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[ A Little Bit Closer Now (2/5/98) ] 
 

Cities Can Be Made More Livable 

BY ROBERT BERNSTEIN, a Goleta scientist and engineer who has worked on transportation and energy issues for 20 years. 

Land use is the key to sustainable resource use and that recognition is growing. Two recent well-attended local conferences brought together environmentalists, farmers, business people, government officials, and interested citizens to discuss land use issues. And not long ago, the Sierra Club magazine devoted an issue to "Livable Cities," a welcome recognition that helping the environment means keeping people in livable cities. 

For all of human history before the automobile, human land use consisted of dense living areas surrounded by open space, both natural and agricultural. When cities grew, dense satellite villages would spring up with open space in between. 

Within dense living areas, residents' daily needs of work, housing, recreation, and shopping were within a short walking distance. When rail transportation began, this land use remained in place. Rail allowed people to go along obvious transit lines between cities and to satellite villages. 

This land use is still seen in most of the world, including Europe and some pre-automobile cities in the eastern United States such as Boston. In countries like Italy or France it is common for people to go home for both lunch and an early afternoon nap (which our natural body rhythms expect) largely because of the close proximity of work and home. 

The automobile destroyed these natural land-use patterns. Open space became filled in with suburban sprawl, which isolates people from each other and from their daily needs, forcing more automobile use, which in turn creates more sprawl and more paving in a vicious circle. Young people and the very old are hit hardest by the isolation and loss of access and independence. 
 

THE BENEFITS OF DENSE, LIVABLE CITIES: Environmentalists need to understand that the best thing we can do for nature is not to live in it. Living in denser yet livable cities leaves natural space open close to where we live. They also need to understand that "solutions" like powering cars with electricity do nothing to solve the land-use problem. We have paved over half our urban land area for cars; powering them on bean sprouts would not help. Dense land use designed for walking, bicycling, and public transit does help. 

Dense living not only means less energy and land wasted for transportation, it also means shorter electricity, water, sewer lines for utilities, and efficiencies in heating and materials used in construction. 

Farmers need to understand that dense, livable cities are in their interest. Such land use keeps people from sprawling over prime agricultural land and shortens the supply lines from the farm to the table. 

Local businesspeople need to understand that sprawl hurts their businesses. Their employees are stuck in traffic instead of working. People are spending their money on cars and other resources imported from outside the area rather than on local goods and services. The Bank of America has released a report enumerating the high cost of sprawl on business. 

More positively, people walking around downtown Santa Barbara are exposed to a variety of business opportunities that people driving through suburban sprawl do not see. 

Ordinary working people benefit from denser, sprawl-free living. Parents don't need to shuttle kids everywhere by car. Children gain confidence and independence as they can reach most destinations, including natural areas, on their own. They grow up connected to their civic and natural environments rather than alienated, frightened, or even hostile to them. 

Adults obviously also benefit from this sense of connectedness, rather than the alienation and isolation of suburbia. And working people can spend more time and money enjoying the fruits of their labor instead of spending it on driving and earning money for multiple cars. 
 

WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO CHANGE? There must be regional planning that ensures that places like Goleta become self-contained cities or are annexed to other cities rather than becoming part of an endless suburban sprawl. 

Portland is a model of change. They simultaneously increased funding for public transit while greatly increasing the cost of driving in the downtown area. "Free" parking spaces cost from $1,000 to $3,000 each per year; they charge for them and use the money for fast, frequent transit instead. 

Eliminating "free" parking is just one part of eliminating incentives for more driving. Gasoline taxes should be raised to cover all the hidden costs of driving--which include free parking, traffic enforcement costs, and the health effects of pollution and accidents --estimated to be at least several dollars per gallon. Subsidies for driving are really corporate welfare for automobile-related industries; motorists do not get to keep this money. 

"Pay-at-the-pump" automobile insurance, funded by a gas tax surcharge, would not only guarantee that all drivers are insured--it would also provide an incentive not to drive by making the cost of insurance directly related to how much you drive. 

We must return to a traditional grid system for our roads. The suburban winding cul-de-sacs create isolation and dump all traffic onto busy collector and arterial roads, which are hostile to non-automobile travel. Having streets connect in an approximate grid allows traffic to be distributed more evenly, making all areas accessible without an automobile. 

We also must change zoning laws, which favor "monoculture" land use of separated housing tracts, "research parks," shopping malls, and far-flung recreation areas. Building of "big box" malls, which encourage people to drive from far away to stockpile supplies in huge houses, must stop. 

Instead, we must return to mixed land use of shopping streets adjacent to housing areas, with light manufacturing and parks mixed in. People working in office buildings and manufacturing should be able to walk to restaurants, banks, and shopping at lunch time. Ideally, many will be able to walk from home to work. 

Financial institutions currently discriminate against mixed land use in making loans for businesses, homeowners, and developers. Funding of mixed land use should be encouraged, not discouraged. 

The mortgage interest deduction should be eliminated. It not only discriminates against poorer working people who are renters, it also subsidizes people who buy sprawling houses in sprawling suburbs. We should be encouraging people to live in denser urban housing, not subsidizing suburban flight of people and capital. 

It will take many changes, some of which may be temporarily unpopular, to achieve a shift away from sprawl to sustainable land use and livable cities. People must individually and collectively change their attitudes about where they live and how they get around. 

But as long as we all keep our eyes on the goal of sustainability and livability, we can make these changes in land use and transportation, which benefit both people and the natural environment.