Big and simple, flat and square: Vancouver and the Insatiable Auto (5)
More quotes from my InRoads article:
Cities with good rapid-transit systems faced road congestion; cities with great freeway networks faced congestion; cities with neither faced congestion.
The problem was inherent in the urban form that the automobile created. Just as the streetcar had generated shopping streets along its corridors, with bungalow suburbs within walking distance on either side, Motordom generated its own forms.
Design was simplified: big and simple, flat and square. Land uses were separated and dropped in density, from shopping centres to college campuses to industrial parks. Form followed parking.
No longer was the city redesigned to accommodate the car while leaving most of the pre-Motordom road grid intact; now the postwar urban region would be designed for the car, and only for the car. All other transportation choices were minimized. Distances would be too far to walk, roads too dangerous to cycle, transit too infrequent, taxis too expensive.
From the drive-in garage at the front of the house to the free parking wherever there was a destination, the assumption was self-evident: almost everyone would drive almost everywhere for almost everything almost all the time.
By 1942, the traffic engineers had encoded all the standards for emerging municipalities to adopt in order to guarantee, as the manual promised, “efficient, free and rapid flow of traffic.”
And it couldn’t possibly work.
