Letters to the Editor
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New Urbanism is not the answer
I am soooooo tired of hearing how the so-called “new urbanism” is going to solve all of our unlivable landscape problems that I could just retch. I watched a small city (100K, counting college students) use this planning fad to transform itself from a city where pedestrians, bus riders and, especially, bicyclists outnumbered fossil-fool powered wheelchairs by at least ten to one to a bedroom community almost totally devoid of human powered transportation.
How did this happen? It works like this: new urbanism requires commercial centers to be very close to each other because it assumes that people’s transportation choices are driven exclusively by distance, with fossil-fool powered wheelchairs required for any distance exceeding two miles. Where you have these commercial centers, you have high densities of cars. Add the high density housing next to or over these centers (a main feature of “new urbanism”) and you get densities of fossil-fool powered wheelchairs that cause almost everyone to refuse to walk/cycle in these areas. Since these high-density zones are everywhere, no one can get anywhere with any degree of safety without a ton or two of steel around them.
A secondary tragedy of “new urbanism” is that very few of these developments “pencil out” on brownfields. This results in any and all open space being pressed into service to save us from sprawl. Of course, since people have a natural desire to spend time in open space away from other people’s cars, communities that adopt “new urbanism” soon find that everyone is driving out of town every chance they get just to enjoy a walk or bike ride (as was already suggested by one responder).