Each Monday the Franklin Blvd. landscaping crews are already out, and they post their sign near where I board Franklin:
I believe they are missing an "R" in the word landscapers -- It should read "Landscrapers Ahead," because for the next five miles landscrapers are the only things on either side of the boulevard. Miles of suburban sprawl in both directions, sprawl that had scraped the land from any previous agriculture or open space value. No more migratory birds. No more burrowing owls. No more Elk, and no more Groves. Franklin Blvd. runs down the middle of former ag land that had no trees, no boulders, no hills and no major creeks or rivers -- it was a developer's paradise. Instead of building up (skyscrapers) we built out (landscrapers).
My few visits to Western Europe made it clear that they have preserved their countryside while at the same time expanded their populations. Even while America stayed busy bulldozing ever larger swaths of land for collector roads and low density suburban living, Europe found ways to build cities that built up and out, instead of just out...the consequence of which preserves their surrounding lands as rural.
Perhaps Americans never learned to do this because our cities were built at roughly the same time as industrialization, and our initial suburban build-outs were intended to get people away from the industries that plagued the cities. European cities were developed centuries before, and so were better established with compact living arrangements that remain to this day, arrangements that need much less external energy to sustain.
I don't really know the true causes of suburbanization; I wasn't around when this shit started. But I'm currently living in the suburban peak, and what I do know is that our landscrapers require an immense volume of energy to build, to maintain, and to live in. The energy used to perpetually motor the kids to school ('cause it's too far to walk and too dangerous in any event), to perpetually motor to work ('cause we separate land uses), and to perpetually motor for recreation ('cause our cities are so fucking boring that we holiday at theme parks) is stunning. Every Monday morning, the landscaping crew drives in from elsewheres and mows the Franklin grass using heroic volumes of energy. There are dozens of miles of collector road grass strips in this city that have to be serviced...these are our public realms...the realms that the public doesn't even use. They only see it as they drive by. What, you think some family's gonna picnic on the grassy berm next to all that commuter traffic?
The grass is mowed and no one uses it.
2 comments:
There is plenty of blame to spread around.
One place to start is with the former Big Three. Going back to the immediate post WWII era few people remember (know?) that GM bought out many local street car operations.
Their goal - get people off the street cars and in the cars. It worked.
It took us 65 years to get to this point and sadly another 65 or so to dig out of this mess.
I spent one fantastic day in May of this year in Dusseldorf, Germany with the sole intention of seeing the city by transit.
I went everywhere. I saw everything.
A fantastic network of both bus and streetcar (actually, more like light rail), serving a city that built nearly everything with six-stories -- not so high that the density gives it a congested feel, but not so low as to give it a ghost town feel. A great mix of both up and out with a population density sufficient to provide for transit for everyone.
These "street cars" really, really, connect people to everything with such a stunning level of service and with a fair degree of quiet-ness -- they weren't at all like the noisy affairs of my own Sacramento area light rail trains.
I, too, wonder about 65 years from now. I won't be around but I'm wondering -- what will my City of Elk Grove look like -- five times as spread out? There is no indication that it won't be...which is exactly why I regard myself as hopeful for some really bad shit to happen to force us to change our land use patterns. I believe that's the only thing that could work to change us; we've already committed to the continuation of our suburban buildout when our green shoots of recovery grow into small trees.
What sorts of bad things? Well, perhaps traffic so insanely bad we demand better places. A population so fat we demand more walkable environments. Resource scarcities, either political and/or actual shortages, that accentuate how utterly dependent on external energy we are. Perhaps a depression.
I would think that unless something bad happens we're just going to blindly try to convert our entire energy intensive lifestyle to battery this and hybrid that and windpower this and solar that while not addressing the underlying madness of powering all this shit with low-density energy sources. If my Highway 99 is instead filled with 85,000 daily batterized Chevrolet Volts or Oldsmobile Ohms instead of gasoline powered cars, we really wouldn't have changed shit.
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