Have you noticed that sidewalks are a foreign concept in suburban America? It seems as though for the past 50 years city planners have forgotten to design neighborhoods for their inhabitants. Instead, they’ve been thinking about their wheeled vehicles — those extensions of self we have created to take the place of our own living, breathing bodies. Where sidewalks do exist in suburbia, they are rarely, if ever, utilized. What’s worse, they were for decades simply omitted from urban designs.
I realized the true extent of this depressing reality in the Binghamton tri-city area after a recent visit to a movie theater on Vestal Parkway. After the film, I wanted to walk back to campus — it’s not that far, two miles at the most — but after surveying the Parkway and deciding I was in a continue-living kind of mood, I resolved to take a cab back to campus.
In terms of distance, one could easily walk the two miles from the theater back to campus, but in practice, it’s nearly impossible. One would have to either walk in the ditch along the side of the road, or walk along the meridian with cars whizzing by at 50 miles per hour on either side. Was there really a time when architects and planners couldn’t imagine someone wanting to hoof it instead of taking the car?
As we now know, driving is not all it’s cut out to be — it’s not only expensive and polluting, but also anti-social. It removes you from what urban theorist Jane Jacobs referred to as “ballet of the sidewalks,” encasing you instead in the bland, predictable and cut-off environment of your box of glass, plastic and steel. You are in the milieu, but not of it. It’s become all about efficient execution: an isolated existence in which we travel from home to Wal-Mart and back as quickly as possible so as to stay as comfortable and safe and familiar as possible, but without taking part in the tragic, joyful and mundane realities of daily life. Our “spheres-of-living” have been reduced to discrete locations with nothing in between: driveway to massive parking lot to massive parking lot, as if there were no world out there in between.
To be fair, contemporary city planners seem to be heeding the call to design pedestrian-friendly cities. But the fact remains that a tremendous portion of America’s infrastructure was built in the first half of the 20th century, and it is what we will be stuck with for some time. I’m not sure that anything can be done anymore about the crazy labyrinth of highways that encases Binghamton University, and I’m not trying to make the argument that we should all get rid of our cars; I’m also a realist. I can accept the fact that an abysmal American public transportation system necessitates car ownership and usage. But the U.S. Department of Transportation estimated that this past June, Americans drove 12 billion fewer miles than in June 2007. With gas prices high and environmental awareness growing, this figure will only increase. City planning in suburban America has to adapt to this new reality.
We need to stand up and let it be known that our car-centric society is unacceptable. Our country needs to be built for its people, not its cars.