A CONNECTION BETWEEN ROADS AND OUR TOWNS
The road is an element of city planning as old as civilization itself. It originated as tow paths dividing village huts, foot paths through jungles and forests cleared to ensure safe passage from one location to another for commercial trade, and from agriculturally rich areas to populated centers. Cities have evolved extensively through out civilization but the basic principals remain for roads. Within populated regions smaller roads and sidewalks provide separation of uses as well as direct paths to intra-city destinations, populated regions are connected via arterial roads and freeways, and agriculture hubs are connected to their distribution and urban destinations through interstate highways. From ancient Rome to Industrial Paris and even to today’s suburban centric culture the road has been as important of a component as any zoning, architectural, or engineering decision. The differences we see from antiquity to pre-auto and post-auto city planning are not a variance in the basic functions of roads but instead in the prioritization of the three fundamental transportation purposes.
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TOO FAR NOTH ING AROU ND HERE IM NOT WALK ING THER ELET SOR DERI NIDO NTWA NTTH EKID SWAL KING TOWO RK IAM TIRE DOF SPEN DING MYP AYCH ECKO NGAS
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It begins with tow paths or in the modern era the local road and sidewalk. In the era of the subdivision, neighborhoods have taken on the identity of former villages and towns. Several examples in Northern Virginia can be dizzying, Braemar (Manassas, VA) is a massive subdivision which bears its own local identity with residents. While it remains an unincorporated region of Virginia, encompassed by Manassas as a whole, its shear size and acreage is equivalent to most European towns/walled cities and its population of over 2000 residents is typical of the same. So why aren’t areas like these incorporated townships or cities? In order to be a city or town, an area must have variant uses. A city is hardly just a population center, it is a location in which goods/services are traded commercially. Subdivisions, while populated, lack this essential component which makes creating a town/city financially possible (otherwise town and city functions could not be afforded without extensive local taxes). Instead these neo-villages arrange home owners association fees in order to pay for common functionality, and rely on county
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jurisdictions to assist with all other typical town/city actions. Because people cannot find a commercially viable service or trade within their own subdivision, the populated subdivision must be viewed as only a portion of the overall modern town/city, in the case of Braemar it would be Manassas. The problem arises in that the function of local tow paths have always been for the purpose of intra-city activity and the promotion of heavily travelled paths to become commercial active corridors, the idea of main street is as old as the original bazaars. In the era of subdivisions and the inability for a person to travel without a powered machine to the equivalent “main street”, now known as commercial business districts, town/city layouts now much incorporate minimum 4 lane roads for local paths within subdivisions, and 6 lane roads for inter-subdivision travel in order to provide for left turn, right turns, and sufficient safe through passage for vehicles. Markets, due to the congestion of these roads, now are located in “super centers” that are located for easy access from heavy freight trucks instead of located based on central resident access.
Because of the increase in size for local roads, the division between agricultural zone highways and local tow paths have become scrambled which has created the need for even wider road design, available paved shoulders, and screened right of ways that avoid direct access from homes. These design criteria only 30 years ago were reserved for only highways, but in the neo-village it is impossible to maintain a separation. The boundaries that are defined with the neo-village highway now counteract the original purpose of the intra-city road, to promote commercial trade of goods and services. The areas found between super centers/groceries and subdivisions is often a void zone, adjacent to wide roads with frequent truck traffic. Empirically we have now come to understand that the market does not see economic benefit from these formats except in the creation of strip malls, a format that creates massive parking regions in between super centers/groceries and houses in order to artificially stop the traveler.
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Bipedal The scale of all design elements in order to occupy, use, and house our vehicles for even simple intra-city travel shows the impact of subdivision design. This has hurt the idea of Main Street, now replaced by fast food pop-ups and gas stations. Main Street, the idea stores and restaurants lining a central corridor, cannot exist when one must find a place to park their vehicle and where trucks and through traffic endanger adults, children, and pets. It
isn’t that Americans have become lazier and can no longer walk the same as our grandparents and Europeans, it is that American towns have become too vast for residents to travel from home to Main Street. More important than just the shear distance, the American town now has created impassible obstacles and abandoned night time zones of strip malls, that promote blight and crime due to massive parking areas and poor surveillance.
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FROM THE FARM TO THE
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FROM THE FARM TO THE TABLE The original villages at the birth of civilization put people and markets together at the hearts of the population, converged on a main road, and spoked to the surrounding agricultural regions. Farm uses were therefore the only demands on these spoked roads and the farmers would only have a daily commute into town to sell foods and the daily commute out of town, returning with goods, money, etc. Trade from city to city was accomplished via separate travel ways that specifically connected regions via a trade route. In the neo-village model of subdivision development, the region between trade centers and farms have expanded exponentially with homes, forcing farms to be further and further from their consumers. Consequently, the cost of freight and the frequency of trips necessary have forced machine like efficiency in agricultural uses which now favors economy by scale operations instead of hard working entrepreneurs. The 3 axle flat bed has been replaced by the 18-wheeler causing an additional expansion in the amount of pavement needed for loading docks and operations. One of the biggest problems with creating dense Main Street developments has therefore become the lack of marketability for delivery of stock to stores/restaurants without excessive loading dock access ways in the rear. We must re-evaluate our farm practices to understand that food prices today have never been historically so low. The average American used 30% of their paycheck for food only half a century ago, today it is only 10%. While we no longer pay the high relative cost for food, we are paying additional taxes that go towards road repairs, lowering economic well being of small businesses, and paying more and more money towards oil subsidies and commodity security overseas. These are real costs that are delayed at the dinner table, but come out of our collective wallets every tax year.
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Beyond the collapse of the traditional farm, highways that once connected farms directly to distribution centers and town farmers markets now must be shared between commuters and agricultural use which has created far greater incidence rates for truck accidents and excessive maintenance costs for roadways. Truck corridors require far different design criteria for everything from slopes, expensive durable materials, noise reduction barriers, landscaped barriers for pollution, and of course pavement widths and on/off ramp turn radii. All of these elements has created a city land use system that has our DOTs as the number one land owners in every jurisdiction. In order to turn the tide we must return to the world of the greatest generation. A world of;
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THE REVERSE EFFECTS OF N I M B Y The birth of a suburb is far less miraculous than a city. No natural commodities are necessary, no ease of access to waterways, no particular resources for industry, and for the most part it is a zero risk growth. A developer is all but assured that by building adjacent to other similar units that they have foresight on what the market will pay and can judge the economics of the project accordingly. The suburb is, again, as old as civilization itself. For centuries some people have escaped the cramped and crowded city streets in order to live a bit off the beaten path, trading the comfort of access with the relative safety of seclusion.
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The evolution of the town has unbalanced the natural ratio, by making the ease of access temporarily lessened through the use of freeways in suburbs, it is eluded that travel from one region to another will always be quick. Soon the inducing of additional demand, the process of growing further and further out, creates more traffic than originally anticipated, requiring road widenings. In an interesting turn of events, it becomes those who originated the migration, outwards to the suburbs, that typically now stand against these road projects. They clearly would inherit all of the detriment to local businesses and accessibility (something that despite the neo-village model eventually occurs from redevelopment and the scavenging of properties) as well as pollution, congestion, and treatment of area as a through way to greater commercial prospects within the city. The inner suburbs see none of the improvements from the road projects, touted as congestion removal and increased access projects.
The signature piece of the Embarcadero Center by Architect and sculptor John C. Portman, Jr This stretch of bay frontage previously was buried under an elevated freeway, now it is the commercial heart of the city of San Francisco.
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Sadly, it starts from a mistaken ideology. By opposing the natural and slower redevelopment within their suburb, and higher density in commercial districts, they create an atmosphere in which land developers must look horizontally, instead of vertically, for new jobs and economic growth. The shift to look further out is encouraged by farther suburbs which need a growing population’s tax revenue to provide social services and jurisdictional functions. Rarely do these further suburbs need to aid in the maintenance and improvements of roads closer to the city of which they are the greatest population of users by total road miles.
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Roads have become massive barren lands 90% of the time in order for the flood of traffic to be accommodated every rush hour morning and evening. When the commuters are done travelling through the inner suburbs they sweep out like a tide eroding the commercial viability of the region, but unlike the tide they do not replenish the proverbial community shoreline by purchasing goods and services. The net effect is a city that retains its economic strength, a far suburb which retains a large tax base with little funding burdens, and an inner suburb which has been robbed of both population and jobs as it becomes a gap land of stagnation. When we began to redesign our communities to fit in line with a departure from civilization, we forgot all of the elements of humanity that we would stay
connected too. Unlike the self-sufficient farmer the majority of the world cannot sustain itself, it relies on the collective knowledge and skills of society for 100 different direct and indirect interactions every day. As we pulled apart the threads of what defined transportation and land use we found new challenges we had to accommodate, cheap food production and delivery requiring massive truck routes and loading facilities, increased lengths and areas of pavement that stretch far further and run empty most of the day to branch to more remote areas, and combined freight and commuter routes which created more accidents and more traffic are just a few of the challenges now faced.
We object to sprawl when it correct sa problem but not when it destroy s our natural surrou ndings PAGE 16
When we began to redesign our communities to fit in line with a departure from civilization, we forgot all of the elements of humanity that we would stay connected too. Unlike the selfsufficient farmer the majority of the world cannot sustain itself, it relies on the collective knowledge and skills of society for 100 different direct and indirect interactions every day. As we pulled apart the threads of what defined transportation and land use we found new challenges we had to accommodate, cheap food production and delivery requiring massive truck routes and loading facilities, increased lengths and areas of pavement that stretch far further and run empty most of the day to branch to more remote areas, and combined freight and commuter routes which created more accidents and more traffic are just a few of the challenges now faced.
To address our societies land use problems we must readdress the foundation of our planning decisions. Are we living more comfortable lives now that we live outside of cities? Our connection to our neighbors dwindles in the face of further isolation and separation as we
consign to our role of reluctant service users from ever consolidating providers. We must all sacrifice the immediate gratification of the cheapest product if it is provided at a reasonable price in a more local origin. While we pay 10 or 15% more in this method, we spend that additional money in our own backyards, which is returned more efficiently when our own services and skills are needed. The Main Street and the local mom and pop aren’t dead, we just need to stop making bad choices that kill them off. Small changes in design, a return to 10’ lanes that are design for cars not 18-wheelers, requiring concessions by freight users to utilize smaller delivery vehicles inside of inner suburbs, and a basic understanding that some reinvestment through new developments (specifically those that provide more housing options and quantities) is healthy. While mass transit helps connect cities and communities together, we all could solve the problems of land use by acting more like our grandparents generation, without a significant portion of the anticipated public funding need.
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