I went to a great CE class this morning on Smart Growth. The fast paced class, newly offered in our state, went through about twenty ways in which towns and cities in Massachusetts are being encouraged to build in ways that reduces sprawl, encourages walkability, and conserves open land.
They were great ideas and Cambridge has already put a number of them into practice such as traffic calming, transit-oriented development, and greening up the parking lots.
But I couldn't help but think as I listened that perhaps all of this was too little, too late. While some of the ideas dealt with traffic either directly or peripherally, in the end we were talking about continuing to build. There was not nearly enough mention of the missing link - public transportation. We cannot grow without dramatically increasing our public transit infrastructure.
Unfettered growth has made much of our country a much less enjoyable place to live than it was twenty, forty or one hundred years ago. Automobile traffic is choking our towns and cities. There's too many of us and more importantly we have too many cars. Public transportation is far, far more limited than it was a century ago.
I've lived in a twenty of thirty mile radius for most of my life. I know what traffic used to be like. I see the long backups that never occurred before. I watch as the rush hour spreads to hours, as heavy traffic on the highway, once limited to special events like a Red Sox or Celtics game, becomes the norm at almost any hour of the day. I revisit the town I once lived in - where I was introduced to stop lights when the town's first traffic light was installed when I was six - and now the traffic down Main Street, where I once biked and walked unaccompanied as a seven or eight year old, is fast and unending.
I really do think that we're a bunch of frogs in a big pot of boiling water who didn't notice that the water was heating up. Incrementally we've built and built, developing farm land, filling all the empty places, choked our roads, fouled our air, built endless swaths of ugliness - and we just didn't notice what we were losing.
It was a beautiful country. And certainly there are many pockets of beauty remaining (do your darndest to preserve all that you know of!) but too often many of my favorite places, while still beautiful, have to be endured with endless amounts of traffic whizzing by.
Smart Growth principles can help ensure that development is done better than it might have been. But we can't be satisfied with small, incremental steps.
We're already more than maxed out in terms of automobile traffic - any growth, no matter how smart, is going to make things worse unless we make a huge push for top notch public transit.
We've got to address better ways to get from Point A to Point B. One by one behind the wheel of our huge hulking automobiles cannot be the answer.
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