A Tale of Two Cities
Recent visits to Los Angeles and Savannah showed me how mass transit links and walkability are just two sides of the same coin. Without both, you will need a car to live somewhere, and most people need a car to live in either L.A. or Savannah.
Rail construction in downtown Los Angeles.
While L.A. has stepped up its construction of light rail in recent years, and it has an extensive public bus system, no one in L.A. seems to go anywhere without a car if they can avoid it. To wit, the friends I was visiting had not been to the light rail station that is closest to their house, even though it’s less than a mile away. I discovered the reason when I tried to get to their house without a car. The streets of their neighborhood, Mount Washington, which is built on a steep hill, are in no way designed for pedestrians. Too narrow for buses or trolleys, they wind, they dead-end and they lack sidewalks. Carrying two bags in the rain and constantly doubling back to find my way was a very unpleasant experience. While the rail lines need to cover much more ground (a process that one former city official told me will take 30 years), they will never make neighborhoods like Mount Washington truly accessible for non-drivers. The problem with L.A. in many places (though not all, Santa Monica and Hollywood Boulevard were just two of the exceptions I saw), is that the areas that are linked by mass transit are simply unwalkable.
A square in Savannah, Georgia.
Savannah has precisely the opposite problem. Its historic core is a glorious pedestrian experience: Tree-lined sidewalks, slow traffic, beautiful greens, and median strips characterize the streetscape, while the houses all face the street and none hide behind garages. And yet you cannot get from the airport to downtown without a car. If you do not have a car it is $30 for a cab. So whereas L.A. has a bus from the airport to the central train depot, Savannah chooses not to capitalize on its own accessibility. The result is that no one, except for a few students who bike around, can live there without a car. The larger lesson is that neither mass transit nor walkable urbanism is sufficient to wean us off our automobiles. Since so many places have neither, we may often forget that it is a two-step, not one-step, approach that is needed.
Ben Adler joins Next American City as an Urban Leaders Fellow based in Washington, D.C. He will be focusing on Washington and the role of the federal government in urban policy. Ben covered the 2008 election and Congress as a staff writer for Politico. Prior to joining Politico Ben was the editor of CampusProgress.org, a daily online political and cultural magazine at the Center for American Progress, a regular contributor to The American Prospect Online and its award-winning blog, TAPPED, and a reporter-researcher at The New Republic. His writing has also appeared in Newsweek, The Washington Monthly, In These Times, The Nation and the websites of The Guardian and The Atlantic among other publications.
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Alex Ihnen in St. Louis, MO on Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 12:30pm
Excellent reminder of the challenges of building light rail today. Everyone wants light rail to connect where they already go, such as regional job centers and shopping districts, but more often than not light rail is expected to be non-obtrusive and is therefore located at the very perifery of the area to be served. One example, reducing costs by utilizing existing (often abandonned) train lines looks smart, until one notices that the 1/4 mile radius at every station contains nothing but empty light industrial and brownfields. Let’s build where new development will occur. Of course federal guidelines for projecting ridership currently do not allow for this.
Greg Ptacek in Los Angeles on Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 1:18pm
You’re mistaken. The vast majority of residences in L.A. are linked directly to its mass transit system. Most people in L.A. live on geography as flat as Savannah’s; your friends’ home tucked into the hills of Mt. Washington is the exception to the rule. Also, what does it say about your friends that they’ve never been to the light rail station close to their home? They can’t walk, bicycle or drive there? (What are they afraid of?) Tens of thousands of L.A.commuters DO use mass transit - light rail, subways and buses.
Curvie Hawkins in Arlington, TX on Sat, Apr 04, 2009 at 1:12am
On the Savannah choice of not having a bus, I wonder if it ultimately came down to finance/economics. Public bus service is obviously not going to be profitable, but there must be a level of performance to warrant justifying trips to/from the airport. If there are limited resources for bus service, the planners there may have—correctly in my opinion—decided it would be better served meeting the needs of the Savannah residents and their daily commutes, as opposed to serving tourists.