The permanent tension: Why the city's archaic street plans threaten modern mobility

“ Lack of planning is responsible for much of the traffic congestion with which the cities are wrestling nowadays.
The great importance of streets. The Streets.—The streets are very important factors in the daily life of every community, far more so than we commonly realize. They are the city’s arteries. On their surface they carry vehicles of every sort. Their surface also affords locations for lamp posts, telephone poles, hydrants, and many other instrumentalities of public service. Underneath the street surface are sewers, water mains, gas pipes, and conduits ”

“ Street sounds come surging up to us—the hoarse Voice of the City—a confused blur of noise—clanging trolley-cars, rumbling wagons, and familiar cries—all the varied commotion of the home-going hour when the city's buildings are pouring forth their human tide of laborers into the clogged arteries. ”

“ An old city, growing by the coalescence of numerous ancestor villages, the irregular and discontinuous street plan of Baltimore is the despair of the stranger and the daily inconvenience of its own citizens. The city lies in the path of one of the heaviest highway-traffic streams in the country, and by millions of travelers who have moved with that stream the difficulties of the Baltimore passage are well remembered.
The close block plan and narrow streets of the older sections of the city are chiefly an inheritance from the early nineteenth century. ”

“ The congestion of traffic in the downtown streets of our large cities is due to four causes: (a) the increased number of vehicles, (b) the different rates of speed at which different types of vehicles desire to move (horse-drawn vehicles, street cars, motor trucks, trucks, motor cars, motorcycles, etc.) , (c) the inadequate width and faulty arrangement of streets due to the lack of planning, and (d) the improper driving and parking of vehicles.
The older streets cannot now be widened except at very great expense because the private property which fronts on them is so valuable. ”

“ At present the streets of many larger towns, and especially of such old-established towns as London, whose central portions have the narrowest arteries, present a quite unprecedented state of congestion. When the Green of some future History of the English People comes to review our times, he will, from his standpoint of comfort and convenience, find the present streets of London quite or even more incredibly unpleasant than are the filthy kennels, the mudholes and darkness of the streets of the seventeenth century to our enlightened minds. ”

“ The high degree of restraint placed upon every motorist when the possible capacity has been reached, or even approached, results in driving conditions that are wholly intolerable. Drivers are entitled to exercise some freedom in their selection of speed and their ability to maneuver. The extent to which this liberty may be exercised is dependent primarily upon the volume of traffic using the highway and also, for two-lane roads, upon the portion of the highway where sight distances are adequate for overtaking and passing. ”

“ It has become increasingly apparent that public funds applicable to highway construction, especially on the more important routes, have not been sufficient to prevent their increasing obsolescence. On the contrary, the conclusion is clear that the condition of the more important highways is falling steadily further behind the needs of traffic. ”

“ Considering the needs in respect to highway and street improvements described in detail in this report, it is believed that the Federal Government can most helpfully contribute to the important improvements required in the following ways:
1. By facilitating the acquisition of adequate rights-of-way. To a great degree the early obsolescence of the rural highways previously built is due to the restrictions imposed upon their design by inadequate rights-of-way. In cities, archaic street plans are in need of major revision to permit the free flow of modern traffic. ”

“ Every large city has become, in a sense, a bottle-neck for the important railroads that pierce it. In some cases like Chicago or St. Louis or Kansas City or Indianapolis, the situation has been solved by the creation of belt-line freight railroads partly or entirely encircling the town. At Buffalo, the New York Central lines have built a connecting line to enable through traffic to escape the congestion of city yards and terminals, while at New Haven, the road of the same name has recently spent several million dollars in enlarging its narrow throat in the middle of the town. ”

“ The land on either side of the streets becomes enormously valuable. The traffic changes in character. New ways are demanded by the new conditions, but they are not built because the compensation required for disturbance terrifies the reformer. There follows a phase during which you have heavy congestion of traffic, and then, unless reform comes in time, a succeeding phase of decay.
It is very rare in the history of great urban centres to find the problem tackled at the right moment and solved: to find governors of sufficient daring to take the economic plunge. ”

“ Coal, for instance, is a freight business of itself. It is not handled in the regular stations of the railroad, but in specially designed pockets and storage sheds, which may be located at from one or two to half a hundred different accessible points about the city. One begins to see, after a little while, why the railroads now seize with avidity each opportunity to gain lines through the hearts of our cities. Each line gained means some appreciable relief toward the taking up of a traffic burden that increases yearly. ”

“ The frequency of street intersections is the cause of excessive stops and starts in cities. Every intersection also introduces substantial elements of delay and congestion.
If the permissible speed of moving traffic is 35 miles per hour, a halt of only half a minute at a traffic light consumes time in which each halted vehicle, but for the stop, would have advanced nearly 4 average city blocks. ”

“ The lack of such safe passing sight distance is the principal reason for the formation of queues behind slow-moving vehicles and a major cause of the obsolescence of highways built in the past. Where passing sight distance is inadequate, safe drivers are restricted in their freedom of movement to almost the same degree as if the lane used for passing were filled with oncoming vehicles; and those who attempt to pass under these conditions are reckless drivers who all too often cause grief to others as well as themselves as a result of their action. ”

“ Correction of sight-distance deficiencies on the 1,900 miles carrying 500 to 800 vehicles hourly will generally require extensive relocation to develop the alinement needed to provide the sight distance necessary for these roads as two- and three-lane highways. The traffic on these roads is increasing, and in the not distant future may be expected to reach volumes requiring the capacity of divided four-lane highways. ”

“ The star-shaped contour of the modern great city, thrusting out arms along every available railway line, knotted arms of which every knot marks a station, testify sufficiently to the relief of pressure thus afforded. Great Towns before this century presented rounded contours and grew as a puff-ball swells; the modern Great City looks like something that has burst an intolerable envelope and splashed. ”

“ You have got in modern times that further curious reaction due to growing excellence of communications—that is, due to the growth of the Road—the pulse of the great modern city. Crowds of human beings pour out of Victoria or Liverpool Street into London and pour back from London in the evening. The station of St. Lazare in Paris is, in Europe, the most striking visual evidence of this strange modern development, great floods of human beings cascading into the city at the opening day and ebbing back at its close. ”

“ So that Bond Street and Regent Street, the Boulevard des Capucines, the Corso, and Broadway will still be brilliant and crowded for many years for all the diffusion that is here forecast—all the more brilliant and crowded, perhaps, for the lack of a thronging horse traffic down their central ways. But the very fact that the old nucleus is still to be the best place for all who trade in a concourse of people, for novelty shops and art shops, and theatres and business buildings, by keeping up the central ground values will operate against residence there and shift the "masses" outwardly. ”

“ Transportation and communication, tramways and telephones, newspapers and advertising, steel construction and elevators—all things, in fact, which tend to bring about at once a greater mobility and a greater concentration of the urban populations—are primary factors in the ecological organization of the city. ”

“ The municipal transportation and communication question has developed a large literature which is to be found in many separate works on the telephone, telegraph, radio, street-car systems, busses, automobile, mail service, newspaper, and railways as well as in municipal reports, technical and administrative journals, and textbooks on the city.
3. The existence of streets, pavement, alleys, sewers, and other devices of the same sort that characterize the city as a physical mechanism influence the behavior of the person and the group, and as such are of interest to the sociologist. ”

“ If further, we consider the case of the smallest urban communities—the highway or ribbon towns that at intervals stretch out along main highways and vary from a block or two to several blocks in width—the bypassing of such places is not only helpful to the preponderant through traffic, but is usually necessary for the avoidance of congestion and serious accidents and the protection of life on the main street of the little community. ”

“ In the construction of future belt lines and bypasses control of lateral access and separation from the grade of cross highways at intersections always should be provided. Only by so doing can the bypasses be preserved for their proper function of serving through traffic. So protected, the cities can expand beyond the circuit routes provided without interfering with the discharge of the duty of such routes. ”

“ Where traffic on the rural routes is heavy and, in the environs of cities, where it is desirable to discourage undue extension of road-bordering city growth, prohibition of access to the highway from abutting land, controlled access at specified points, and the closure or grade separation of all intersecting highways are essential. ”

“ To-day it is carrying off the remnants of that station improvement to the scrap-heap and trying to see far enough into the future to build a station that shall last it fifty years at least.
There is not an engineer employed by that railroad [Pg 95] who will assert himself as possessed of the absolute belief that the new station will be adequate for the traffic of a half century hence, if indeed the great spreading palace of steel and marble be in existence at all at that time. ”

“ The present flow of traffic within the city is affected by the existing pattern of land use, the existing location of railroad and other transportation terminals, the existing concentrations of business, industrial, and cultural establishments, and the existing location of residential areas of various classes. It is probable that many of these existing land uses will be materially changed within the life period of any substantial new traffic facilities now provided. ”

“ A very few great arterial roads joining up the main centres of population would have far more effect upon our present difficulties than their mere mileage would seem to warrant. There could be no question of stopping the new form of traffic upon the ordinary roads remaining, which in length might be twenty or fifty times those of the new roads. But it would be of such advantage for long-distance travel to use the great arteries that at the expenditure of greater mileage you would find the new traffic seeking them at the nearest point upon one side and clinging to them for as long as possible. ”

“ If our line is to link two important traffic centres and [Pg 38] is to make a specialty of through traffic it will have to be very much of a town that will bend the straightness of our route. If, on the other hand, the line is to pick up its traffic from the territory it traverses we can afford to neglect no place of possibilities. We must make concessions, even if we make many twists and turns and climb steep grades; we cannot afford to pass business by. Perhaps we may even have to worm our way into the hearts of towns already grown and closely built, and this will be expensive work. ”

“ Coming as I do from Europe to America, I am amazed at the apparent buoyancy and abundance of New York. The place seems to possess an inexhaustible vitality. But this towering, thundering, congested city, with such a torrent of traffic and such a concourse of people as I have never seen before, is, after all, the European door of America; it draws this superabundant and astounding life from trade, from a trade whose roots are dying.
When one looks at New York its assurance is amazing; when one reflects we realize its tremendous peril. ”