road capacity to accommodate the projected traffic load. Lost in this process is the simple act of questioning the acceptability of the projected outcome. Accepting without question, for instance, that traffic will double in the next ten years means that we agree to accept twice the congestion, twice the pollution, twice the cost and twice the inconvenience of the traffic we have now. Is this really an outcome we are willing to accept? Shouldn't we be working to reduce congestion instead of accommodating its increase?
Highway engineers are a dutiful and dedicated lot, greatly concerned with safety and efficiency, but not well known for creativity or sensitivity to the broader issues their work indirectly affects. Nevertheless, we defer to engineers' mind-numbing reports and analytical projections, without ever considering the critical question "What do we want our hometowns to be like?" As a society addicted to specialists, we blindly trust DOT "experts" to plan our roads, but we fail to force these experts to honor the values of the communities they work in. We too often fail to consider the social or cultural cost of their "solutions" until the too large bridge or too wide road is cast in immovable stone.
Connecticut towns like Redding, Guilford, and Sharon have learned it is possible (though difficult) to preserve local values in the face of DOT's "bigger is safer is better" attitude. Redding and Guilford both passed up federal dollars that would have replaced small local bridges with concrete monstrosities; Sharon compromised with DOT to build a smaller replacement bridge than DOT originally proposed.
Since I started learning more about roads, the cost of car ownership, other transportation alternatives, and how each transit system affects communities and the individuals in them, I have grown less and less fond of my car, and more appreciative of cities that welcome non-car travel. My marriage to my car has become seriously strained.
As Middletown faces the challenges of growth at the turn of the millennium, it is vital that we learn to recognize the myths that will distort the debate over the roads we are married to, and the realities that should define the relationships we will live with 'til death do us part.
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