I lived in older urban areas—Manhattan, Chicago, Washington, D.C.—for thirty-two of my first thirty-seven years on this planet. My only nonurban experiences were in college towns, like Princeton and Palo Alto. I had walked to work almost every day of my life. But then I was blessed with three usually delightful children, and I did what millions of other Americans have done facing an expanding household. I moved to a suburb and started driving.
There is nothing unusual in a middle-aged man leaving the city. As we’ve seen, cities disproportionately attract the young. Almost one fifth of Manhattan’s residents are between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, while only 13 percent of the nation is in that age category. Still, given my love of cities, my decision to suburbanize deserves a bit more explanation. What terrible bout of insanity induced me to choose deer ticks as neighbors instead of people?
I remain unsure about whether my suburbanization was a mistake, but there were logical reasons for the move: more living space, spongy lawns for toddlers to fall on, my desire for a less Harvard-dominated neighborhood, a reasonably fast commute, and a good school system. Leaving the city meant an end to excellent accessible restaurants, but with three small children, I wouldn’t be eating out often no matter where I lived. Thanks to the Massachusetts Turnpike, it doesn’t take me much longer to get to the things in Boston that I value most: cannoli in the North End, Flemish painting in the Museum of Fine Arts, and Logan Airport.
This chapter is about precisely that type of calculus—the appeals of car-based living in lower-density places, which have attracted so many people, including myself. Older cities must compete against car-oriented areas, and it always makes sense to know your enemy. Ranting about the philistinism of people who choose car-based living in Houston may be emotionally satisfying to some, but it does nothing to help older cities attract more people. For millions, the appeal of suburban, Sunbelt places is real, but better policies, both at the national and local level, could enable older cities to compete more effectively.
Whether you or I love or loathe the exurbs should be irrelevant for public policy. The government should not be in the business of enforcing lifestyles that we happen to find appealing. The government’s job is to allow people to choose the life they want, as long as they are paying for the costs of that lifestyle. Yet today, public policies strongly encourage people, including me, to sprawl.
I doubt that I would be in the suburbs if it weren’t for the antiurban public policy trifecta of the Massachusetts Turnpike, the home mortgage interest deduction, and the problems of urban schools. Eliminating pro-sprawl policies won’t bring back every declining city, and it won’t kill the suburbs, but it will create a healthier urban system whereby walking cities can compete more effectively against the car. The stakes are even higher in the developing world, where cities are more fluid and where a wholesale move to American-style sprawl would mean a massive rise in driving and energy use.
Sprawl Before Cars
Transportation technologies shape our communities, and modern sprawl is the child of the automobile. The connections that define cities have always entailed some form of transportation. Sprawl isn’t the opposite of urban density; rural isolation has that distinction. The people who live in sprawling exurbs have access to neighbors, stores, employers, and restaurants. They just have to drive. Sprawl began many centuries ago, when people started using something other than their own feet to travel, and since then boats, horses, omnibuses, elevators, subways, and cars have all influenced how cities were laid out and how they grew. Many older neighborhoods, like New York’s Washington Square and Barcelona’s Eixample, which are now beloved by urbanists, were the sprawl of earlier eras.
Each successful new type of transportation generally goes through three phases. First, technological breakthroughs enable the large-scale production of a faster way to move, such as a steam-powered train or a car. Second, a new transportation network is built, if needed, to accommodate this new technology. Third, people and companies change their geographic locations to take advantage of this new mode of transport.
The first transport revolution was the domestication of pack animals ten millennia ago, which seems to have started in the Middle East. Pack animals didn’t require a new road network, for horses, donkeys, mules, and llamas can go pretty much anywhere a human can. But the pack animals did change human geography. The urban historian Paul Bairoch argued that before them, moving food was so hard that people had to live near food sources. Pack animals made cities possible, by making it easier to transport enough food to feed concentrated urban masses.
Wheels seem to have originated in Mesopotamia around eight thousand years ago, but the oldest existing wheel is five thousand years old and Russian. Egyptians and Indians had the wheel by at least 2000 B.C. As anyone who has ever been on a dune buggy knows, wheels don’t need paved roads. Still, roads really speed up wheeled transport, especially in places without flat, dry ground. The Incas never developed the wheel, quite possibly because pack animals functioned better in the mountainous terrain of the Inca Empire.
Building and maintaining roads requires strong and wealthy civilizations. Good transportation brought far more honor and wealth to Rome than the bloody pageantry of the Colosseum. The empire’s large cities were sustained by the wheeled transport that distributed vast amounts of grain brought by ship from Spain and Egypt to feed the nonfarming urbanites. Inside cities, Roman grids accommodated wheeled carts. After Rome fell, the ability to maintain roads disappeared, and without roads, wheels lost their value. The pack animal came back. Paving returned with centralized political power in the High Middle Ages, when leaders like Philip Augustus, the great consolidator of France who pushed the English out of Normandy in the thirteenth century, started paving Paris for the first time since the Roman era.
Much ink has been spilled about medieval innovations in horse travel, such as the stirrup and the saddle, which increased the importance of earlier equine innovations, like the breeding and training that enabled humans to ride horses at least five millennia ago. But throughout most of history in the densely populated, non-nomadic parts of the world, horses have been an elite transport technology. Maintaining a large life form for personal transport was far beyond the means of most ordinary farmers or townsmen. Horses only began transporting large numbers of people when their costs could be shared, through mass transit.
In philosophical circles, Blaise Pascal is known for his reflections on Christianity, while mathematicians know him for his contributions to geometry and probability theory. Pascal’s famous wager, which suggests that if there is any chance that God exists, then it makes sense to be good, is still the stuff of undergraduate bull sessions. Among urbanists, however, his glory comes from being a father of the bus. In 1662, Pascal organized the first public bus line, charging five sous for the privilege of being carried by horse across Paris.
Pascal’s public buses were, appropriately enough, a gamble that required sufficient scale to be a good bet. Running a bus route along a fixed line only makes sense if there are enough customers. Seventeenth-century Paris had the paving and the population to make a bus line possible but not actually successful. The real era of bus transit began in the 1820s, when city populations had expanded dramatically, and horse-drawn buses started appearing in Paris, New York, and London.
The first public transit in New York City was a twelve-person omnibus that ran along Broadway in 1827. The poor quality of New York City’s roads slowed the bus down, so its owner laid down rails. Over time, a rail network was built to carry those horse-drawn omnibuses. It was paid for by private operators, but it was also subsidized, as the city gave them right-of-way on previously open city streets.
A half-hour commute on foot can bring an average walker only about 1.5 miles; the omnibus easily doubled that range, which enabled the growth of uptown neighborhoods that catered to the well-off. An omnibus ride may have cost only five to seven cents, but ordinary laborers earned only a dollar a day
, so they kept walking. Like the car, buses started off as transportation for the prosperous. By selectively speeding the rich, buses began the exodus of the wealthy from the urban core. When everyone walked in New York, the rich lived in Bowling Green, a central location with easy access to the wharves. After the omnibus, the prosperous were able to commute in from less dense quarters uptown, and the suburban pattern started.
There is a clear demarcation between the older areas of New York and Boston, with their chaotic, unplanned streets built during the pedestrian era, and the much more orderly city built around wheeled transport. The fifty-foot minimum street widths and straight lines of New York’s 1811 grid were designed to accommodate masses of horse-drawn vehicles, even those, like the omnibus, that hadn’t yet shown up in New York.
Before the bus, the land that is now the southern end of Fifth Avenue had been one of the poorest parts of the city, an early African-American district and cemetery. In 1826, the city bought a big plot of land in the area, Washington Square, and turned it into a marching ground. With the omnibus, this once almost rural outpost became a quite plausible home base for well-to-do merchants to commute from. Wealthier New Yorkers built stout row houses that still stand, enjoying their views over the city’s green acres. Washington Square, now an archetypal urban space, was then a proto-suburb, a place that grew because a faster form of transportation enabled the rich to travel farther and buy bigger homes with more land. In the 1950s, when Jane Jacobs fought against running a road through Washington Square Park, she was fighting to save nineteenth-century sprawl from twentieth-century sprawl.
The next step after the omnibus was to power carriages with something other than equine muscle. Matthew Boulton understood that the steam engine could move wheels, and Richard Trevithick built the first functioning train in 1804. As steam engines became more reliable and coaches more comfortable, entrepreneurs started laying down rail networks. Intra-urban systems were built on existing roads, in tunnels, and on elevated rails. Building at street level was cheap but used valuable city real estate and created lots of noise and smoke. London, the world’s largest city, with the greatest demand for faster transport, pioneered the underground rail system in 1863. More than twenty-five thousand people started using it almost immediately.
Running steam engines in tunnels may be better for pedestrians, but it isn’t great for the riders sitting in smoky cars. New York City, which also had plenty of demand for its streets, went for elevation rather than tunnels. The city’s subways didn’t appear until 1904, more than thirty years after steam trains traveled above Manhattan. Tens of millions of dollars were invested in elevated rail networks, which were run by some of the most infamous figures of the Gilded Age, like Jay Gould and Charles Yerkes.
Those rail networks enabled New York City to sprawl farther. The northern stops on the Manhattan elevated train lines initially attracted tourists eager to see the island’s relatively uninhabited upper reaches. The elevated railroad made it possible to live in neighborhoods like Harlem and commute at the rapid rate of 12 miles per hour to jobs downtown. My grandfather grew up in one of those northern Manhattan neighborhoods made accessible by the El. From one perspective, the steam train-enabled growth of the nineteenth-century city looks like a great burst of urban expansion.
But those steam trains were also creating early suburbs. If Washington Square is the sprawl of the omnibus era, then the Philadelphia Main Line provides the quintessential examples of suburbs built on steam. In the 1860s, the Pennsylvania Railroad acquired 283 acres in Lower Merion Township, on which it created the town of Bryn Mawr. At first, the new homes were weekend houses, but as trains got faster, a new form of suburban living came into being. Just as Washington Square housed the elite New Yorkers described by Henry James and Edith Wharton, the Main Line provided homes for the wealthy Philadelphians played by Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story.
Werner von Siemens took the next step by powering an urban train with electricity in Berlin in 1881. No horses. No steam. Just gliding trains powered either with an overhead cable or with a third rail underneath. Electricity proved a perfect fit for mass transportation in densely populated cities, but electric streetcars and trains required two networks, one to ride on and one to provide power. Frank Sprague was, like Henry Ford, a brilliant mind collected by Thomas Edison. Also like Ford, Sprague left Edison and transformed city life with his transportation innovations. He invented the trolley pole, which brought electricity to cars throughout the city via a network of overhead wires. By the late 1890s, urban landscapes were full of trolleys. Siemens and Sprague helped cities move up as well as out. Siemens invented the electric elevator; Sprague co-invented the Sprague-Pratt elevator, which ran more swiftly and safely. Even though trains and streetcars lowered the price of traveling into the city center from far away, the late nineteenth century saw cities stretch up as well as out.
Electric streetcars, like the earlier omnibuses, shifted population within cities worldwide. The Passeig de Gràcia, in Barcelona, is one of the most architecturally important streets in the world, with masterpieces by Antonio Gaudí, Josep Puig, and the other greats of Catalan architecture. The Passeig, a broad, beautiful thoroughfare, runs outward from the Plaça de Catalunya, on the edge of the old city, through the Eixample, a nineteenth-century district made possible by streetcars. The Eixample was outside the old city’s walls, but when those walls were torn down in the 1850s, the city held a competition to create a plan for a new district. The competition was won by Ildefons Cerdà, a civil engineer, who planned the area’s octagonal blocks. While New York City’s grid is detested by many urban planners for its plodding uniformity, Cerdà’s plan is celebrated for its quirky creativity. He designed it to accommodate transportation innovations: Those octagons were meant to enable the turning of large, steam-powered vehicles.
The Eixample was first reached with horse-drawn carriages, but in 1900, the streetcars that ran down the Passeig de Gràcia were electrified. The new transportation made the area a magnet for prosperous Catalans who paid the city’s best architects to design their homes. The Casa Milà, an undulating masterpiece by Gaudí, was built for a developer who was known for dressing and marrying well. Another architectural icon, the Casa Amatller, was built for a chocolate magnate.
While the nineteenth century saw several transit innovations, the twentieth-century city was dominated by one: the internal combustion engine. Germans Nikolaus Otto, Gottfried Daimler, and Wilhelm Maybach, connected by the city of Cologne, produced the four-stroke internal combustion engine and used it to power the world’s first gas-powered motorcycle in 1885. In Mannheim, 120 miles away, Karl Benz developed his own gas-powered two-stroke engine, and in 1886 he patented his Motorwagen. While Germans were responsible for the key innovations in producing the automobile, Americans, especially Henry Ford, deserve the credit for mass-producing cars. By the end of the 1920s, Americans had 23 million cars on the road. Cars, unlike trains, functioned reasonably well on the existing roads, which were already being converted to asphalt in the nineteenth century. Henry Ford’s Model T’s were sturdy vehicles, simple enough to be repaired by ordinary people, and they traveled easily at modest speeds even on dirt.
But drivers soon realized that cars could run much more quickly on limited-access highways with smooth asphalt paving. America began building a highway network to accommodate the new form of transportation. New York State opened the first part of its parkway system in 1908. That system was meant to give drivers easy access to the city at the soaring speed of 25 miles per hour. By the 1920s, the federal government started organizing and funding a system of paved roads throughout the nation. The Federal Highway Act of 1921 provided $75 million of matching funds ($765 million in 2007 dollars) for state highway projects, such as the parkways built on Long Island by Robert Moses, New York’s master builder (and Jane Jacobs’s bête noire), who was also one of the world’s great experts on and advocates of limited-access highways. During th
e Great Depression, the New Deal put people to work paving highways, such as Route 66, immortalized in song by Bobby Troup and Nat King Cole, and in prose by John Steinbeck. The Okies in The Grapes of Wrath traveled to California along the “Mother Road.”
President Eisenhower dramatically deepened the federal government’s commitment to highways—a commitment that lives on to this day. Mobility is often crucial to military success, which may explain why generals are often keen on improving transportation. General Washington was passionate about canals, and General Eisenhower loved highways. With some cause, the Eisenhower Interstate Highway system has been called the largest public works project in history. Today, the system includes forty-six thousand miles of roads, built and maintained with tens of billions of dollars of federal and state spending. The vast scale of federal support for the highway system has led some to see a devilish conspiracy of automakers who used public funding to destroy the streetcar. Certainly automobile manufacturers, like most other firms, wanted to defeat their competitors, who happened to run buses and streetcars. But if there was a conspiracy, then it operated in full view and with abundant popular support. Americans loved their cars and were happy to spend billions creating a fast network of highways.
If Henry Ford’s assembly lines were the first phase of the car era, and the highway system was phase two, then mass suburbanization and the rise of car-oriented cities has been phase three—the population’s response to the new transport technology. Income and population growth have been significantly higher in those metropolitan areas that were included in the highway system. Suburbs grew more quickly in areas with more roads, and cities emptied. Nathaniel Baum-Snow, a Brown University economist, has calculated that each “new highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18 percent.” One potential problem with such calculations is that more highways may have been built in areas that expected more suburbanization, but Baum-Snow handles this problem by focusing on the highways that were planned in 1947 for military purposes. Like omnibuses and streetcars, the automobile reshaped urban America.
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Made Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier Page 21