Vital Little Plans
Page 19
*3 In chapter 11 of Cities and the Wealth of Nations, “Faulty Feedback to Cities,” Jacobs argues that multi-metropolis nations inevitably become one-metropolis nations because of the poor feedback provided by national currencies. In short, the value of such a nation’s currency is most influenced by the city that does the most international trade, yet other cities that do little international trade receive the same feedback. Thus, New York City may be well served by feedback from the U.S. dollar, while Oklahoma City is not.
*4 In The Economy of Cities, Jacobs argues that Los Angeles underwent an episode of new work and import replacing–fueled growth after World War II (151–54). See “Uncovering the Economy” in this volume for a summary of that episode.
*5 Military goods and services act as “sterile” imports, imports that cities cannot replace, for two reasons. First, many of the imports are weapons or other military gear with strong government restrictions that prevent their participation in open-ended, symbiotic local economies. In the language of Systems of Survival, they are “guardian” products, not commercial products, and are thus governed by the guardian moral system, which forbids trade. Second, many military goods and services end their journeys in war zones or military bases, areas without creative urban economies capable of replacing any remaining unrestricted imports. For more on this and other national programs, see chapter 12 of Cities and the Wealth of Nations, “Transactions of Decline.”
*6 For more on performance zoning, see “The Real Problem of Cities” in this volume.
A City Getting Hooked on the Expressway Drug
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THE GLOBE AND MAIL, NOVEMBER 1, 1969
When my family and I settled in Toronto about a year and a half ago, we soon learned the flat we had rented was perched on the putative edge of the Spadina Expressway, variously described to us as elevated, no, depressed; six lanes wide, no, eight; with a subway underneath, no, without; to be built soon, no, not for a long time. Whatever it was, it was not imaginary. Up at Highway 401 we could see what Marshall McLuhan calls the launching pad, a big, confident interchange poised for imminent attack upon a wide swath of raw earth and for the subsequent invasion of still unviolated ravine and pleasant communities to the south.*1 In the mind’s eye, one could see the great trees and jolly Edwardian porches falling before the onslaught.In the mind’s eye, one could see the great trees and jolly Edwardian porches falling before the onslaught.
But surely, we suggested to one another, it would not really happen. Ten years ago, even five, but now? Surely the government in so up-to-date a City Hall must know all about the expressway disaster lands in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Buffalo, Detroit, Washington—the battles and demonstrations, mounting over the years, by increasingly desperate victims.*2 They must certainly, we thought, have reflected upon the lesson of Los Angeles, where at rush hour the cars on the great freeways crawl at 10 miles an hour, the same speed the horses and buggies used to achieve, where the poor have no practicable way to reach jobs, where the exhausts have turned the air into a crisis, where expressways, interchanges and parking lots occupy some two-thirds of the drained and vacuous downtown.
But Los Angeles, we soon read in the newspapers, possesses an almost ideal transportation system and affords the model Toronto is aiming at. The speaker quoted was Samuel Cass, director of Metro’s traffic department.
Since gaping at his statement, I have learned that the Spadina (no, the Allen) Expressway is but one strand planned, although a most crucial one, in a tight concrete net whose effect, just as Mr. Cass said, will be to Los Angelize Toronto.*3 Reading and listening to the official and unofficial comment in favor of this policy, I have been struck above all by its innocence. Toronto, it seems, retains illusions about inner-city expressways that have been shattered elsewhere by experience. Let us identify a few of these innocent dreams.
1.
THE ILLUSION THAT THE COST OF AN EXPRESSWAY IS COVERED BY THE CONSTRUCTION APPROPRIATIONS
They are the least of it. As the Spadina Businessmen’s Association has accurately pointed out, although few seem to hear, many businesses displaced by city expressways are permanently lost to the city’s economy with the jobs they provide.
New quarters for enterprises that do survive, and new dwellings, cost much more on the average than those destroyed, with no net increase in shelter for the increased expenditure.
City streets victimized by increased traffic onto and off expressway ramps must be widened.
Parking space, much of it on valuable inner-city land, must be increased.
Parkland and potential parkland—in Toronto the ravines—must be sacrificed.*4
While it is difficult to attach a dollar cost to intensified air pollution and noise, the cost is there.
Similarly, the widespread uprooting of people and disintegration of city neighborhoods exact vast and mounting social costs.
I am only reporting what has been learned from experience in many U.S. cities whose people once thought an appropriation paid for an expressway. These are the bitter realities that recently led Patrick Moynihan, President Richard Nixon’s assistant for urban affairs, to sum up a despairing account of fiscal and social havoc with the statement: “More than any other single factor it is the automobile that has wrecked the Twentieth-Century American city, dissipating its strength, destroying its form, fragmenting its life.”
I have mentioned only capital costs. Direct and indirect operating costs of expressways have also proved larger than anyone expected.
In some U.S. cities now, repairs and physical maintenance are reaching more than 8 percent of construction costs annually. Put another way, once an expressway begins to age, its cost of construction may have to be duplicated thereafter as often as once every twelve years.
At least one U.S. hospital has noted the interesting fact that its annual deficit is more than equaled by the costs of treating automobile accident patients. Hospital and medical services, ministering to the most dangerous form of city transportation the world has ever known, contribute to the hidden operating costs.
In New York, where the courts are so overcrowded the whole system of administering justice has almost broken down, a huge portion of the load involves traffic violations and traffic accidents, another hidden operating cost.
When land is expropriated for expressways, interchanges and ramps, its cost is not considered a continuing item. Yet in reality there is an annually recurring loss of taxes. One specious means of attempting to compensate for this loss is to zone for high-tax, high-rise apartments beside the expressways. These, too, bear hidden social and economic costs.
The fallacy has been to assume that cost accounting methods which are appropriate for expressways out in the countryside or on the outskirts of cities can be applied also to expressways within cities. The two are simply not comparable. Confusion is compounded when the appropriations for city expressways are compared with costs of public transit. The comparisons are specious.
2.
THE ILLUSION THAT A CITY CAN SIMULTANEOUSLY BUILD AN EXPRESSWAY SYSTEM AND CONTINUE TO DEVELOP PUBLIC TRANSIT
For the reasons just mentioned, no city is rich enough to do so. Public transit inexorably deteriorates when expressways pre-empt a city’s resources. If Toronto goes forward with its present policy, one can safely prophesy that 10 years from now public transit will be much inferior to that of today.*5
3.
THE ILLUSION THAT A CITY CAN HALT AN EXPRESSWAY PROGRAM IF IT PROVES INADVISABLE
Unfortunately, there is a point of no return when options have been lost. To understand why this is so, one must realize that what makes an expressway different from an ordinary city street is the expressway’s limited access and egress points. You can’t leave and enter at every street corner. Limited access, so successful a feature in highways built through open country or at city outskirts, automatically creates traffic jams on city streets leading to and from heavily used ramps. In the case of the Spadina Expressway, fo
r instance, the destination of many drivers will be midtown, the Bloor Street area. The traffic jams will be intolerable unless cars going some distance east and west are sorted out and diverted from the Bloor bottleneck. Therefore, north of Bloor, the longer-distance midtown cars must be diverted into a Crosstown Expressway, linking to Highway 400 on the west and to the Don Valley Expressway on the east. In short, once the Spadina is built, there will be no option to forego the Crosstown. Even Mr. Cass cannot retain that option.
Moreover, as traffic builds up over time, new bottlenecks will result from the Crosstown. Still others will appear south of Bloor in the territory where the Spadina and Highway 400 merge and then flow on to the Gardiner. Since the Gardiner is already at capacity, it must be enlarged.*6
This dynamic is the reason why a city expressway program is never finished. Loss of the option to halt is built into the system itself. It is rather like getting hooked on an addictive drug.
4.
THE ILLUSION THAT EXPRESSWAYS HELP THE SUBURBANITE
This dream seems especially seductive to innocents in North York. Of course, the suburbanites are visualizing a journey to the same downtown they already know, maybe even to an improved version of it. But as the expressways, interchanges and parking lots downtown proliferate, as the local streets grow ever more congested, and the pollution and noise intensify, the quality of the inner city deteriorates. The suburbanite is even cheated of his dream of a swift journey, if he travels during commuting hours.
5.
THE ILLUSION THAT TRUCKING IS AIDED BY CITY EXPRESSWAYS
The competition of passenger cars with trucks for street space is the worst handicap to movement of goods in cities, and expressways do nothing but exacerbate this difficulty. The more passengers that can be moved by other means than automobile, the better for movement of goods.
6.
THE ILLUSION THAT THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE TO CITY EXPRESSWAYS
This, of course, is woefully unimaginative. The illusion is most severe among those who cannot conceive of mankind getting around in cities by means other than feet, automobiles, subways, trolley and bus.
A recent analysis of city transportation problems and solutions undertaken by a firm of California systems analysts at the behest of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development concludes that it is cheaper for a large city (the examples studied were Boston and Houston) to employ new transportation technology than it is to build subways or extend an existing subway system—as well as being cheaper, of course, than instituting or extending an expressway network. The method most favored by the analysts for its economy, convenience and speed is a system of small, public dial-your-destination cars running on their own narrow rights-of-way like trains, joining up together over fast, express segments of the journey, then peeling off to their diverse destinations.*7
Unfortunately, virtually all American cities have already lost any option, in the foreseeable future, to use such ideas. They have already bought a system and, bad as it is, buying another is academic. But Toronto is not yet in that position.
No single type of vehicle or service, however, can supply the many complicated public transportation requirements of a large, modern city. A variety of new services and vehicles is required, complementing one another. Hovercraft, already commonplace on the muskeg, have obvious advantages for lake and river cities.*8 In Toronto they could take part of the commuting load, could provide extremely fast service to Hamilton and, extended thereafter to Rochester, Buffalo and Detroit, the service could take pressure off airports. It might obviate the need for the Harbor Commissioners’ proposed inter-city airport off the Beaches. Even sky-cars developed from the types now used for amusement at the CNE and on the Islands, could perform a utilitarian job, swooping people from one part of downtown to another.*9
7.
THE ILLUSION THAT METRO COUNCIL HAS ACTUALLY AUTHORIZED THE SPADINA EXPRESSWAY
To be sure, it has authorized something, but what? It doesn’t know. As of Sept. 2, members of Metro’s Transportation Committee had not yet seen plans for the expressway and admittedly did not know the answer to these and other vital questions: What will happen to traffic at Bloor Street? Where will exit and entrance ramps be and into what local streets will they feed? How will the Gardiner take increased traffic feeding down from the Spadina route?As a relatively recent transplant from New York, I am frequently asked whether I find Toronto sufficiently exciting. I find it almost too exciting. The suspense is scary.
Presumably Metro Council is still in the dark, as is the city Department of Planning, because the Transportation Committee was told plans would not be available for its information until after the first of next year.
As a relatively recent transplant from New York, I am frequently asked whether I find Toronto sufficiently exciting. I find it almost too exciting. The suspense is scary. Here is the most hopeful and healthy city in North America, still unmangled, still with options. Few of us profit from the mistakes of others, and perhaps Toronto will prove to share this disability. If so, I am grateful at least to have enjoyed this great city before its destruction.
* * *
*1 Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) was the Canadian philosopher and media critic best known for coining the phrases “global village” and “the medium is the message.” Jacobs and McLuhan worked together on the campaign to stop the construction of the Spadina Expressway in Toronto. Their collaboration culminated in the script for a documentary film, The Burning Would, released in 1969.
*2 These cities were all the scenes of “freeway revolts” in which citizens rose up to stop the construction of highways through their neighborhoods. Jacobs’s remark about Toronto’s “up-to-date” City Hall, which was inaugurated on September 13, 1965, is a reference to the fact that it was designed in the then-fashionable Brutalist style by Finnish architect Viljo Revell. For a photograph of the building, see the title page of Part Three in this volume.
*3 The Spadina Expressway was planned as a downtown connector from an existing ring route, Highway 401. Part of its length would have replaced Spadina Road and Spadina Avenue if it had been completed. Today, the only finished section of the proposed Spadina Expressway is known as Allen Road, after William R. Allen (1919–85), a former “super mayor” of Metropolitan Toronto.
*4 Thousands of years ago, after the last ice age, retreating glaciers left a thick layer of sand and soil over the entire region surrounding present-day Toronto. Rivers and creeks running to the Great Lakes eroded the soft earth and created a distinctive series of jagged ravines. After Hurricane Hazel in 1954, which caused massive property damage and numerous deaths in these low-lying areas, the newly minted Toronto and Region Conservation Authority expropriated the ravines and preserved them as parkland. They are the inspiration for Toronto’s self-conception as “the city within a park.”
*5 It’s impossible to know whether Jacobs’s uncharacteristic prophecy would have come to fruition, since Toronto’s “present policy” did not go forward. After years of protests, the Spadina Expressway was finally canceled in 1971, marking a turning point in Toronto’s traffic planning. Ontario premier Bill Davis best summarized the spirit of the moment in his June 1971 speech announcing the expressway’s demise: “Cities were built for people and not cars. If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop.” (Quoted in John Sewell’s The Shape of the City, 179–80.)
*6 In fact, not only was the Gardiner Expressway never enlarged, insufficient maintenance funding left it crumbling by the 1990s. By 2011, it cost the city an estimated $12 million a year simply to keep the elevated expressway on life support, and in 2015 controversy flared about whether to tear down or otherwise rework part of the expressway.
*7 For further analysis of experimental transportation, see “The Real Problem of Cities” in this volume.
*9 At the time Jacobs was writing, the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) and the Toronto Islands both featured fairgrounds with overhead cable-propelled transportation.
The Real Problem of Cities
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SPEECH AT THE INAUGURAL EARTH WEEK TEACH-IN, MILWAUKEE TECHNICAL COLLEGE, 1970
The Soviet encyclopedia always used to be good for a laugh because it claimed that virtually all inventions from the sewing machine to the telephone had been thought up first by this or that obscure nineteenth-century Russian. Perhaps they were. But the ideas were not put to practical use. The difference between thinking up a useful idea, invention or method and actually incorporating it into everyday economic life is a vital distinction. An economy that cannot or does not put available inventions, methods and services to ordinary use, when they are needed, is a stagnated economy.The difference between thinking up a useful idea, invention or method and actually incorporating it into everyday economic life is a vital distinction.
A stagnant economy, instead of incorporating the new kinds of goods and services it needs as time passes, concentrates too long and too heavily on production of older goods and services, and depends too long on established organizations and enterprises. The United States now has a stagnated economy. I am not talking about a recession or even a depression but about something much graver, which may possibly even be irreversible.*1