TheMondayGarden.com

I lived in New York City for 28 years, a place that some would say is the root of all evil. But have you wondered why New Yorkers are so famous for their ability to overcome adversity? Every kind of person lives there and no one has to take pass an urban fitness test to get in. What makes New Yorkers different? Could it be the lack of private cars? The rest of the country is always astounded by the number of New Yorkers without drivers’ licenses. New York is a city of walkers, bus and subway riders, and taxi hailers. As such, New Yorkers are used to finding a way around barriers, to interacting with whoever is standing next to them, to cooperating with strangers.

In New York City, “car v. pedestrian” is a fair fight; the foot traffic being given at least equal importance to the vehicular traffic. In the suburbs, evolving into “urbs”, things are different. The car wins, even when it shouldn’t, perpetuating its priority in the scheme of things. This thinking needs to change.

Once the middle class dream was a house with a lawn, two cars, and two kids. The private car made suburbia possible; the investment in suburbia is ensuring the private car’s continuation. To me, “suburb” means a place of low-rise residential dwellings on lots of sometimes an acre or more. The result is a low-density population, so spread out that few of life’s necessities can be obtained on foot, so spread out that providing effective public transportation is virtually impossible.

picture: crosswalk, Strawberry Hill Ave, Stamford Ct October 2004

Many still enjoy being separated from their neighbors by a lawn and a few bushes, having a barbecue in the backyard rather than at the park, and gardening in the yard rather than on the balcony. Not all are equipped with the generosity, tolerance, and flexibility required for cooperative urban living. But at what price for our grandchildren when all the forests and meadows are gone? Is it worth it when the commute to work means sitting in traffic for two hours?

I, for one, have difficulty grasping the joys of spending one’s Saturday fighting local traffic to get the chores done. What works for me is ambling along a street with interesting store fronts, stopping to check the progress of the street trees’ developing buds, patting a neighbor’s dog, and chatting with people that I might not otherwise meet. Yes, I share two elevators and a communal laundry with 170 other families, and I can not have everything “my way” on demand all the time. But why is this a hardship?

picture: “ghosts” left on the sidewalk by fallen red oak leaves. Strawberry Hill Avenue, Stamford CT October 2004

My town (Stamford, CT), like many, is evolving from a suburban town into an “urb”. Our city planners are valiantly trying to guide us in the direction of a livable, human-scale urban center with sidewalk cafes and river walks. They are trying to avoid the pitiful of “strip malls” that have scarred so much of the suburban landscape. But sometimes it seems to me that there is a step back for every step forward because the old car-first thinking is so hard to change.

What I see: if we suburbanites could only turn back the clock (or forward) to the age of residential villages, clusters of homes with daily necessities in walking distance, where most long-distance transportation was provided by public transportation:

• We’d be healthier because we’d walk more.
• Our air, ground and water would be less polluted.
• Less of the land would be sealed under asphalt and concrete.
• Less of the land would be consumed by low-rise homes, office buildings and industrial structures.
• More of the land would be open, uncultivated space for all creatures to enjoy.
• We’d be a more connected community because we’d interact more.
• Mothers won’t spend a good part of their lives as their children’s chauffeurs.
• Our grandchildren would be assured sufficient petroleum, a precious, diminishing fossil fuel, for lubricants and medicines.
• We would be able to literally stop to smell the flowers as we went about our daily business.
• Our economic development would not be stopped time and again because there’s no way to handle the projected vehicular traffic.

Even if our city leaders didn’t support this vision, it must be recognized that as we become cities, there are a lot more pedestrians whose needs have to be taken into account. Some are those walking a block or two from their cars (and hopefully patronizing the local family-owned shops along the central streets as well as the big chain stores).

However, many of the pedestrians are people, like me, who don’t have cars, and who live our lives in the urban centers and in the adjacent places which we can reach by foot and public transportation. Some of us can not afford cars; some of us, particularly seniors, have physical disabilities that prevent us from driving; some of us just arrived from other countries and have not been able to get a drivers’ license yet. Some of us, like me, are people who do not buy into the “car culture”, and who want to live our lives in a way that has the least negative impact on the earth.

How do we get there? There’s a major shift in behavior needed. No one’s going to leave the car home, or better yet, sell the car, unless it’s the best immediate choice. Our city leaders in our developing towns need to “build the field” so that walking, the bus and the train are viable ways of living.

PS. Try the bus—there is a whole community of interesting people there waiting to meet you.