Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  Many of those accidents were very severe, and some involve such tragedies as loss of eyes and paralysis from the neck down. One woman in San Antonio was so severely hurt on a stationary bicycle that the manufacturers gave her $900,000 in an out-of-court settlement.

  The article in which I read about all this, in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, went on to describe another phenomenon. To pedal an indoor bicycle becomes so boring as to drive many people to their wits’ ends, it seems. One couple in Houston whom the reporter interviewed were planning to watch television while exercising on their new stationary bike—a bicycle for which, by the way, they were laying out $1,500. If that seems like a lot of money for a bike that doesn’t go anywhere, consider that some stationary bikes can cost as much as $3,448. They have built-in computers to assure you that what you are doing is having an effect apart from just making the wheels go around. People have also taken to fighting the boredom by buying videocassettes that unroll scenery for them on the walls of their rooms.

  Before we snicker at these extravagances or snort at these artificialities, think about the fact that many of these poor souls literally have no feasible place where they can ride actual bicycles and go anywhere. They live in expressway cities like Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles or Detroit, and even smaller places as well, like Needville, Texas, or Kalamazoo, Michigan. For them, it’s as if to get anywhere much, you’d have to take your bike on the Gardiner or the 401.*1

  This is what Metro would be like too, if its highway and traffic department’s plans had not been stopped by citizen action. Sam Cass, the department’s chief, boasted back in 1970 that when his plans were carried out, no spot in this city was to be farther away from a major expressway than three quarters of a mile. Ramps and interchanges were to abound. What was to be left of the city would amount, in effect, to the clover in the clover leaves.*2 That is no environment for biking, nor for public transit either. In such an environment, of course sane people would take their bicycles indoors and run the scenery on the walls.

  This is what Metro could just possibly still become, as schemes afoot right now warn us. I am thinking of such things as the proposed Leslie Street Extension, now under serious and expensive study with the apparent support of the City of Toronto’s own planning department, over the objection of North York neighborhoods that would be damaged. I am thinking of the recently proposed widening of Spadina below Bloor, which, if I have been correctly informed, has already tentatively been put into the next capital budget by Mr. Cass. This too, alas, seems to have the support of the City of Toronto’s own planning department. That scheme happens to be precisely what was originally planned by Mr. Cass for the lower end of the Spadina Expressway. It amounts to building the Expressway from its southern end northward, an old trick I am familiar with in the United States: if opposition stops an expressway at one end, then you start building it from the other end.

  Marshall McLuhan once said that Canada enjoys an early warning system, if it had the sense to heed what has happened in the United States. What has happened in the United States is that the expressway system of attempting to deal with transportation between suburbs and downtowns has now succeeded in making suburbs themselves the very worst scenes of traffic jams and backups in the nation.

  An article about this phenomenon, also from The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, begins:

  Fairfax County, VA. Every weekday morning Gretchen Davis drives down Fairfax Farms Road on the way to work at the Ayr Hill Country Store in nearby Vienna. Sounds pastoral, doesn’t it?

  But a short way down the road, Mrs. Davis reaches Route 50, a major arterial highway….There a river of cars roars through the suburban calm….What used to be a pleasant 20 minute commute [stretches] into a nerve-wracking hour.

  Can you imagine Mrs. Davis choosing to negotiate this on a bicycle? Or sending her children, if she has them, on bicycles to what is their suburb’s own downtown?

  What has happened in this suburb is, if anything, becoming all too typical, the report goes on to tell us, with nuggets like these: Millions of suburbanites now share Mrs. Davis’s frustration. Urban planners now say traffic tie-ups are becoming the major problem of the suburbs. Buildings at the business nodes are too far apart for walking, so any movement between them must be by car. The morning traffic is horrendous, but lunchtime only brings more traffic jams as people flood out of office buildings, jump into cars and head for restaurants. As suburban highways choke, they spill into small roads, disturbing the tranquility of residential neighborhoods. The Dallas and Houston metropolitan areas now suffer bumper-to-bumper traffic on many highways twelve or more hours a day. Snarled traffic in the suburbs of San Francisco now regularly adds up to a total backup of some 170 miles, and so on.

  In sum, warnings from the U.S. tell us that suburbs, which it was long supposed were benefiting from the expressway system of trying to handle transportation between suburbs and downtowns, have themselves inexorably become victims of the system—a lesson that people in North York, for one, are just now starting to grasp, although their politicians haven’t.

  I have been dwelling at length on expressway folly, in part to emphasize that this way of trying to meet a city’s transportation needs leads to a wretched environment for cyclists. But let us look at this in a broader context too. In many respects, the interests of cyclists are identical with the interests of other groups who are deeply concerned about the quality of life in cities and suburbs.

  I am thinking, for instance, of

  • People who care about cities and suburbs as safe and pleasant places to bring up children;

  • People who care about the tranquility of residential areas and the dangers to them of environmental degradation;

  • People who value ravines and other city oases of nature, and care about protecting them from paving, traffic and noise;

  • People who care about the quality, convenience, and financial resources and soundness of mass transit;

  • People who care about the mobility of children, the elderly, and those too poor to own a car or—as may be the case—two cars;

  • People who care about combating emissions that help cause acid rain and other pollutants;

  • People concerned about profligate wastes of energy, and the consequences of that waste for ourselves and the planet.

  People with concerns like these are natural allies of cyclists, whether sports cyclists, touring and other recreational cyclists, or utilitarian cyclists. Intrinsically, these people’s battles are also the cyclists’ battles, and cyclists’ battles are their battles, because all these superficially different interests converge. They all amount to trying to keep city and suburbs as high-quality places for people—not just people who are spending part of their day in cars, but people walking, strolling, running, pedaling, playing, gardening—or for that matter, listening for bullfrogs.

  About those bullfrogs: last year I was flabbergasted to hear an official of a cycling organization say his organization and its membership were simply uninterested in the sorts of interests and allies I have just mentioned, and that his organization would in all likelihood support a proposed new traffic artery or a widened road which was opposed by the neighborhood it would damage, if the scheme would save a few minutes for cyclists. Same for a highway through a formerly wild ravine. I fear he thought I was slightly balmy, or anyhow impractical, when I told him that somebody who cared deeply about preserving a habitat for bullfrogs was more of a natural ally for him than an expressway builder or a road widener or an automobile traffic planner. Only last week I happened to read a remark by another cycling official, to the effect that whatever is good for cars is good for bicycles too, apparently on the premise that both kinds of vehicles roll on pavements.

  The logical end result of short-sighted or wishful policies like those is, of course, stationary bicycles going around and around indoors. Literally pedaling alone, with videocassette scenery for comfort, becomes all too logical a sequel when cycl
ists figuratively pedal alone without empathy or regard for other people interested in the quality of city life, for their own or other reasons.

  At present, cyclists don’t have much clout in pushing for the facilities and city qualities they need and want. I think they would have more clout if they pedaled along with their many, many potential allies, getting aid from those allies in support of cyclists’ needs, and in return helping their natural allies in their battles for better quality of city life: working in mutual support with people who care about bullfrogs, or about traffic lights where the schoolchildren cross, or about threats of expropriation to their working places or their homes, understanding that the specific needs and desires of city cyclists can be furthered only within a broader context of the city as a decent place for people to live and get around in.

  As a practical matter, how do loose but effective alliances among city groups come about? I will mention a bit of history as an illustration, because it occurred at a time when the very notion of such diverse alliances had to be invented or stumbled into. Back in 1956, I happened to be one of a group defending a community park in New York, where I lived at the time—defending it against being bisected by a proposed expressway.*3

  We weren’t making much headway at first. As Robert Moses, New York’s chief highway planner and vandal of the time, said at one public hearing, we were “nothing but a bunch of mothers.” We had no clout.

  All the established organizations in the community had their own important concerns on which they focused. Most of them should logically have been our natural allies, but even those that recognized this tended to be too bureaucratized to be effective allies. Of course they didn’t think of themselves so, but like most organizations they were automatically little bureaucracies with executive committees, or boards of directors, or the like. They had to go through time-taking procedures, more often than not at infrequent meetings, to debate and pass resolutions endorsing support of this action, so much the worse. If there wasn’t time for it at the end of the agenda, it got short shrift. And if some members of the executive disagreed with the object of stopping the expressway, as sometimes was the case, so much the worse still.

  We felt as if we were stuck in flypaper, unable to mobilize effectively the really big support that actually was out there in the community—and elsewhere in the city too—as we knew from petitions, letters to editors, talk with neighbors, and other evidence.A city good for cycling is also a city good for walking, strolling, running, playing, window-shopping, and listening for bullfrogs if listening for bullfrogs is your thing.

  At this point, a public-spirited man with considerable experience in citizens’ organizations suggested we ought to start what he called an umbrella movement on the issue, a rallying organization for embracing natural allies in either an informal or a formal way, an organization whose members would simultaneously help natural allies in their battles which were congenial to our cause.*4 That is what we did, calling our outfit The Committee to Save Washington Square from All But Emergency Traffic. The method worked. Not only did we find our allies and defeat the expressway and close off even the existing narrow roadway through the park for all except fire engines, ambulances and the like, but in the process we got other natural alliances going, alliances that worked for many other constructive mutual purposes.

  Something much like this happened in Toronto also during the early 1970s, when many neighborhoods were engaged in crisis battles to preserve themselves from outrageous schemes by developers and traffic promoters. Neighborhood groups took to working together under an umbrella confederation, supporting one another. The Stop Spadina Save Our City Coordinating Committee played a key role in initiating the alliances, although of course not the only role.

  It seems to me that cyclists need to get analogous support from natural allies, and give analogous support to them. Otherwise cyclists are unlikely to get very far in improving this city for cycling and, in the process, helping to improve it for all those others who care, for their own reasons, about the city’s quality of life.

  Whether effective mutual support will develop, I don’t know. Certainly it won’t develop without effort, or without understanding that a city good for cycling is also a city good for walking, strolling, running, playing, window-shopping, and listening for bullfrogs if listening for bullfrogs is your thing.

  * * *

  *1 Jacobs here names two prominent expressways in Toronto. In the next sentence, “Metro” refers to the now-defunct metropolitan level of government in Toronto, including York, East York, North York, Etobicoke, Scarborough, and the old city itself. In 1998, the Government of Ontario forcefully amalgamated these municipalities into one “megacity.”

  *2 Patterns of expressway interchanges often take the form of four interlocked loops, which resemble a four-leaf clover. To say that only “the clover in the clover leaves” would remain is to say that only the unused and mostly unusable scraps of grass inside the looping on-ramps would remain.

  *3 The park in question is Washington Square Park, and Jacobs’s passionate and witty defense of the park can be found in “Reason, Emotion, Pressure: There Is No Other Recipe,” in this volume.

  *4 The “public-spirited man” in question is Raymond “Ray” Rubinow (1905–96), a lifelong administrator of charitable organizations, preservationist, and activist who also helped save Carnegie Hall.

  Foreword to The Death and Life of Great American Cities

  * * *

  MODERN LIBRARY EDITION, OCTOBER 1992

  When I began work on this book in 1958, I expected merely to describe the civilizing and enjoyable services that good city street life casually provides—and to deplore planning fads and architectural fashions that were expunging these necessities and charms instead of helping to strengthen them. Some of Part One of this book: that’s all I intended.

  But learning and thinking about city streets and the trickiness of city parks launched me into an unexpected treasure hunt. I quickly found that the valuables in plain sight—streets and parks—were intimately mingled with clues and keys to other peculiarities of cities. Thus one discovery led to another, then another….Some of the findings from the hunt fill the rest of this book. Others, as they turned up, have gone into four further books. Obviously, this book exerted an influence on me, and lured me into my subsequent life’s work. But has it been influential otherwise? My own appraisal is yes and no.It is not easy for uncredentialed people to stand up to the credentialed, even when the so-called expertise is grounded in ignorance and folly.

  Some people prefer doing their workaday errands on foot, or feel they would like to if they lived in a place where they could. Other people prefer hopping into the car to do errands, or would like to if they had a car. In the old days, before automobiles, some people liked ordering up carriages or sedan chairs and many wished they could. But as we know from novels, biographies, and legends, some people whose social positions required them to ride—except for rural rambles—wistfully peered out at passing street scenes and longed to participate in their camaraderie, bustle, and promises of surprise and adventure.

  In a kind of shorthand, we can speak of foot people and car people. This book was instantly understood by foot people, both actual and wishful. They recognized that what it said jibed with their own enjoyment, concerns, and experiences, which is hardly surprising, since much of the book’s information came from observing and listening to foot people. They were collaborators in the research. Then, reciprocally, the book collaborated with foot people by giving legitimacy to what they already knew for themselves. Experts of the time did not respect what foot people knew and valued. They were deemed old-fashioned and selfish—troublesome sand in the wheels of progress. It is not easy for uncredentialed people to stand up to the credentialed, even when the so-called expertise is grounded in ignorance and folly. This book turned out to be helpful ammunition against such experts. But it is less accurate to call this effect “influence” than to see it as corroborati
on and collaboration. Conversely, the book neither collaborated with car people nor had an influence on them. It still does not, as far as I can see.

  The case of students of city planning and architecture is similarly mixed, but with special oddities. At the time of the book’s publication, no matter whether the students were foot or car people by experience and temperament, they were being rigorously trained as anticity and antistreet designers and planners: trained as if they were fanatic car people and so was everybody else. Their teachers had been trained or indoctrinated that way too. So in effect, the whole establishment concerned with the physical form of cities (including bankers, developers, and politicians who had assimilated the planning and architectural visions and theories) acted as gatekeepers protecting forms and visions inimical to city life. However, among architectural students especially, and to some extent among planning students, there were foot people. To them, the book made sense. Their teachers (though not all) tended to consider it trash or “bitter, coffee-house rambling” as one planner put it.*1 Yet the book, curiously enough, found its way onto required or optional reading lists—sometimes, I suspect, to arm students with awareness of the benighted ideas they would be up against as practitioners. Indeed, one university teacher told me just that. But for foot people among students, the book was subversive. Of course their subversion was by no means all my doing. Other authors and researchers—notably William H. Whyte—were also exposing the unworkability and joylessness of anticity visions. In London, editors and writers of The Architectural Review were already up to the same thing in the mid-1950s.*2