For the Wonks
John Norquist, head of the Congress for the New Urbanism (recently in the news because of its controversial plan to redevelop Biloxi, Mississippi) spoke last night at Town Hall as part of a series of events to promote tearing down urban highways, including the Alaskan Way Viaduct. (Speakers also included Town Hall’s David Brewster, the Discovery Institute’s Bruce Agnew, and others, but since my crush on Norquist has already been well-documented, I’ll stick to talking about his speech.)
There’s a longer story, which also focuses on the Washington State Department of Transportation’s (WSDOT) series of viaduct open houses, coming out in tomorrow’s paper, but for now, here are a few excerpts from Norquist’s highly entertaining comments:
• On French architect Le Corbusier’s high-rise “City of Tomorrow,” which inspired the “urban renewal” program in America, with its disastrous high-rise housing projects: “All the pedestrians have been removed. The only purpose of the street is the movement of traffic. It becomes a utility line.”
• On the ever-growing width of arterial streets in the United States: “Traffic engineers back in the 1920s designed streets … with 50 feet of pavement and six-and-a-half or seven feet of sidewalk. But now [a 72-foot-wide street] is the standard. … There’s no money left for sidewalks, so people walk in the gutter. This is the choice that Americans make: They can either ride in a car or be a criminal suspect.”
• On freeway-building in the mid-20th century, which devastated many poor and minority neighborhoods: “This is the black community in Milwaukee in 1906”a thriving, though down-at-the heels, urban neighborhood. “This is the way it looked after it was ‘improved’ by [the US Department of Transportation]”a six-lane freeway lined with sound walls, which Norquist called “the only surviving technology of the East German republic.”
• On freeways vs. streets for reducing congestion (a timely topic, since the no-rebuild viaduct replacement option would push some viaduct traffic onto city streets): “”From a congestion standpoint, the complexity of a wetland absorbs water, so it slows down flooding… The same thing is true of the street grid. The complexity of the network absorbs [traffic] flooding and gives people the chance to use their brains and pick [different] routes.” In Houston, freeways ”were specifically designed to move traffic out of the city… When the bombs would launch you’d get out of town just in time as the mushroom cloud blew up over Houston.” But during last year’s Hurricane Rita, those very roads “failed when we needed them the most.”
Norquist’s vision of a highway-free waterfront hasn’t gained much traction at WSDOT, which remains intent on providing plenty of room for every single one of the 110,000 cars that currently use the viaduct daily. However, some have speculated that the no-highway option may win out even if it doesn’t make it onto a November ballot (currently, the council is leaning toward putting just two options, an elevated replacement and Nickels’s multibillion-dollar tunnel), because so much of the money for both of those options (between $500 million and $2.1 billion) remains unsecured. The no-highway option, which would improve surface street connections and pay for some improvements to I-5 and transit) is estimated at just $800 million.
Yeah, regardless of what's on the ballot, doing nothing is always an option in this city.
I'm not sure I even have an opinion on this any more. I'll probably never own a car again as long as I live here.