Drive

by Tim Falconer

  Once again, Abdulhai didn’t agree. Because of latent demand, new roads or lanes will attract more drivers and become more congested. So the expanded highway will be worse than the day it opened but better than the day before it opened, and the additional capacity means that more people can use the road.

  When it comes to transit, he divides people into three groups. At one end of the spectrum are transit loyalists, who either love riding buses, streetcars and subways or can’t afford to get around any other way. At the other end are people who are dependent on the car for a number of reasons—“some of them are good reasons, some of them are bad reasons”—and it’s completely unrealistic to expect them all to start taking the bus everywhere. But in between is a segment of the population that will take whatever is most convenient, and there are two ways to sway these people: one is to make travelling on freeways a miserable experience, something that’s gradually happening; the other, better approach, is to improve transit so people will take it because they want to, not because they have to. “If you increase highway capacity only and you ignore transit completely, then you’re going in the wrong direction,” Abdulhai argued. “You’re telling people their better option is the car and that is not what I’m promoting. I’m saying expand transit to accommodate transit users, expand highways to accommodate the must-use highway users and make transit more attractive to the in-betweeners.”

  But adding transportation infrastructure to our cities, while essential, is really just treating the symptoms rather than attacking the disease of bad urban planning. “Transportation begins with the way you build the city, and if there’s a villain, it’s not the car, it’s the way we’ve built our city with single-use suburbs,” Miller said. “We put all the people here and we scatter office buildings and stores hither, thither and yon and we don’t think about the transportation. We assume everybody can get there by car, but we don’t think about the congestion that’s created.”

  Sprawl isn’t the only cause of traffic, but high-density mixed-use development—which means residents have the option of taking public transit, riding a bike or walking—is part of the solution. “People just drive a lot more in lowdensity areas,” insisted the Sierra Club’s John Holtzclaw, and that’s why a growing number of cities are trying to change their development patterns. “We sometimes say—I don’t know if you can quote me on this but—traffic congestion is our friend. Traffic congestion lets people know how bad things are.”

  “Why do you say you’re not sure I can quote you?” I asked.

  “Because the right—the pro-sprawl people—will say, ‘Hey, they want this! They want you to have to live in traffic congestion.’ No. We want them to move into some place that’s more convenient so they don’t have to live in traffic congestion.”

  HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY would probably have been enough to guarantee that LA ended up dominated by the car, but just to be sure, a consortium led by GM bought one of the city’s two streetcar systems in the 1930s and replaced the comfortable and convenient trolleys with buses. But today, Angelinos have the option of using a mass transit system that includes commuter rail, buses and an expanding network of above-ground light rail and underground subways. So one thing I wanted to do was talk to someone who lived happily without a car.

  And James Kushner couldn’t be happier. He lives in a loft in a converted building in Old Town Pasadena and takes transit to Southwestern Law School in Wilshire, just blocks from the towers of downtown LA, which he can see from his office window. A bald, stocky man dressed in a colourful short-sleeved shirt, he has owned Corvettes and driven the Pacific Coast Highway with the top down, so he knows what fun cars can be. “But I’ve never been happier to be done with the car,” he told me. “I’d rather walk three or four miles than have the ‘convenience’ of a car.” He not only finds the car-free lifestyle healthier, less stressful and less time-consuming, it also helps him get out of doing things he’d rather not do. “If somebody wants me to go somewhere and give a speech or come to a party, I just say, ‘I don’t drive. I can’t go.’”

  LA isn’t normally on the list of desirable cities for non-drivers, but that doesn’t faze Kushner. He thinks the combination of weather and transit means he’s actually in one of the best places in the country. He spends a lot of time in other cities and figures he could also live in San Francisco; Seattle; Washington, D.C.; Manhattan; and possibly Boston and Chicago, though it starts to get a little cold up there. Since he also teaches at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, he travels throughout Europe and admires the compact cities there. He’s also a fan of Vancouver. “When you ride a bus in LA, you know you’re riding with the bottom 10 or 15 percent of the income group of the city, but you don’t have that feeling in Vancouver. So, the transit is comfortable and I think even some of the suburban communities are really quite walkable,” he said. “They were planned in quite a nice way so that you can walk to services, you can walk to shopping. You don’t have to get in a car. They’re not like American suburbs where you can’t get anywhere unless you’re in a car.”

  Kushner’s interest in living without an automobile isn’t strictly personal. Raised in Philadelphia, he joined the Peace Corps and went to Venezuela, where he studied municipal management. After returning to the United States, he worked for Volunteers in Service to America, in Canton, Ohio, representing residents of urban renewal neighbourhoods. Then he joined a legal services program in Kansas City, where most of his cases had to do with highway projects or urban renewal plans or other housing issues. Then it was off to the National Housing and Economic Development Law Project, a think tank in Berkeley, before landing in LA in 1975. At Southwestern, he teaches courses in land use, community development and constitutional law, while his many books include The Post-Automobile City: Legal Mechanisms to Establish the Pedestrian-Friendly City and, most recently, Healthy Cities: The Intersection of Urban Planning, Law and Health, which is about what legal mechanisms could be used to redesign cities to improve individual health and reduce the burden the car puts on the health care system. He’s worried not just about the trauma from collisions but also the high costs of the sedentary lifestyle that comes from driving everywhere, including obesity, diabetes and heart disease, and the asthma caused or aggravated by pollution. “You can create communities that are walkable, that are attractive,” he said. “And you could reduce dramatically the cost of health care, which I think is rapidly becoming an impossible situation for Western countries and even Eastern ones.”

  We’ve hit the point where moving farther out no longer makes sense because the cost of commuting is greater than the benefits of the less expensive house in the boonies. When U of T’s Miller studied suburban living, he found that, as expected, the money people devoted to transportation rose dramatically as they moved away from downtown. What surprised him was that housing costs also went up. He acknowledged that in the overheated Toronto market, downtown homes were more expensive to buy, tended to be smaller and often had higher repair bills because they’re likely to be older; but using data that included the taxes, utility bills and mortgage costs, he concluded that suburban residents may not have found the bargain they think they have. “You’re getting more house, but it probably costs you more,” he said. “People talk about affordable housing and cheap land, but there really is no such thing as cheap land—you pay for it one way or the other. You pay for it in transportation and congestion, and it’s not just you who pays for it—society pays for it.” And the study didn’t even take into account the cost of people’s time, the cost of the pollution or any of the social, personal or psychological costs of long commutes.

  Meanwhile, the design and location of the options in denser neighbourhoods are increasingly attractive. Changing demographics are also helping as the population ages and the families with kids—many of whom will still want the big suburban yard— become a smaller percentage of the mix. “As I go around the country and look at what cities are doing, I am optimistic that great changes are o
ccurring under our eyes. My friends have no idea,” Kushner said, “because if you don’t ride the light rail you can’t tell what’s happening at the stations, and if you don’t ride the subway, you don’t see the increasing crowds.”

  As someone who moved from a four-bedroom house in the suburbs to a one-room loft and now says, “I don’t need any more room,” he thinks more people realize they’ve been over-buying and don’t really need so much space, which just means more to keep clean anyway. “Empty nesters are the shock troops of urban redevelopment,” he argued, noting that as soon as they move in, Starbucks coffee shops, Whole Foods Markets, bookstores, art house movie theatres and other businesses are sure to follow.

  In the last decade, Kushner has seen a dramatic shift in attitude away from the single-family home in the suburbs, which 80 or 90 percent of Americans sought, toward urban living, which 30 to 40 percent now want. As developers see the soaring demand, their attitudes are also changing. “These guys looked at density as insane,” said Kushner. A builder once told him, “Nobody wants to live over a restaurant. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.” Now, high-density apartments and condominiums are profitable projects. “The developers of the single-family home in America right now are dying. The industry’s dead,” he said.” Ten, fifteen years from now, in cities like Atlanta and LA, I think people are going to say, ‘Wow, I had no idea.’ It’s that kind of a thing that creeps up on you. Until you see an article in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, you don’t know the changes are underway.”

  Along with the homebuyers and the developers, the politicians are starting to come around. But while they are increasingly open to higher-density development, they’re slow to stop subsidizing the car. In Manhattan, parking is expensive and usually inconvenient because drivers often have to keep their cars blocks away from their apartments. So most people don’t bother to own a car. If politicians do away with subsidies—“the thumb on the scales,” according to Kushner—the market will go in the direction of high-density, compact communities. “I’m not about being fascist and saying nobody’s going to have a car if I’m in charge,” he said. “I don’t think that’s where we’re likely to go. But I do think the costs have to be understood by people and they have to make informed decisions.”

  TWENTY YEARS AGO, Old Town Pasadena was a sketchy part of town with little housing and lots of dive bars and struggling businesses. Now it’s a thriving mixed-use neighbourhood with offices for people to work in and shops, restaurants and nightclubs that attract people from all over Los Angeles. “It’s such a cool, hip, inviting place to go, and when you’ve got that, people want to live there too,” Frank told me before I left San Francisco, adding that developers quickly started building new condos and converting old buildings. “It feeds on itself.”

  The day after meeting Kushner, I had lunch with Amy in Old Town Pasadena. Afterwards, we walked around, and as she checked out the shops, I took in the historic buildings that had been restored to their former architectural glory and noted all the people walking around. Many were shoppers or tourists, but plenty appeared to be office workers taking a break. (This was in marked contrast to Melrose, where people looked like they just drove there to shop.) But I could see what Kushner had meant when he’d warned me about the commercial gentrification. Bigname chains have moved in, pushing up rents and squeezing out many of the independent stores. When that happens—and it happens in cities all around the world now—it wipes out much of a shopping district’s unique charm and results in fewer shops that cater to the everyday needs of the people who live in the neighbourhood. But Pasadena is still a model for others. “Developers want to replicate it,” said Frank, who remembers the area as skid row when he was growing up in LA. “And then cities also want to replicate it because Pasadena shows them how economic activity has helped make the city fiscally healthier.”

  Santa Monica is another model, as I learned when I met Denny Zane, the Prius-driving former mayor. Now a political consultant whose cell phone rings frequently, he wore a white T-shirt, jeans and running shoes. The issue that initially drew him into local politics was rent control, and he sat on council for twelve years, two as mayor, before leaving in 1992. He remains chair of Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights, an activist group he co-founded. After rent control, he’s best known for the revitalization of the Third Street Promenade, formerly called the Santa Monica Mall. The transformation started at about the same time as the one in Old Town Pasadena, but while the private sector drove most of the changes in Pasadena, the Promenade, which was the centrepiece of the revival of downtown Santa Monica, was the product of city council’s policy decisions.

  The Promenade had been a pedestrian mall since the early 1960s, but it was a commercial failure. Some people thought the solution was to build a large shopping centre at the south end, and the three-storey Frank Gehry–designed Santa Monica Place opened in 1980. But all that did was suck out what was left of the street’s retail life. A few years later, Zane and his fellow councillors set their minds to the problem but couldn’t find anywhere in America that had done what they wanted to do: revitalize downtown without tearing it down. They considered attracting movie theatres as an anchor for the area, but quickly learned that they didn’t have a hope because nearby Westwood had such a large concentration of cinemas. So Zane suggested that outdoor dining could be the street’s salvation: instead of having one big anchor such as a shopping centre, they’d aim for a lot of mini-anchors that would create something distinctive. Despite its ideal weather, LA had no outdoor dining district at the time. Zane blamed car culture for that. “We had no sidewalks. That is, not no sidewalks—we had utterly inadequate sidewalks that were just too narrow,” he explained, adding that the city had widened its streets and narrowed its sidewalks to accommodate more traffic. “People were presumed to get from place to place by driving and not by walking. But here we were looking at this space that, for twenty-five years, had had no cars on it. So the sidewalks were ours to create.”

  Not surprisingly, most of the local merchants thought a much better idea was to close the pedestrian mall and let cars back on the street. A bitter debate ensued until a designer came up with a compromise that included wide sidewalks, two-car lanes and bollards that could be raised or lowered to either prevent or allow traffic on the street. It was a brilliantly simple solution to a vexing little problem and everybody went, “Bingo!” Santa Monica didn’t compromise its outdoor dining for the car; instead, it forced the car to accommodate the outdoor dining and the pedestrians.

  Just as construction was underway, the city received several proposals for movie theatres, but none of them were for the Promenade—just other parts of town where the neighbours didn’t want more traffic or parking problems. Before prohibiting movie houses everywhere except on the Promenade, Zane took the cinema executives on a walking tour to show them they’d be better off there anyway. Afterwards, they all said, “You’re right. This makes sense.” When council unanimously passed the ordinance, it also limited the number of cinemas to three, which left some companies disappointed, but city council didn’t want the theatres to overwhelm the outdoor dining, which was to be the street’s real competitive advantage.

  Almost immediately, the Promenade was a success as people eagerly filled the theatres and the first half-dozen restaurants with patios. But the residents were growing antsy about heavy traffic because several office projects were going up. “They’re fortresses that people drive to, stay in, and then leave,” noted Zane. “And they’re lousy tax generators. They’re just traffic generators.” The community backlash led to a push for slow-growth policies, with some groups touting draconian measures that might have hurt the downtown’s ability to get back on its feet. Because there wasn’t much housing stock in the area, and what did exist was dilapidated, council rezoned the streets around the Promenade to de-emphasize office space and promote housing above the ground level. Developers could go higher with residential buildings tha
n with commercial ones because housing not only generates less traffic, it provides customers for local businesses, making them less dependent on tourists.

  Wider sidewalks and mixed-use development are right out of Jane Jacobs’s playbook, but Zane confessed he hadn’t read much more than fifty pages of her writing. “This was not applied theory. This was just practice, addressing local issues and local dilemmas about traffic.”

  Two decades later, the pedestrian mall is busier than ever. Carmen and I ate lunch there after we picked up the Hummer, and even on a Wednesday afternoon, the place thrummed with people. The project exceeded expectations, in part because so many Angelinos who don’t have their own local options drive to it. Some residents lament the hordes of tourists, and it’s true that on Saturday nights, especially in the summer, the crowds can be overwhelming. But Zane’s satisfied with the demographic mix.

  “Weekend nights are younger than other times, but there are enough middle-aged people,” he said. “We’re like the control rods in a nuclear reactor. The young adults are more like the fuel rods—they’ve got all the heat and energy and razzmatazz. They’re kicking about, having a good time and stuff. But us middle-aged guys keep everything cool and under control.”

  Commercial gentrification is also a concern here. Success attracts corporate retailers who wave money around and drive up rents. We just happened to be sitting on the patio of an independent café called the 18th Street Coffee House, where Zane was eating a piece of cheesecake and drinking a mocha.

  “So you get a Starbucks instead of something like this?” I asked.

  “A Starbucks?” he said incredulously. “I think there are four Starbucks on the Promenade. What the hell is that about? There used to be a wonderful café like this—very cool—but they couldn’t pay the rent.”