The Erosion of Cities or The Attrition of Automobiles -- Jane Jacobs

As mentioned, I am out-of-town, so my posting will be intermittent and not as thoughtful as I'd wish. 

streetsblog.org

In previous posts, I have talked about the 'perpetual cycle' that is created when attempting to increase mobility via private automobile. Cars beget cars.

In her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs -- amateur-activist-turned-urban-guru/prophet, whom I shall talk about much more -- has a chapter entitled 'Erosion of Cities or Attrition of Automobiles':

Today, everyone who values cities is disturbed by automobiles.

Traffic arteries, along with parking lots, gas stations and drive-ins, are powerful and insistent instruments of city destruction. To accommodate them, city streets are broken down into loose sprawls, incoherent and vacuous for anyone afoot... City character is blurred until every place becomes more like every other place, all adding up to Noplace. 

 Noplace.

Keep in mind that this was published in 1961 -- that's 50 years ago.

Too much dependence on private automobiles and [emphasis added] city concentration of use are incompatible. One or the other has to give... Depending on which pressure wins most of the victories, one of the two processes occurs: erosion of cities by automobiles, or attrition of the automobiles by cities.

...

Erosion of cities by automobiles entails so familiar a series of events that these hardly need describing... Because of vehicular congestion, a street is widened here, another is straightened there, a wide avenue is converted to one-way flow, staggered-signal systems are installed for faster movement, a bridge is double-decked as [etc.]... More and more land goes into parking...

No one step in the process is, in itself, crucial. But... each step, while not crucial in itself, is crucial in the sense that it not only adds its own bit to the total change, but actually accelerates the process. Erosion of cities by automobiles is thus an example of what is known as "positive feedback." In the case of positive feedback, an action produces a reaction which in turn intensifies the condition responsible for the first action. This intensifies the need for repeating the first action, which in turn intensifies the reaction, and so on, ad infinitum. It is something like the grip of a habit-forming addiction.

 LA - famous junky.

Anyways, I just wanted to share that, as someone interested in such matters, I have come to understand this phenomenon (which is not readily available in the literature) a mere 5 decades after someone published a book telling of such things.

Today, any traffic engineer or city planner would be considered radical, innovative, and -- usually -- very unpopular should he/she suggest and act on such wisdom.

--

Related: Expanding roadways = urban laxatives