What If I Want to Walk?

Car dependence is social engineering

Sep 28

I’ve done some writing on parking lots before, parking being a huge aspect of how the built environment looks, feels, and operates. As Todd Litman put it at Planetizen:

Parking facilities are the dark matter of the urban universe; they represent a major portion of total urban land and affect virtually every aspect of urban life including development patterns, housing costs, travel activity, walkability, environmental quality, and aesthetics. Yet, to most people, parking is virtually invisible, a huge and costly resource that they only notice when they have trouble finding a space.

Here’s a piece I wrote for Strong Towns about informal commerce in underused parking lots. And here at this newsletter I wondered, mostly as a thought experiment, what would happen if suburban parking lots were not tied to their specific stores or strip plazas, but were instead simply public, usable by anybody shopping or walking anywhere. That’s what I’m coming back to here.

I’ve been working out of a coffee shop since early July, in a sort of light industrial park in Herndon, Virginia, the next town over from my home of Reston. There are a bunch of other stores and businesses—a couple of bakeries, a few restaurants, a print shop, a catering house, etc.

Down the road about 1,500 feet is a Target where I frequently do quick shopping trips, usually to pick up something small like toothpaste or dishwasher pods. About 1,200 feet in the other direction is a Habitat for Humanity ReStore, a thrift shop where I also frequently look around. The Target is about a 10-minute walk, at my brisk pace. Maybe a little less. The thrift store is about a five-minute walk. About a mile away, roughly an 18-20 minute walk, is the Reston Town Center, a downtown-style development that, all things considered, is pretty well done.

Here’s a satellite shot of all this (copyright Google Maps). I’m at Weird Brothers Coffee, in the middle; the Target is labeled on the bottom middle, and the thrift store is on the left near the Spring Street label. The Reston Town Center is at the far right.

Those distances are eminently walkable. However, you’d have to walk along here:

And what’s more, there’s nowhere to park. I don’t mean there are no spaces; the many parking lots along here are almost never full. The issue is that there is nowhere to leave your car and walk around to different properties in the area, because technically each parking lot is exclusive to whatever property it’s attached to. It’s unlikely anyone will call the tow truck if you park and walk off, but it’s possible. And there’s also no easy way to get here without a car in the first place. The rules, as written, do not accommodate treating this environment as an urban fabric.

I wrote about something similar, also for Strong Towns, when I walked down U.S. 50 in the City of Fairfax, Virginia:

Zooming out a bit now, the fact is that while three miles is a long walk, nobody is really going to walk the whole stretch. I passed a lot of stores and restaurants, such that many shorter walks would still provide access to lots of businesses. The scale of everything is clearly intended for driving. But the distances between properties, and between the strip and the nearby neighborhoods, are really not that great. And this is considering the landscape on foot; Fairfax Boulevard is quite easily bikeable in terms of size and scale. The perception of distance is a function not of raw space, but of road design and width, sidewalk design, setbacks, parking lot sizes, and physically disconnected real-estate parcels.

This is a pretty standard urbanist critique of car-dependent built environments. But what’s interesting to me is how this shapes my behavior. During long days at the coffee shop—from 8am to 4pm, most days—it would be nice to go for a walk up and down the street or to the thrift store or Target, and come back. Or to spend an hour strolling around the Town Center. However, I can’t really do that, because I’d be leaving the car at the coffee shop’s lot and walking off.

This forces me to kind of camp out at the coffee shop. It makes it feel, like U.S. 50, that every property along this street is an island unto itself, not connected or stitched together to the others. It seems to reinforce a kind of alienated individualism. It makes it impossible to perceive this strip as a place, where you can move between the properties which ultimately add up to something. The design and rule set produces a certain, particular set of behaviors and attitudes. When you have to drive everywhere, and stop and park at each piece of private property, it makes it hard to form a mental map. Car dependence is at least in part a way of looking at places. The design shapes a certain psychology, and that psychology in turn shapes how we build.

We’ve put considerable effort into making it difficult to get around. We’ve purposely added friction to the variety and fluidness of urban life, whether at the scale of a city or a small town. And we view this strange state of affairs as a normal or baseline condition.

I’m not arguing for getting rid of parking lots, or private property, obviously. I’m trying to convey that this ubiquitous way of designing places is very much a consequence of policy choices, values, and assumptions. You have to really grasp that before you can think about what it would take to make it better.

300 People and History in Clifton, VA

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