Cars: The Locusts of City Life

Photo courtesy of Sevendipity

On a steamy morning last August, I turned my bike right off of 72nd street onto Park Avenue and headed downtown. The weather was clear, and stately apartment buildings formed a canyon on either side. Far in the distance, the Met Life building loomed, providing a sense of enclosure that made the street feel like an outdoor room. It was a typical day on Park Avenue, except for one thing: there were no cars. All around me, fellow cyclists, runners, walkers and roller-bladers cruised. Across the treed-median that Park Avenue is named for, the ambulating hordes moved in the other direction. It was Summer Streets, the event that took place on three Saturdays in August, when Park Avenue from 72nd street down to the Brooklyn Bridge was closed to cars. For anyone ambivalent about the impact of automobiles on city life, the event was a tantalizing taste of what NYC would be like without them.

Throughout The Geography of Nowhere, Kunstler is clear about his view that cars are at the root of the fact that many American towns are unpleasant places to be. These towns, he argues, have been designed around the automobile, a device that is far faster, louder, and more polluting than other forms of transportation that exist at the human scale, like walking or riding a bike. As he puts it, “Everywhere in America, cars had destroyed the physical relationships between things and thereby destroyed the places themselves, and yet Americans could not conceive of life without cars” (240).

From Disneyworld to Greenfield Village, Michigan and Woodstock, Vermont, Kunstler looks in vain for evidence that Americans are cognizant of the difference that the absence of cars makes to the livability of their communities. Time and again, though, he is disappointed. After asking a woman in Greenfield Village why she liked the place, he writes, “I tried and tried, but I could not drag out of her the admission that, perhaps, the place was beautiful because there were no cars around” (200).

As Kuntsler points out, it is virtually impossible to function in most American towns without a car. This is not the case in New York, which is why I have long felt that the city should do more to encourage alternate forms of transportation, and force drivers to bear the true social costs of their vehicles. I live on Central Park West, and would be perfectly happy with it but for the moat of noisy vehicular traffic (8th avenue) that lies between me and the trees beyond. Each morning I awake to the sound of trucks downshifting, and the perpetual honking of cars detracts hugely from the bucolic atmosphere that the park creates.

Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan, which would have imposed a fee on drivers who entered a zone below 60th street between 6 am and 6 pm, had tremendous potential to address one of New York’s principal public problems: its traffic. Unfortunately, the State Assembly refused to vote on it because of concerns about its impact on drivers from the outer boroughs, and we can only hope that Bloomberg will attempt to revive the plan if he is re-elected.

When I see a traffic jam snarling a city street, I often think of our descendants 100 years from now, marveling at the fact that we allowed our loud, polluting, dangerous automobiles in such numbers in the cities where we lived and worked. I’m confident that our affair with the automobile will be seen as one of the darkest chapters in urban planning that this country ever sees.