I grew up about a ten minute walk from my elementary school in Summit, NJ. Despite this fact, I was picked up and dropped off by car to and from that school, every day.
One day I asked my mom: why are we doing this? Couldn’t I just walk to school? She responded that it would not be safe.
Given I lived in a quiet, affluent, suburban area, if I had thought about this response for bit, I might have been confused. What was so unsafe about a ten minute walk to school? But I didn’t think much about it at the time.
In middle school, my mom encouraged me to go to the gym to get more exercise.
I asked my mom if I could get there by biking. With some consternation, she assented, but only after exhorting me to stay on the sidewalk at all times, regardless of whether that was technically legal.
Internally, I rolled my eyes. Was biking in the road really so unsafe that I had to (potentially) commit a crime to avoid it?
Since New York City was the closest big city to my hometown, it was always understood as “the city”. No one would ever confuse “the city” with anything else, even though, for instance, my own hometown was technically a “city”. I had always though it was strange to call my hometown a “city” when it was clearly so different from real cities like New York City.
Since we lived close enough to New York City, and there was an NJ Transit train line straight into the city from my town, we would often go there on weekends. I enjoyed exploring the city via its extensive subway network. I felt a freedom that I had never known before in my hometown, where I had to essentially get a parent’s permission to go anywhere, since they had to drive me.
Before high school, my parents, and my friends’ parents, would from time to time drive my friends and I around to meet up at each others’ houses and hang out. During high school, my friends and classmates started getting driver’s licenses and driving themselves around. This gave us the freedom to hang out on ours own terms.
Though I passed the written driver’s test, I didn’t prioritize finding time to practice actually driving on the road, so I didn’t have a license. My friends bemoaned the fact that they always had to come to my house to pick me up, especially since I lived further away. I felt bad about this, but didn’t see an alternative.
I didn’t live close enough to my friends the way some of my friends lived close enough to each other that they had been able to bike to each others’ houses since they were younger. I had never biked to a friend’s house in my life. Driving was the only way.
One day, as I was getting driven around in the car by my mom, as we were stopped at a large interaction in front of City Hall, I saw one of my teachers from high school riding on his bike on the road.
I was shocked to see him there. Never before had I seen someone biking on a large, wide road such as the one we were on. Why was he biking on that road? Wasn’t that unsafe?
I chalked it up to him being from the UK and not knowing how things worked in the US.
In my first year of college at CMU in Pittsburgh, PA, I and the rest of the first-years were required to stay in on-campus housing. I remained in on-campus housing in the year after, since I enjoyed living within a walkable distance to campus. I had never walked to school, or a store, from my residence before.
In college, I also rode the bus to other nearby areas, like into the University of Pittsburgh campus, where there were more restaurants. The bus was free to CMU students, which was nice. In later years, I moved off campus and relied on the bus to get me to campus.
I studied abroad in Nagoya for half of my third year of college. Since most of the direct flights to Japan went to Tokyo, I planned to land there and then take the shinkansen to Nagoya.
A few weeks in advance, I tried booking a shinkansen ticket for when I landed, but wasn’t able: it seemed like the reservations didn’t allow reserving very far in advance at all.
I was confused, since in the US, I had to book Amtrak tickets well in advance lest they become expensive or sell out.
Upon landing and making my way to the station, though, I learned why you couldn’t book far in advance. It was because trains left far too often for it to even be necessary to do so. I marvelled at the speed, comfort, and frequency of the high-speed trains.
I graduated right when Covid hit in the US. I decided to move with my partner to her hometown of San Ramon, CA, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
This area was similar where I grew up: a “city” of almost exclusively single-family homes, to and from which one must drive to get to most places. But at the time, I didn’t consider that there was any other possible way to live, other than at the extremes at the end of the urban-rural spectrum: either in a skyscraper in a loud, dirty city downtown, or in the middle of rural farmland, where your nearest neighbor is miles away.
Although we didn’t do much during Covid, we did walk around outside to get some fresh air. We often would walk on a long, flat trail nearby called the Iron Horse Trail. I later learned that the “iron horse” that gave the trail its name was the railroad, because the trail used to be a railroad.
As things began opening back up after the worst of Covid seemed mitigated, I got my driver’s license, which immediately opened up the surrounding area for exploration. As noted, there was no longer any train service in the area, and only limited bus service. Thus, since everything was so spread out, driving was, once again, often the only viable option for getting around the area.
I moved with my partner to Bellevue, WA in late 2022. Here again, I found myself in a “city” of mostly single family homes. Though, this city seemed to have somewhat of a downtown. I also learned that a light rail line was under construction and would open soon, which I was excited about.
I worked remotely at first, but when I switched jobs, my new job required some in-office time. I decided immediately that I would not be driving downtown during rush hour. I decided instead to get a bike, which I would then use to get to a bus that went downtown. But then I realized the hill near my house was too steep.
I tried my friend’s e-scooter, but didn’t like that. So then I got myself an e-bike and pannier. I quickly realized how convenient and enjoyable it was to zip around town without a car and without having to wait for the infrequent bus. I also, however, began to experience firsthand how some drivers seemed bothered or surprised to see bikes on the road and felt it necessary to pass me with little clearance, great speed, and sometimes yelling and jeering.
Once the light rail opened, I also used that from time to time by parking in the massive 1,500 stall parking garage at South Bellevue and taking the train north two stops.
Over time, I’ve thought more about these past experiences and how they relate to my current desires to live in an area where I am required to do as little driving as possible. I’ve been to a few countries outside the US, and it seems to me that every other developed country I’ve been to has far superior transit and walkability.
I’ve also come to realize that a great many issues - traffic congestion, housing, sustainability, third places, public safety, public health, conservation of nature, sense of place, loneliness - are all related to the same problem. Which is:
In the mid to late 1900s, US cities, led by the example of Robert Moses, ripped up their extensive electric streetcar and interurban lines to reconfigure existing streets exclusively for cars, and bulldozed through nonwhite neighborhoods to construct a massive network of federally funded controlled-access interstate highways, which allowed rich whites to flee from those cities, away from the nonwhites who were just starting to gain some semblance of civil rights and economic prosperity, and into the redlined, exclusionary-zoned, sprawling single-family suburbs, which were and are subsidized by the economic output and tax revenue still generated by those cities, that the suburbanites had rendered unrecognizable in service of allowing them to travel by single-occupant car to every possible destination they might desire to go.
This national tragedy occurred in varying degrees in various cities, and today, various cities are taking various degrees of action to mitigating this injustice. Some cities, regrettably, are doubling down.
Although it is a slow, arduous process, blocked and delayed by NIMBYs at every turn, I now know there is a name for those concerned with this slew of issues: urbanists.
This post details my path to urbanism. Where does the path lead from here? With luck, forward.