﻿This is Los Altos Hills, a wealthy suburban town of 8,500 people in the San Francisco
Bay Area that was in the news a few years ago over its fight with navigation app Waze. Los
Altos Hills was one of many suburbs across North America concerned that Waze was sending too much
outsider traffic through their quiet residential streets. In some cases, residents fabricated
reports of traffic accidents on the app to send a signal that their neighbourhood is closed.
On one hand, all of this is understandable. Cars are dangerous, loud, and they pollute. Having a
lot of traffic through your neighbourhood degrades your quality of life in meaningful ways, including
threatening your kids’ ability to be independent and play outside. Residents on certain roads that
saw sharp increases in traffic reported being afraid to cross the road to get their mail.
On the other hand, it’s hard not to notice a certain contradiction.
At the same time that they’re fighting to keep other people’s traffic away from their
neighbourhood, Los Altos Hills is literally built to generate traffic for other neighbourhoods.
There is no grocery store within the borders of this 9 square mile or 23 square kilometre town—in
fact, there are very nearly no stores at all, and this is not by chance. Los Altos Hills has a
complete ban on commercial properties, meaning the only retail in town is a bookstore on a college
campus and a gift shop at a monastery. Residents must travel elsewhere to buy essentially anything,
and with its inconsistent sidewalks and close to zero transit, when residents leave they’re
almost always driving. The town plan mentions its dependence on the rest of the Bay Area for stores
and employment, but assures that the relationship isn’t one-sided because the town has a lot of
natural beauty that other Bay Area residents can move there to enjoy or admire from afar.
If there’s anything we’ve learned following urban planning and city politics it’s that questioning
the role of cars in cities really strikes a nerve. When you talk about the downsides of cars,
from noise to safety to pollution, or support policies that give less space and priority to
cars, from pedestrian streets to bike lanes to transit priority corridors and traffic calming,
you’re accused of waging a “war on cars” and attacking people’s basic freedoms. We’ve seen this
on our own channel when we talk about bikes and transit, and we saw this when living in Montreal
under mayor Valerie Plante, who was constantly accused of being anti-car for pedestrian streets
and new bike infrastructure. Before that we lived in Toronto under suburban mayor Rob Ford when he
and his brother Doug Ford, then city councilor but now Premier of Ontario, were the ones denouncing
the “war on cars” fought by the “downtown elites”. Car-advocacy group “Get Toronto Moving” highlights
anti-car environmentalism like bike lanes, transit signal priority, and “No Idling” signs.
Everyone seems to frame this debate as the anti-car urbanites versus the pro-car suburbanites
but we think this is a big misunderstanding, and not just because we know lots of people in
the suburbs with more urbanist views who want better bike and transit infrastructure. Even
the stereotypical suburbanites who happily drive everywhere are well-aware of the downsides of cars
and willing to implement policies and designs that manage and limit cars in their own neighbourhoods.
We saw this with the example of Los Altos Hills at the beginning, which fought its own war on
cars from the Waze app, but it’s way more than one rich town’s feud with a technology company.
Avoiding car traffic around your home is a part of the suburban dream, built into the
design of the suburbs in fundamental ways. One of the most distinctive features of post-war
North American suburbia and one of the most desirable locations for a suburban house is
a cul-de-sac. Real estate ads mention them prominently, and studies have found that
cul-de-sacs can increase the property value of a house by 10, 20, and even 30%. People like
living on cul-de-sacs for the traffic safety and quality of life—people don’t like “tons of
traffic whizzing by their front door”, especially suburban families who appreciate it as “a natural
place for children to gather and play”. People also appreciate the lack of noise from motors,
car stereos, and horns. It’s easier to sleep. It’s hard to see the suburbs as entirely for
the freedom of cars when their basic road layout, including cul-de-sacs, courts,
and other circuitous designs, is meant to limit and discourage traffic.
It’s not just road layouts. Suburban-style zoning that bans shops and businesses in residential
neighbourhoods is usually justified with a worry about traffic, and traffic comes up all the time
as a reason to ban denser housing (p. 14). In the suburbs, traffic is actually a really big deal,
and avoiding it is one of the top priorities for residents. Part of the constant concern about
traffic is people not wanting congestion slowing down their trips, but part of it
is also not wanting their quiet, safe, pleasant street overrun by a bunch of new cars or trucks.
Minimizing the impact of cars is even built into the basic design of suburban housing. A common
justification for large suburban front lawns and houses being 10 or more metres from the sidewalk
is to put you further away from any traffic that does go through your neighbourhood, for
the noise and the possibility of a car crashing onto your property. This actually happened to
a neighbouring house when I was a kid. The suburbs are, in a pretty fundamental way,
built on a recognition of the negative effects of traffic and a desire to limit cars in their
own neighbourhoods. In that sense, we’re not so different after all. That’s why it’s hard
to take it seriously when we’re accused of being anti-car or against people’s “freedom to drive”.
Can someone who enjoys living on a suburban cul-de-sac and who doesn’t want denser housing
in their neighbourhood because of the traffic really complain about people who live closer to
downtown building bike lanes, giving less space to cars, and trying to slow or reduce traffic?
These traffic calming barriers in Montreal were installed in 2011 to block cars driving through a
school zone. Is this a war on the car, an attack on people’s right to drive wherever they want?
Because this is functionally the same as a suburban cul-de-sac. Maybe we don’t see
cul-de-sacs as a limit on freedom because they’re built like that from the beginning while these
barriers were added in later, but they do the same thing: they block through-traffic.
We’re making the point that initiatives like traffic calming, bike lanes, and transit priority
are the urbanist equivalents to suburban designs and policies like cul-de-sacs, single-use zoning,
and density restrictions, because they’re all meant to manage and limit the effects of cars.
There is a major difference though, because the urbanist approach to managing cars is
built on providing alternatives and reducing the amount of driving that people have to do,
while the suburban approach is based on locking people into driving and increasing overall traffic
but moving it somewhere else for other people to deal with. Montreal’s traffic calming barriers
aren’t actually the same as a suburban cul-de-sac because a cul-de-sac blocks all traffic modes,
creating longer distances and encouraging people to drive. Traffic calming barriers, which we’ve
also seen in Quebec City and Ottawa for example, block cars but continue to allow easy access for
people on foot or bike. With technology they could also be built to allow transit to go through.
The contrast between a completely impermeable cul-de-sac and a selectively- impermeable traffic
calming setup really shows the difference between urbanism and what we might call suburbanism,
but this is more than just road layout. Denser, mixed-use development that puts people close to
schools, stores, and jobs can actually get to the root of the traffic problem by making
people not have to drive as much, instead of just pushing the driving somewhere else.
That is the basic contradiction of North American car-centric suburbia. If you live
in a cul-de-sac or other quiet street in the middle of a residential neighbourhood isolated
from businesses and far from your job downtown, you’ve minimized traffic around your home and
immediate neighbourhood but you’ve maximized the amount of traffic you generate for other people,
whether that’s other suburbanites who can’t afford the desirable quiet streets within suburbia
or that’s people who live in the central city whose neighbourhoods you drive through to get
to your job, in some cases on highways from the 60s and 70s that demolished large parts
of their neighbourhood. Suburbia, at least as we largely know it today,
is based on avoiding traffic as much as possible while generating as much traffic as possible. It’s
anti-car in your own neighbourhood but pro-car through other people’s neighbourhoods.
While this is a critical perspective on North American car-dependent suburban development,
our basic point in this video is that we’re all more similar than we think.
Almost everyone, whether urban or suburban, recognizes the downsides of cars and wants to
manage and limit cars around their home and in their own neighbourhoods. Everyone wants their
children to be able to play outside safely. No one likes waking up in the middle of the night
because of loud cars. What we need is recognition that urbanist policies like pedestrian streets,
bike lanes, transit priority, and traffic calming aren’t crazy anti-car aberrations,
they’re an understandable expression of concerns and preferences that most people have. This video
is a call to think in a more productive way about how we can reduce car dependence and car traffic,
instead of trying to fix the problem by moving it somewhere else for other people to deal with.
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