by Joel Garreau
However, there are reasons to believe that the demographic underpinnings of our newest traffic jams are cresting. And fixes do exist to improve traffic flow somewhat.
The best news for the future of traffic in America is that it is not humanly possible to increase the number of cars on the road at the same rate as in the past. Their number is approaching the saturation point. There are already 19 percent more legally registered motor vehicles in this country than there are licensed drivers. The boom in new drivers has also peaked. The Census is expected to find only four states in the Union—each in the Southwest—with more people eighteen to twenty-four-years old than a decade before. There are not many more women who can work, who want to work, who do not already work.
Typical commutes are becoming shorter, insists Alan Pisarski, author of Commuting in America. To be sure, contradictory forces are at work. There are “supercommuters,” who travel more than a hundred miles round trip in search of low housing prices or country spreads. But fewer than 4 percent of all work trips are more than thirty miles. Most commonly, they are under ten miles. People typically took 21.7 minutes to get to work in 1980. The new Census number will probably be closer to twenty minutes, Pisarski believes. That is because of Edge City. Commutes to Edge City are two-thirds the typical commute to the old downtown; jobs in Edge City are closer to the homes of the middle class than at any time since World War II.
If these statistics seem hard to believe, it is because the stress of driving is going up. In the past twenty years, highway travel has risen 69 percent and capital spending on bridges and highways has fallen 38 percent. There is a huge supply of urban activists, environmentalists, planners, and not-in-my-back-yard subdivision residents who have enforced this trend. They have the quaint notion that it is more important to create neighborhoods that are attractive for people to stay in and enjoy than it is to pave them so that people can rapidly go somewhere else. We once built highways the way the pharaohs built Pyramids. Now we have stopped. This is a genuine threat to the future of the automobile, the undermining of its advantage in terms of choice and time. And there is no absolute solution to this problem. In a popular location, any improvement in traffic flow is probably temporary. The more capacity you add, the more likely you are to make the place more popular, attracting more development, thereby attracting more business, and creating more traffic.
But there are ways of ameliorating this situation some. Each is part of a simple combination: squeeze a little more capacity out of existing roads; decrease demand. None is overwhelmingly important in itself, but together they can amount to a fair improvement. These methods include: creating special car-pool lanes; transforming highway shoulders into travel lanes; squeezing an extra lane into the travel path by reducing the width of every lane from twelve feet to eleven; metering on-ramps to spread out and speed up the flow; creating transportation management authorities to coordinate ride sharing and the shifting of corporate work hours, allowing flex time arrangements that let people go to and from work earlier or later than normal; and legalizing jitneys to allow a kind of private-enterprise minibus to deliver multiple passengers door to door. Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institution, who has long studied Edge Cities, thinks the answer is to buy a good car stereo and commute with someone you love. The Japanese are showing the prototypes of single-passenger cars that are half as wide as normal cars, meaning that you can get twice as many of them in a lane. Then there are the high-tech solutions. Build intelligent freeways that let drivers know where traffic tie-ups are and how to avoid them. Onboard navigation computers have been sold in Japan and Europe for several years. A project in California proposes equipping cars with radar and computerizing the highways so that vehicles could zip along at sixty miles per hour, three feet apart. The problem? If something ever went wrong, the liability lawyers would devour every single individual and government unfortunate enough to survive the pile-up.
But the best bet is probably the one we are engaged in right now: building Edge City. It is a world that does not deny the automobile, but at the same time increases density, putting everything a person desires as close as possible to his house while reducing the number of different places he has to park in order to go about his affairs.
Three quarters of all car trips are not commutes to work. They involve tending to the effluvia of life. The proof of all this is Los Angeles, the great-granddaddy of Edge Cities. Californians now actually consume less gasoline per person than the national average. They also require fewer cars per capita than people in other big states like Texas and Florida. And their typical commute is under ten miles—the same as the national average.
Just about everybody who looks seriously at the problem of traffic ends up thinking that the answer is to raise the cost of driving. Ray Watson, the first planner of Irvine, California, the largest Edge City created by one corporation, points out that if we merely increased the occupancy of the average car from today’s 1.23 people to 1.77 people, we would have more road capacity than we would ever need. He believes that a serious tax on gasoline is necessary and inescapable. He thinks a few presidents of the United States may lose re-election before we come to accept that. But he believes it inevitable. He further insists that when it happens, it is important not to shield the poor from the effect of that tax. It is they who are the most likely candidates to switch to car pools and mass transit, he reasons, so in the war against traffic, the first casualty must be egalitarianism.
Cervero of Berkeley also thinks that the biggest problem of the automobile is not the car itself but the lack of appropriate price clues. We think that roads are free, and we use them with abandon. He sees the solution as pricing the automobile “realistically.”
That may involve putting tolls on the most congested roads in order to let the market allocate that scarce resource, especially at rush hour. Put a sticker on every bumper. Let it resemble the parallel bars of the Universal Product Code on every cereal box. Station a laser reader on the roadside. Every time it reads the presence of my bumper, let my Visa card be charged. Let those who most use and most value these public road spaces be charged the most amount of money. Transfer the proceeds to whichever additional transit schemes the electorate thinks best: freeways, railroads, buses.
Of course, the problem with other transit systems is that no matter how much we subsidize them, they remain mass transit. The cheapest and most flexible form is buses in special high-occupancy-vehicle lanes. But there is something about buses we hate. “Show me a man over thirty who regularly takes the bus, and I will show you a life failure,” said one senior mass transit official who obviously wished to remain anonymous. Buses feature the fewest cubic feet of elbow room per passenger of any transportation mode in this century, with the possible exception of the New York-to-Washington air shuttle. Because they have to make so many stops, and frequently have roundabout routes, they are often slower even than bumper-to-bumper traffic. Their ambiance is that of a public washroom. Buses are those contrivances onto which affluent people would like to force everybody else—in order to make it easier for them to drive.
Trains, by contrast, can be charming. They can offer the leg room of a limousine. They can include sleeping cars and restaurants with fine china, if we choose. But the economics of commuter trains are maddening. There is not thought to be a single commuter rail system in the United States that manages even to meet its expenses out of the farebox. They need subsidies just to move, no less to lay track. A new rail car costs a million dollars. If you could attract a hundred passengers into it each rush hour, it would still cost $10,000 per person for the rolling stock—the price of a decent automobile. And that’s before you go to General Electric or General Motors and pay up to $4 million for a locomotive. Nor does it count the cost of the track, or the land under the track, or the power guides over the track, or the electrified third rails in the middle of the track, or the building of stations, or maintenance, or fuel, or the cost of a driver for the train, or of conductors
and guards. One train set is lucky to make two trips in the right direction per rush hour. These trains carry a heavy load four hours a day, five days a week. Not much time to make up your costs. Nor is the system adaptive. If the driver goes on strike, the system dies. If key equipment fails, so does the system. Because you have to wait at the platform for the train to come, and then sit through all its interminable stops, on a door-to-door basis, commuter rail generally has an average speed lower than that of automobiles in rush hour. Then you get to your office and are stuck without the flexibility of a car. If you need to drop the kids off at the day-care center, or pick up some groceries on the way home, or make a sales call during the day, or go to a meeting some distance away, you have a problem. That is not trivial. There is now usually a third rush hour in Edge City—lunch. Nor is it easy to run trains in the spiderweb pattern of Edge City. Nor is it easy to relay track when development patterns change. No wonder forecasts for recent light-rail projects turned out to be wildly off the mark. They overestimated ridership and underestimated cost by a combined factor of from 200 to 400 percent. An Edge City is thought to need a stunning thirty million square feet of office space—equivalent to downtown Dallas—to justify a new rapid transit train system. None of them is that big yet. A merely huge fifteen million square feet—the size of downtown New Orleans—is thought to be required to make new light rail cost effective.* This is why commuter rail is so frustratingly difficult to justify as a transportation solution. The alternatives have to be pretty wretched to make the calculations work. The air quality has to be utterly desolate, and automobile traffic impossibly congested, and the cost of land for additional lanes of freeway prohibitively expensive, or rail comes a cropper.
Even traditional arguments for the train are facing new competition. Remember the idea that people waste less time on trains, because they can read or work or sleep? Books on tape, concert-quality car stereos, car phones, portable fax machines, and lap-top computers all are making car time more productive. Refrigerators and beds have been in vans for decades. Now there is serious talk of cars with microwaves so that you can start thawing dinner.
But this all focuses on trains as transportation devices. There may be a stronger argument for them than that. Maybe they should be subsidized because they bring civilization. The logic goes like this. A train station invariably results in a knot of dense development. That is because every builder wants to be able to charge high rents by saying his property is within walking distance of that station. Now, as a matter of fact, the vast majority of all people will continue to arrive at such a rail-served Edge City by car. Even in a building directly over the tracks, 90 percent of all office workers will demand parking. But so what? By building the train station, you have convinced people to build unusually high and walkable densities. This density, in turn, serves the purposes of creating civilization in the form of restaurants and bookstores and the like. This civilization, in turn, gives that particular Edge City a blessed competitive advantage. This increases property values. Therefore, a strong fairness case can be made that some of the money should be kicked back to the train.
But these are not major twists. The fact is, the technologies for moving humans have pretty much hit a dead end. Rocket-planes may someday allow the wealthy to get from New York to Tokyo in short order. Magnetic levitation may allow trains to move as fast as a DC-3. But these incremental improvements are not likely to change most people’s lives. Would they even be as much of a rumble as the creation of Federal Express? Few seers seem to think so.
No, the final frontier, as Captain Kirk used to say, would appear to be—the “dematerializing technologies.” These are emerging technologies so revolutionary we still don’t usually understand them for what they really are—which is a new kind of transportation method.
There is no one who is truly suggesting that humans will be turned into Star Trek-like ions, to boldly go to some location where no man has gone before. At least not in the reasonably foreseeable future.
But still … But still …
Consider the lowly facsimile machine. You stick a piece of paper into it in Detroit. The machine subtracts the paper. It moves everything important about that paper across a wire. At the other end—Stuttgart, perhaps—it adds the paper back. It functionally rematerializes the original dematerialized document.
Have you not, for practical purposes, just transported this piece of paper? You have certainly replaced a whole bunch of motorcycle messengers, mail trucks, and overnight cargo air planes. That is the essence of the dematerializing technologies. They are what we used to think of as communications devices. But they have become so advanced that they are now backing out the physical movement of objects; hence, they have become a transportation breakthrough.
Since cities are formed by the state-of-the-art transportation device of the time, the dematerializing technologies would appear to be the next shaper of our cities.
When you start looking around, you realize that a lot of things are routinely being dematerialized these days. A newspaper published by the Detroit Free Press or the Detroit News, for example, makes the first twenty-two miles of its trip to a distant subscriber dematerialized. A page made up at the papers’ headquarters is scanned by laser and transformed into computer code that is then transmitted to Sterling Heights over regular telephone lines. There it drives a machine that burns a negative that is transformed into plates that are slapped onto the presses. The transmission takes less than two minutes. In effect, that Sterling Heights plant is where the paper is materializing.
You can dematerialize a door. Suppose you want a fancy one—special height, width, glass, carvings. Right now, a distant manufacturer with special capabilities is probably your source. After meeting your peculiar specifications, he puts the door on a truck to ship it a thousand miles. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Say the manufacturer is using computer-driven machine tools. If a shop close to you is similarly equipped, it could easily make the same door—if it knew how. The answer might be to pay the fancy specialty-door maker to transmit the information that sets up the local shop’s computerized tools. Then let the local shop make the door. Presto. No long truck trip.
You can dematerialize humans, after a fashion. The more people do their work in front of computer screens, the more corporations realize that they do not need to transport all their employees to expensive central locations. They can let the humans labor near where they live, and electronically transport their work, instead.
Take the Ford Parts and Service Division. It is headquartered in an Edge City in Dearborn. But Ford wanted to locate some jobs in the old downtown, at least partially to demonstrate its civic commitment. So Parts and Services in 1990 moved its Customer Assistance Center to a remote location—the high-rise, riverfront, downtown Renaissance Center. That detachment is linked to the rest of the company by PROFS, Ford’s worldwide computer network. For those people who work there and also live in Detroit, the relocating of their jobs to Renaissance Center has effectively caused them to be dematerialized. They do not have to commute to Dearborn. Their work is shipped on a wire, and they are removed from the freeway.
The implications of these dematerializing technologies are staggering. Their very purpose is to make distance irrelevant. When you start thinking of the potential of these technologies, you begin to wonder why we build any kind of cities at all, Edge or otherwise. The key determinants in real estate have always been location, location, and location. But the point of these machines is to make location meaningless. We used to say that somebody lived an hour away from us. Now we say he lives an hour ahead of us. With enough computers and telephone lines, should it not be possible to remove ourselves each to our own mountaintop, never to come together again except electronically?
The answer, mercifully, is no. Too lonely. To the extent that dematerializing technologies make distance irrelevant, they allow other values to come to the fore. As a result, an ancient one now looms newly large in a way that is h
eart-warming and reassuring. Humans, as it turns out, really are social animals. They like to be with other humans. In the last few decades it was ballyhooed that everybody would soon live and work in electronic cottages, linked only by computer bulletin boards and fax machines. Hasn’t happened. Computer industry analysts now think that no more than 3 to 5 percent of all workers will ever be permanently home-based. People may use their home offices to work on nights or weekends, or to start up businesses on the side. Women who are pregnant or families with young children will continue to find home offices a godsend—allowing them to keep in touch with work without losing touch with the kids. But it turns out there’s a real problem with working at home all the time. It is just as Finn Caspersen of Beneficial Corporation at New Jersey’s 287 and 78 maintained: electronics do not provide the kind of connectedness with other people we get from face-to-face contact.
In fact, it seems that the more cleverness-based and computerized our world becomes, the more we require face-to-face contact. For the most valuable kind of information may be inherently uncomputerizable—because it is ambiguous. Take the question “Can I trust this guy?” Very difficult to establish that over a telephone or a computer.
Or take the creative cross-fertilization that routinely occurs in those wildly undervalued sessions known as “schmoozing” or “B.S.-ing around the water cooler.” In those encounters, one person says to a second, “What are you working on?”; a third adds, “Did you know Sarah was doing something on that?”; a fourth says, “Did you think of trying it this way?”; and a fifth says, “I know somebody you’ve got to talk to; I’ll call you with the number.”
The entire exchange takes two minutes, yet it may be the most productive encounter of the entire day for everybody involved. What’s more, the smaller your enterprise, the less likely you are to gain this sort of unplanned, unplannable, serendipitous cross-fertilization in the halls of your own office. This was pointed out by Edwin S. Mills of Northwestern University in a ground-breaking analysis of ambiguous information.