Photos of San Francisco Bay sprawl: Exuberance.com

Today’s LA Times features an astonishingly ignorant defense of sprawl by a man named Robert Bruegmann. He is the author of a book called, “Sprawl: A Compact History”.

There is a reason many of us consider sprawl, “America’s most lethal disease”. It has destroyed the countryside around America. It promotes obesity by eliminating walking. It makes us dependant on our car to get anywhere. It has caused downtowns to decay, and turned us into a nation of frustrated idiots sitting in our cars on clogged freeways. Sprawl is what makes the air in Southern California poison and contributes to our alarming rates of asthma.

But Bruegmann, like his philosophical partner, Joel Kotkin, praises rampant sprawl as good because it is economically good. He says congestion is not bad in Los Angeles, because Paris (always bash Paris and you win friends on the right) is even worse because you cannot drive 60 MPH through the Champs d’Elysées. Why would you want to? People walk in Paris! Who strolls down the 405?

He argues, without proof, that anti-sprawl “activism” has reduced funds for new highway construction and therefore we can’t get anywhere fast:

“The only way to break the vicious cycle of new roads, more traffic and increasing sprawl, the anti-auto forces claimed, was to stop building roads and create more mass transit. This would, according to their logic, turn the vicious cycle on its head, creating instead a virtuous cycle in which more people riding on urban mass transit would create more demand for work and housing within the city in areas convenient to transit stops.

This is, of course, the logic that has undergirded a great deal of public policy in Los Angeles and many places across the country in the last several decades. And it has led to the expenditure of billions of dollars on new transit systems, such as the new light-rail lines and subway in Los Angeles (as well as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s proposal to extend the subway still farther down Wilshire Boulevard).

However, despite this expenditure, transit’s share of total trips has fallen and traffic has continued to get worse in almost every market in the country. In the L.A. region, for example, mass transit, which accounted for an extremely small 1.94% of trips in 1983, dropped to only 1.64% in 2003, according to figures compiled by transportation consultant Wendell Cox.”

It’s interesting that anti-public transportation advocates always point to the billions that have been spent on subways, buses and light rail. But how many hundreds of billions more have we wasted on road construction? How many hours of traffic and tax dollars are thrown at the (poor) maintenance of our roads?

At times, Bruegmann’s essay seems to dance into the realm of fantasy as he describes life in Los Angeles:

“Anyone who is old enough to have driven in L.A. or in most other U.S. cities in the 1960s or ’70s can testify to the sense of liberation that accompanied the completion of the new roads. Suddenly it was possible, in a matter of minutes, to make trips that had previously taken hours. People in Santa Monica soon thought nothing of accepting dinner invitations in Pasadena.”

I don’t know anybody in Santa Monica who would delight at accepting a Friday night dinner invitation in Pasadena. Imagine the traffic as you navigate Wilshire to get onto the 405 south, to get to the 10 east, and you crawl through the 110, through downtown, to finally arrive exhausted and frustrated at Pasadena, two hours later? The freeway is an impediment, not an enabler, of dinner plans between far flung friends!

His Jules Verne conjurations continue:

“There is no technical reason that we couldn’t have, not too far in the future, personal rapid transportation capsules running both on rails and rubber wheels, using alternative fuel sources and operating either on their own over short distances or linked together for longer distances on guideways that would allow speeds of hundreds of miles per hour.” Rubber transportation capsules? That sounds like a new sex toy.

He blames the “anti-highway lobby” for obstructing the necessary the construction of new freeways:

“Given the great success of the anti-highway lobby in arguing its cause, it is not surprising that during the recent decades of tax cutting and tight budgets, there has been a marked lack of taxpayer support for building adequate new roads and increasing capacity on existing roads.”

I’d like to pit the powers of the “anti-highway lobby” against the very weak(!) oil, automobile, real estate, banking and tire companies. Like the proverbial “gay lobby”, whom the Christian right accuses of having an agenda merely because they propose an alternative to status quo ignorance, those who think beyond autocentricity must be out to destroy the American way of life.

The debate over sprawl is not merely about the car vs. public transportation. It is about how we choose to live. Do we want to pave over every farm, forest and wetland to build roads, houses and malls? Or would it be more sustainable, in the long run, to draw a line around our metropolitan areas, and plan them to be denser while preserving the countryside around cities?

There is no way to turn back the clock on the development of our region. We are urbanized from Palm Springs west to the ocean. Yet our way of getting around is completely inadequate. We need monorails to get us across the Sepulveda Pass and down to LAX. We need light rail and high speed rail to bring commuters from the Antelope Valley to Long Beach. We need thousands of units of housing along the train and bus routes so that our use of public transportation will rise above “1.64%”. People in this city don’t ride the bus or train because they don’t want to. They don’t ride because they don’t find it convenient. Make it easy and people will use it.

Would we rather live in a sprawling San Bernardino, CA or Zurich, Switzerland? Which city provides a better way of life, aside from the ability to drive 70 mph through the center of town? Better yet, which city has a center and which city lacks not only a center, but a soul?