People should always take priority over cars.
While this seems like a no-brainer, many American cities have it the other way around. In Doraville, Ga., an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous lower-income community, pedestrians’ safety is neglected. Buford Highway, the community’s main commercial hub, is notorious for its fatal traffic accidents. “For decades,” writes Thomas Wheatley in Axios, “traffic planners have prioritized the speed of automobiles over the safety of pedestrians on Buford Highway. Doraville has seen more than 30 crashes involving pedestrians over the past five years.”
Some municipalities have attempted to design communities such that their residents can traverse the sidewalks without the fear of two-ton steel contraptions zipping by. Culdesac Tempe, a “car-free rental apartment community” in Tempe, Ariz., is paving the way for a new kind of lifestyle.
This little experimental neighborhood in the desert is car-free and completely walkable. That’s right, in Culdesac, there is absolutely no residential parking. Rather, people walk and bike to where they need to go. There are also discounts on ride-sharing apps and free rides on the metro. Culdesac is replete with various shared spaces: coffee shops, picnic parks, dog parks, and a community pool. And everything is within walking or biking distance.
With its New Urbanist touches, that creates a people-friendly environment conducive to social connection. People see their neighbors on the street and wave to them. Even better, as Robert Steuteville writes in Public Square, “residents hold an outdoor monthly barbeque.”
If you live in New York City, as I do, all of this is completely foreign. In the Big Apple, we have developed a hardened and fundamentally distrustful disposition. When we walk down the street, we turn off our peripheral vision and focus only on the destination, never the journey. The idea of waving to a perfect stranger is risible. And in Midtown, where I work, it’s a miracle that there aren’t more accidents: Cars whiz by in a mad rush to beat the yellow light, riders on motorized bikes go against traffic rules, and pedestrians seem to have adopted the mindset of pigeons, blatantly ignoring don’t-walk signals.
Environment affects behavior. Developers influenced by New Urbanist principles understand this well. Americans would do well to take a step back and reassess what our priorities should be as community members: people or cars?
Some politicians have taken an interest in walkable cities. Earlier this year, in a discussion on housing policies at the National Governors Association, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum remarked that “we’ve built cities all over America that are designed for automobiles and not designed for people.” This is a fundamentally communitarian sentiment, and one that we should take seriously.