What's Wrong with the Automobile Pt. 1

I'm going to start by proclaiming my sincerity that I do not hate cars. I love taking road trips and being on the open road. Cars have some amazing advantages to offer as a tool for us to use and to desire to get rid of them completely is rather silly. That being said, cars are not an absolute good they have negative qualities about them as well. In particular I want to focus on the incompatibility of cars in developed urban areas.

When I talk about urban areas I do not merely mean large cities like New York and L.A. Mid-size cities like Omaha or even small cities like Sioux Falls are included even if the effects are not as noticeable. Density is the measurement that truly matters (although population is not completely irrelevant).

Initially, it may seem that the problem with automobiles is emissions and exhaust and at the present that is a serious problem, but it is not what makes automobiles incompatible with urban areas. It is good to remember that in the last 40 years or so cars have become much more efficient and the emissions per car have been reduced (the number of cars has drastically multiplied which offsets the increase in efficiency). It seems likely therefore that as time goes by we will be able to continue to reduce car emissions and eventually move to a non-fossil fuel base and remove the emissions problem altogether, so emissions isn't the problem with cars.

The problem with cars is not a problem of emissions but a problem of space. Cities and urban areas work on principles of density and function best both economically and socially (not that these two aspects are completely distinct from each other) when the densities are high (It should be noted that "high" is not a particular number but is a relative value dependent upon the particularities of individual cities, and neighborhoods and districts within cities.). For discussions on why this is so look at Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities. High densities require a conservation of space and cars, by their nature, work against such a principle. Cars require space in two different senses. Cars are themselves large and tack up a certain amount of physical, but when cars are moving they require an additional amount of space to operate in safety like a personal bubble.

Lets deal with the moving space first. Cars are useful because they allow us to quickly get from one place to another very quickly. In a car I can get from Omaha to Denver in about 7 hours (okay 8 if you drive the speed limit, but come on). That is about 7 hours to cover a distance of 540 miles. Now quickly do the math, to cover 540 miles in 7 hours you have to go on average about 77 mph. Now to have a large metal and plastic object travel at 77 mph creates some obvious safety concerns. One needs to be able to keep the car in control while going at that speed and in order to do that, the road has to be designed in certain ways. Invariably all of these design attributes require space. Want to get rid of all the stops on the road, well build a freeway, but you need to take extra space along each road to construct ramps and bridges in order to remove traffic conflicts. Need to be able to make a 90 degree curve without slowing down, then you are going to need to increase the radius of the curve by a few hundred or thousand feet. Want to keep other cars from brushing up against you, well you might have to increase your lane width from 10 feet to 12 feet.

In the end all those extra feet and yards add up, and these extra feet are needed just to keep cars going safely at 40 or 45 mph. Look in your own city, any road that has a speed limit of 45 probably is either two lanes, has a median and a little bit of boulevard grass (between 10 and 20 feet) before the sidewalk. Or it is a two lane road with ditches, or other wide grass shoulder separating it from buildings and people. These adaptations are necessary to ensure the cars will be able to maintain the speeds it needs, get rid of all or even just a few of the aspects and the car has to slow down to 30 or 25 mph (think downtown areas). Now look at how far away some of those suburbs are and you realize that traveling at 25 mph would result in trips of an hour or more to get to the center of town assuming no congestion or extra stops.

It should be easy to see that for automobile travel to be useful (over long distances at least) you need to be moving at high speeds (4o and above), but to be able to travel at these high speeds you need to create roads with design features that take up lots of space. As urban areas require density and the conservation of space these two are at fundamental odds with each other. When I return to this topic I will look at the other space issue of cars, the far more problematic issue in regards to proper city development.