Biden Touts Green Cities Amidst Parking Lots
Wednesday morning I ventured to New Carrollton, the last stop on the D.C. Metro’s orange line. The Vice-President’s daily press schedule misleadingly described the speech he was to give on the stimulus spending bill as being at the station. Upon exiting I saw no visible signs of a political event. All I could see was a massive sea of parking. After asking everyone where the event was, only one person seemed to know. He gestured in a direction that a I took to be straight to my right, but several minutes of walking that way led only to the end of the parking lot. When I got back he clarified that he meant across the parking and across the highway beyond. Outside the parking lot was a wide road, and another parking lot across the street. From there I walked towards the highway overpass along the shoulder of the road, feeling increasingly unsafe as the road bent and the shoulder narrowed until I could barely go further and there was clearly nothing one could get to on foot worth seeing.
Later, I discovered that the event had been held at a nearby facility for D.C. metrobuses, and was pegged to Earth Day. Vice-President Biden was announcing that $300 million of the stimulus money would be spent on helping cities buy more efficient bus fleets. “From advanced battery cars to hybrid-electric city buses, we’re going put Recovery Act dollars to work deploying cleaner, greener vehicles in cities and towns across the nation that will cut costs, reduce pollution and create the jobs that will drive our economic recovery,” said Biden.
I’m all for that, but there’s an irony seemingly lost on the White House. The environment where they chose to have the event is completely inhospitable to pedestrians. It’s great that there are metro stations in the D.C. suburbs. But this area, not far from the District border, is a network of highways, huge buildings surrounded by parking lots and wide roads. Although I did see people arriving at the station by bus, there were enormous numbers of cars parked there. You could not walk to any sort of business.
The reason our carbon emissions are so out of proportion to our population is largely because of this disastrous mode of urban/suburban development. As I note in my new article on suburban planning, transportation accounts for 32 percent of total CO2 emissions in the U.S. — the most of any end-use sector. Americans use cars for almost 90 percent of all their trips, compared to 58 percent in the United Kingdom. This is more attributable to the proliferation of unattractive, inaccessible environments like the one I saw today than it is to the inefficiency of city automobile fleets. $300 million for cleaner buses is great as far as it goes, but it does not go nearly far enough in curbing carbon emissions. Only a radically new approach to urban planning will have the effect we need.
Ben Adler reports on Republican and conservative politics and media for The Nation as a Contributing Writer. He previously covered national politics and policy as a staffer at Newsweek, Politico and the Center for American Progress. Ben also writes regularly about urban and environmental policy, and he was a 2008-2009 urban leaders fellow at Next American City.
john in USA on Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 4:10am
P.S THE GREEN AGENDA
allitia dibernardo on Sun, May 03, 2009 at 6:21am
Thanks for this telling anecdote. For those of us who come from older urban areas, in my case Philadelphia, it can be a bewildering experience to experience sprawl first-hand and at-risk. I recently was outside of DC , at an alleged “town”, for a meeting with the FDA in their new compound and wanted to get a Starbucks. Although I could see the coffee shop in an adjacent stripmall, there was no path for me to take that seemed remotely safe. I tried anyway and eventually gave up trying to cross 4 lanes of traffic at an intersection where the volume of cars pouring out of the mall parking lots (and turning across my path) was staggering. The thought occurred to me upon returning to Philadelphia that there is no way to turn that kind of sprawl into the kind of high-density, traffic-intense but human-centered fabric we have in older cities. It also occurred to me that residents who live in these towns-in-name-only interact chiefly with traffic and parking lots during the course of the commuting day, which is a very impoverished and depleted mode of public interface. This kind of car-centered civic planning fails on so many levels we have to ask, why we keep doing it?