Cars, a love story: How building a robust public transportation network in Connecticut will save our marriage to the car (and help our budget crisis, too)
Connecticut is home to the oldest scenic parkway in the country. This is, in essence, where American car culture began. As a state we owe much of our growth to highways. Although Connecticut experienced rapid growth during the industrial revolution, even more explosive growth occurred with the advent of the automobile. Between 1945 and 1990, Connecticut’s population experienced an average 5% annual increase. We built-out our farms and forests, putting our money into vast networks of roads and streets. We did so with the hope that never ending growth would somehow fill already accumulating infrastructure deficits. Of course, the growth did come to an end. But the operations and maintenance of it all continues. And in 2018, Connecticut faced one of the worst fiscal crises in the nation.
From diners to drive-ins, Connecticut is rich in cultural resources defined by the automobile. For some, few activities are more enjoyable than a late summer evening drive along scenic roads. But as our growing infrastructure deficit needs spiral out of control, it’s clear that too much of anything is indeed a very bad thing.
We’re spending an inordinate amount of time and money on sustaining our love of cars. We accept bumper to bumper traffic and fatal car accidents as a cost of living. Instead of taking a step back as one might do in a responsible relationship, we’re gearing up to take on even more burden. We plan more infrastructure, more debt, more shared responsibility, and more liability. Even the transit-friendly Let’s Go CT plan includes billions for widening highways and state roads. Many of which run right through our neighborhood centers. We’ve become so attached to the car we can’t see we are burying ourselves in debt, destroying our neighborhoods, and polluting our air to no great benefit. The car cannot fulfill all of our transportation needs alone and we should not expect it to.
The transit vs. car dichotomy is an error in communication.
The perception that millennials and zoomers are completely abandoning the car in favor of shiny new buses and trains is not only wrong, it also creates an unnecessary battle.
We don’t need to abandon our cars, but we do need to find different ways to move so we don’t have to rely on them so much. Expanding highways does not relieve traffic congestion, it only creates more demand which in turn leads to more congestion. So how do we fix traffic? Instead of piling on more car-centric infrastructure, we need to call on some friends to lighten the load. We need to construct an alternative framework within and among our existing roads and highways.
This is where buses, trains, bikes, and sidewalks come in. Transportation alternatives are not an enemy to the car. On the contrary, public transportation and transportation alternatives might just save the car.
The fundamental problem with our love of the car is that, for those of us that use our cars on a daily basis, many of our wants and needs are antithetical to a good relationship with our cars. For those of us using cars regularly — we are the traffic we say we want to mitigate.
No one likes traffic. It eats our time and makes our heads spin. But traffic is what happens when we are entirely dependent on our cars to get around.
What happens when we demand more lanes and more roads without alternative transportation options? More developers and buyers take advantage of these expanded roadways and the newly accessible land nearby. Pretty soon there’s an application for a 75 unit subdivision that will decimate the woods behind your home, and the farm beyond that. Within a few years, there’s just as many traffic delays as there had been before we widened the road, if not more. We then widen our roads more to meet demand, which then encourages more sprawling development and more people driving in the area. While this cycle may have served our short term desires for privacy and access in the past, it is a losing strategy.
Infrastructure does not pay for itself. The development around a road contributes to its maintenance. But when a road and all its associated infrastructure (drainage, utilities, sewers, etc.) is surrounded by only a few, sprawling homes or businesses, the tax contribution of those pieces of land does not come close to paying the cost of road maintenance, especially on our widest roads (Strong Towns and Urban3 are both great sources for literature on this). So when we see traffic and race to build the next highway or more lanes, temporarily relieving traffic congestion is only exacerbating our town’s and state’s budget deficits.
We see this pattern throughout Connecticut. Expanding the tax base by building new roads, neighborhoods, and park-your-car-here shopping centers allows us to move with the car. But inevitably, this growth is choked out by itself as congestion reaches a critical capacity. As highway traffic and red-light back-ups become the norm, the cycle of road-widening either repeats itself or the explosive development that once was heralded as a boon for the town slowly fades away. We’re then left with empty or underutilized shopping malls and wide, exorbitantly expensive roads to boot. In any given urban or suburban town in Connecticut, we see examples of both bustling, crowded commercial arterial roads and the older, near-empty strip developments nearby.
But cars are cool.
Cars get picked on a lot these days. But American culture is very much tied up in the car. As a country, despite the rhetoric, we continue to drive. In some places we’re driving more than ever. We love cars and we can’t seem to get enough. I don’t blame us. Cars are cool. Cars get us places. At their best, cars are fast, gripping, journey-making machines capable of zipping us from point A to point B in comfort and style.
If we want to better our relationship with the car we need to adapt.
Looking a few decades into the future, some autonomous car advocates have promised to solve our traffic congestion woes. There are certainly some gains to be made by computer algorithms computing best routes for us. But even the most conservative estimates demonstrate that, while driverless cars might decrease the total number of cars needed for transportation (in a future where car-sharing is dominant), the number of cars on the road at any given time will likely increase. Traffic will not be solved by driverless car technology alone. It’s a simple problem of physical space. The average car occupies approximately 100 square feet. One person walking, on a bike, or sharing a well utilized bus will always take up less room than someone in a car.
The only way to decrease car congestion is to provide more people with viable alternative transportation options. We need to invest in public transportation and pedestrian infrastructure. This approach affords us more open space and fewer burdens on our tax base. It saves our relationship with the car because it allows those of us who choose to and are able to drive to continue driving with less congestion, and it affords those of us who must live in or choose to live in more dense areas with opportunities for connections to get where we need to go. All of this without clogging up streets with additional cars in our neighborhood centers, where far too often arbitrary parking requirements take precedence over space for housing and public space.
Think for a moment, of your favorite place to be in the world. I doubt it’s within an empty parking spot. Yet this is how we’ve chosen to fill hundreds acres of land within our cities and towns. Beyond limited revenue from the dreaded parking meter, these spaces are costly and unproductive. We’ve demanded so much space for cars for so long, we’ve lost sight of the fact that even the smallest spaces can be productive and vibrant if they’re reserved for people and not just for machines. Investing in public transportation not only eases traffic, it opens up new opportunities for previously overlooked space.
A future for Connecticut
The State of Connecticut is well suited for higher quality public transportation than it has today. Fortunately, there are some hopeful developments in the world of transit. Our commuter rail system completed a major expansion with the new New Haven Hartford Springfield commuter program that came online in spring 2018. Providing reliable commuter rail lines promotes intercity transit. Beyond hopping conveniently from one downtown to another, however, even high-quality commuter rail is limited in its impact. Light-rail and frequent service trains may be an attractive option for across town trips in mid- to large-size cities, but Connecticut cities are small. Even in the most dense areas, light-rail and frequent service trains would be prohibitively expensive to construct, and largely unnecessary.
The answer is simple. Buses, sidewalks, and bike lanes.
In the past one hundred years, Connecticut built an extensive network of roads and bridges. Many state roads and town boulevards are great candidates for frequent service bus corridors. And Connecticut’s historic downtowns are already primed for improved sidewalks. With electric bikes, even the hilliest areas of Connecticut could benefit from bicycle infrastructure.
We’ve invested so much in our roads and bridges. Now, let’s put them to work.
