Future Gridlock: Blame All the Empty Seats, Expert Says
The next time you find yourself creeping along a freeway in bumper-to-bumper traffic, consider this possibility:
“We now have enough front seats in the nation’s automobiles to carry the entire American population at the same time, plus enough back seats to carry everyone from the Soviet Union as well. The trouble is that these seats are being driven around empty.”
That was the decidedly contrary message Sunday from Melvin M. Webber, professor of planning at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Urban and Regional Development, at a wide-ranging UCLA symposium on “The Car and the City.”
Fill a Few Seats
In a weekend dominated by sentiment opposed to the privately owned automobile (“I hate the car!” declared one panelist, Marvin Adelson of UCLA), keynote speaker Webber was decidedly more pro-auto. “Traffic congestion would disappear as if by magic,” he assured the conference, “if we could somehow fill just a few of those seats.”
Dismissing the idea that some mass transit miracle could save us from predictions of impending gridlock, Webber instead endorsed an approach of tinkering with the current auto-highway system, which he described as “the best ground transportation system yet devised.”
And he sketched a futuristic vision of cities with gigantic office parks along the periphery of metropolitan areas near single-family housing projects. Such complexes, he said, are becoming the successors to our traditional high-rise central business districts and will eventually ease traffic congestion.
More than 50 experts from throughout the country--urban planners, architects, historians, designers, writers, sociologists and artists--attended the two-day examination of the automobile as a social force.
What Auto Has Wrought
“People have vague stereotypes about the role of the automobile,” said Martin Wachs, transportation planner in UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, which sponsored the event. “We hear cliches like: ‘L.A.’s love affair with the car.’ We are trying to look in a more penetrating way at what the auto has done to daily life in the city, and particularly Los Angeles.”
The outcome was a dizzying profile of the motor car, which superficially might be viewed as “just another piece of 20th-Century technology which promised to make life easier and more attractive to Americans,” noted one participant.
But in passionate and often contradictory discussions, the car was held responsible for perpetuating macho images, reinforcing gender stereotypes, breaking up families, freeing up families, causing crime, deterring crime, influencing roadside architecture, creating new neon language of signs and symbols, shaping social identity in the barrios and creating theme parks, mini-malls, plazas and shopping centers.
Above all, the consensus had it, the automobile has created a massive dependency relationship between Americans and their cars. The love affair with the car has become a marriage, suggested one speaker, and the marriage is on the rocks. We feel doomed to a future of gridlock.
It was against this backdrop that Webber offered a vision of the future that put blame less on the car than on planning to accommodate it. “I suspect we’re all spending a pleasant spring weekend like this because we share a generalized anxiety about the expanding number of automobiles throughout the world,” he said, “and because those automobiles are proving to be such powerful agents of change.”
But automobiles are popular everywhere, he argued, and not for the reasons usually cited: People aren’t attracted to cars because they are lovable or prestigious, but because they offer better transportation than anything else available. The car’s superiority lies in its capacity to provide “no-wait, no-transfer, door-to-door service . . . The car is always on call, as it were. No other transport mode comes close to meeting that standard of service.”
But this dream vehicle demands a free-flowing traffic system, and Webber offered a short sketch of urban history to underline possibilities for future travel.
(As a practicing planner, and then an academic, Webber was involved both in the original studies leading to the construction of BART, San Francisco’s rapid transit system, and a subsequent study of its social, economic and environmental impact. He recently stepped down as director of Berkeley’s Urban and Regional Development Institute after heading it since its founding in 1970.)
Too Many Cars
Describing our contemporary commuting predicament as having crammed too many cars into cities not designed for them, he predicted further shifts in urban patterns that already are occurring: A continued move of mass production workplaces from the factory to the office, and an increase in computer networks freeing offices from their tether to central business districts.
“That’s the big city-news for the 1990s,” he said. “The glue that has held cities together is being dissolved.”
In the meantime, short-term solutions for commuter congestion might include “smart traffic signals” that adjust themselves to the traffic flow, flex-time for spreading commuters’ cars over more hours of the day, and filling in all those empty seats of the one-driver, one-car phenomenon with such incentives as congestion-free diamond lanes and computer-linked car pools.
Despite our anxiety over impending gridlock, it is not car owners who need the most help, he emphasized, but those denied this accessibility--the approximately one-third of the U.S. population that doesn’t have access to a car because they are “too poor, too young, too old or too handicapped.”
Competing With Auto
They deserve the same travel flexibility that car owners enjoy, said Webber, who thinks that mass transit systems should be modeled along the lines of “automobility.” An effective transit system can compete with the automobile only on the automobile’s terms--which means at approximating its door-to-door, no-wait, no-transfer service.
For examples, he said, “we might look to the Third World, where small-vehicle, auto-like systems operate successfully and effectively. We have much to learn from the jeepneys of Manila, the collectivos of Caracas, and the mutatus of Nairobi.” Such domestic systems as the airport-bound Super Shuttle vans are examples of using the automobile as public transit--operating as taxis and jitneys that approximate what automobiles do best, he said.
Our life with the car--like any relationship--needs constant attention, and Webber acknowledged such needs as continued research on effective fuel substitutes to stem its “horrendous appetite” for petroleum products. This, he believes, is possible, if it is given a political priority.
The automobile--or its successor--is here to stay, he concluded. “Our central challenge is to invent ways of extending the equivalent of automobility to everyone.”
