Insolent Chariots

Martin Harris

Martin Harris lives in Brandon, VT. He is an architect, and a property rights and education advocate.

As the first Rutland (VT) automobile parking deck, built 30 years ago in a downtown-revitalization campaign by city and state planners, went under the wrecker’s ball into oblivion last week, I was reminded that, for almost as long as there have been cars, there have been planners complaining about them. Typical was John Keats, writing, back in the ‘60’s, an anti-POV (privately-owned-vehicle) commentary whose focus can be gauged by the title: “Insolent Chariots.” His argument was and is a familiar one: that POV’s, through their demands for travel and parking pavement, were destroying cities, countryside, the landscape, the environment, social conventions, and so on. Keats is pretty much forgotten today, but his arguments--fewer POV’s, more public transit and walking--live on, and are constantly recycled by younger generations of planners, environmentalists, and social activists.

Then and now (a new “Transit Center” supposedly replaces the old deck, with the added fillip of a very small bus terminal) the logic of downtown parking remains more an article of faith than of reason. After all, if you have a 19th century downtown (basically designed on the medieval European model of streets for pedestrian workers and the occasional mounted noble) like Rutland, and most American cities, you’re going to have traffic congestion simply because so many of the workers and nobles now have cars and, being Americans under it all, like to drive themselves in their cars to as close to their destinations as they can get. Therefore, when planners deploy their inimitable planning skills (and grant-writing prowess) to build vehicular parking in the heart of the downtown, they’re ensuring continuing congestion as all the drivers are enticed to try to maneuver to and from whatever has been built for their POV’s. In terms of solving the congestion problem, it doesn’t work very well: it can’t.

A more logical strategy (rejected at Rutland, but in place at Montpelier) is to furnish ample parking spaces on the perimeter of the Central Business District (CBD in planners’ lingo) and offer mini-bus transit, preferably frequent and free, between the parking spaces and the downtown core. At least, such a strategy, if it works, reduces CBD vehicle congestion because those who wish to go there have already been pedestrianized. Presumably, they’ve been enticed out of their POV’s on the CBD perimeter by a well-designed taxpayer investment in a park-and-ride system which, although it will invariably be a money-loser, can be argued to have intangible benefits in improving CBD livability for those desiring to, or obliged to, go there.

Thirty years before Keats, architect Frank Lloyd Wright also wrote (and drew) about POV’s. Instead of discouraging or banning them, however, he proposed that modern American cities be redesigned for modern American mobility. In 1932, he wrote The Disappearing City but Americans weren’t paying attention because most of them were still POV-less urbanites. The nation had gone majority-urban just prior to the 1920 Census, which duly recorded the statistical event, but most of the new urbanites were not yet car-owners, and, except for a higher-income rail-commuter class, could foresee no other future than streetcars, buses, elevated railroads, and subways. Besides, there was a Depression on. In 1945 he wrote When Democracy Builds, but Americans again paid little attention: they were busy packing for the escape to the new suburbs which began as soon as WWII ended and the GIs came home. In the Levittowns that sprang up across the land, tenant pedestrians became POV-owning landowners. In 1958 Wright tried again, writing The Living City on the same theme: creating multiple Broadacre Cities, sloganized in the website as “Wright’s answer to urbanization.” Here’s a more detailed description:

. . . a master plan for ideal communities, located away from large cities, viewed from Wright as unfit for human habitation. . . . Broadacre City combined social ideas and values with contemporary concerns about technology. . . a reverence for nature around which to center a way of life, as opposed to the imperatives of the social planners . . .

would result in low-density, heavily treed and lawned semi-urbanization, built around citizen freedom of movement and widespread American ambitions for as rural an environment as they could afford to move into. Henry Ford and Robert Moses understood. Lewis Mumford mostly didn’t. Jane Jacobs, not at all.

When asked, modern planners identify with Keats, not Wright, even though the vast majority of the American public identifies with Wright and not Keats. For the last half-century the middle-class has been voting with its feet for decentralized suburbia, but planners call it “sprawl” and push for “smart-growth” and The New Urbanism. Public acceptance is, on balance, less than enthusiastic. But planners are determined to save the cities, and have been building downtown parking structures to attract POV drivers voluntarily while doing their best to keep business downtown involuntarily. As Wright predicted, it doesn’t work very well, which explains why Rutland City’s first downtown parking deck has just been torn down, while customer resistance to its replacement “Transit Center” threatens its own economic future. Doubtless, government will continue to pursue its urban-core policy for its subject citizens, but it’s interesting that the State Environmental Court opted for a suburban location (Town of Berlin) rather than downtown Montpelier for its own new quarters. Apparently, govemment employees are like ordinary folks: they’d prefer to drive to work and park their POV’s near their jobs in a low-density urban environment: Broadacre City by another name.

As befits a State Capital, presumably blessed with more planning talent than an outlying city like Rutland might attract, Montpelier offers state-of-the-art POV planning: spacious free parking on the perimeter of the CBD and free mini-bus service downtown and back out at frequent intervals. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work because it doesn’t have customer appeal: I’ve used it numbers of times and was always the only passenger on the bus, which perhaps explains why such vehicles are invariably equipped with dark-tinted windows quite capable of concealing the absence of ridership within as they make their perimeter-to-core-and-back circuits all day and into the night. I know FLW  (Frank Lloyd Wright) was a nutty-looking guy with imperious manner, broad-brimmed black hat and voluminous cape, but he accurately foresaw and designed what Americans want. Question: Why do planners ignore him?     *

“Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.” –George Washington