Choosing Chicago Part 6

Part 1 (Go the beginning of Choosing Chicago, if you missed the first part of the series. Otherwise, read on.)

Part 6

In Miami I had my moment of realization. I’m not sure why such an obvious fact had never occurred to me before. In thinking about the different cities we were visiting, the neighborhoods were shaped by their street grids. I began to realize that despite a city’s best intentions the basic grid can’t be changed. The streets just are where they are. Miami had installed a PeopleMover elevated tram to transverse an inaccessible downtown, but it didn’t fix the basic problem. A pedestrian can’t walk from downtown to the adjoining Omni neighborhood on most of the streets. The areas are only connected for vehicular traffic on roads.

Miami was spending boatloads of money to bring in fancy consultants to help them “reshape” their urban environment for cycling and walking. An honest assessment would be to tell them to pray for an enormous natural disaster—an earthquake or hurricane which levels part of the city. Something which would wipe their slate clean and allow them to start over from scratch.

A city can be designed for travel by foot or in cars, but not both. Parking completely changes the landscape. If the streets are laid out for walking around, then it will retain its basic pedestrian scale, like the grid of Manhattan. Suburbs designed for trolley cars, like those found in Brooklyn or many neighborhoods of Chicago, also maintain a pleasant atmosphere, particularly when fast transit links to downtowns are available. Neighborhoods built in the last seventy years are designed for cars.

Americans have a choice we don’t want to make. We want to believe there is a magical middle ground between facilitating walking and the use of cars. It doesn’t exist. High priced consultants are creating reams of reports on design tweaks to “retrofit” sprawling communities into old fashioned cities. The entire city of Miami cannot be retrofitted for pedestrians.

Sure, any city can make improvements to the urban environment. But I realized there are very few neighborhoods, anywhere in the country, which are both affordable and offer the amenities we wanted. The USA is, likely will be, and always has been a nation of single family homes on farms, in towns, and later in the suburbs. The best way to get around these places is in a car.

Suddenly our choices were narrowed. There are very few neighborhoods anywhere in the country like Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, Park Slope in Brooklyn, or Miami Beach, Florida. Given our budget constraints, our reasonable options were even less.

Part 7 (We decide on a city.)