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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 29, 2012
Making cars visible
Thought for the day: The railways were built by robber barons, i.e. capitalists. The highway systems were built by politicians. Henry Ford was depending, from the beginning, on the government to supply roads and parking spaces for his vehicles.The statement above is a truly reckless caricature of the actual history. But note, I have presented it as any caricature: to find an angle at which light may penetrate a complex reality. "First simplify, then exaggerate," as the old style book of The Economist magazine counselled. For if you don't, you can make no sense of anything. In fact, the robber barons could not have built their railroads except on land, and they depended heavily on land grants from the usual, inevitably corrupt, political sources. There is no large infrastructural project in history, known to me, that did not require main force to be accomplished. That applies to the Internet, too, incidentally, though its roads were cut through electronic space. And it was partly from reaction to the corruption, that governments took over the highway-building business - typically solving a problem by enhancing it. Those roads were built for everyone to use, or more precisely, everyone with a car, bus, or truck. By today we have reached the point where money is impounded, by tax and otherwise, to provide infrastructure directly to capitalist developments, for the sake of generating jobs and raising more tax revenue. Notice the progression. The robber barons at least had to build the roads for their carriages. The auto barons could expect the government to provide this service, at general taxpayer expense. And now the mall barons expect the government to run infrastructure right to the entrances of their vast parking lots - the very size of these lots stipulated in turn by planning and zoning formulae. It is one big, integrated, public-private monster, in which the risks attendant on all human enterprise have been bureaucratically diffused. My background loathing of ugliness comes into this, but my column today is more immediately inspired by the reading of an article by the superb hack journalist, Dave Gardetta, from the city magazine, Los Angeles. Starting from an explanation of how the Disney Hall's seasonal schedule was dictated by the cost of its parking garage, Gardetta explores the whole neglected history of parking spaces. By the end, we are offered an astonishing vista of sprawling Los Angeles (or by analogy, other cities), shaped by public policy toward parking spaces. And not only the sprawl, but so much violently irrational human behaviour is explained in passing. To say nothing of the environmental implications. Embedded in the article is this memorable observation from Rick Cole, the former mayor of Pasadena: "For 5,000 years we built cities around people, and they worked well. For 50 years we've built them around the parking lot - a ridiculous use of land, of money, and an intrusion into the intimacy of human scale." We're at a dead end. How to return to the pedestrian status quo ante? The way there, according to Donald Shoup, who may be the world's leading authority on urban parking arrangements, might be as simple as deleting all municipal regulations which specify how many parking spaces each private development must supply. Instead, leave parking naked to market forces, and its true cost will soon emerge, creating denser urban environments like Manhattan, where you can't park your car, so there's little point in owning one. While I love to ponder simple solutions, and quick fixes, I don't actually believe in them, and there are of course many more marbles in play. Cities that have adapted to cars over decades would anyway require decades to re-adapt to people. And what was painful moving forward will be painful moving back. But again: the purpose of this exercise is not to fix the mess, but to shine light into it. The railways weren't especially pretty, but they did get you roughly from A to B, and you could walk the rest of the way. Cars eliminate this walking, but while making a destination more accessible, they destroy almost everything that made it worth visiting. By putting every traveller in a heavy metal box, they atomize society, and obviate community. These are not minor criticisms. Meanwhile we must work to pay for things like cars - adding quite visibly to the invisible costs. And in the twilight between visible and invisible, we begin to descry the extraordinary matrix of bureaucracy which we have engendered to diffuse and redistribute those costs. Solutions to any problem begin with making them visible. And this in turn requires a conscious effort, to overcome the myopias that blind us to things as they really are. Often the hardest thing to see is our own moral failure: the way we ourselves incrementally ceded our capacity as moral agents to governments and corporations, in the course of becoming consumers of an illusory "easy life." But that isn't to discount piecemeal solutions. And that takes us back to our robber barons. Let those who really want something, pay for it, as close as can be pushed to full market value. Let those who don't want it, not pay. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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