Unwalkable: What’s Wrong with Irvine, California (What’s Right with Clichy, France)
Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike and Urban Everesting), with photos by Martha Cramer
In Slow Cities: Conquering our Speed Addiction for Health and Sustainability (Tranter and Tolley), we learn how the “motordom” lobby coerced municipal authorities to redirect society into automobile determinism, which forces us into an unhealthy sedentary lifestyle. Compliant municipalities grew around the illusion of moving faster. But when all factors are measured, we see that the speed delusion bogs us down and creates inequality.
Throughout Slow Cities we see many municipalities that once got it wrong evolving toward greater pedestrian comfort and safety. Or as Tranter and Tolley phrase it:
1959: Look twice before you cross the street.
2019: Think twice before you build the street.
Tranter and Tolley cite a passage from Thoreau’s Walden in which he introduces the concept of effective speed. Thoreau claims he can walk to the next town 30 miles away faster than his friend can get there by train, because “effective” travel time must count the time his friend has to work to pay the train fare.
For walkers, effective time also involves safety and aesthetics. Here I’ll contrast two cities with radically different walkability outcomes: Irvine, California and Clichy, France.
Irvine
With no downtown, sprawling Irvine, California offers three possible settings for walking:
- Single-use housing clusters, with no commerce and no through traffic
- Through streets built so wide they become roads
- Shopping centers within immense parking lots
Consider this video by a guy who claims to love Irvine. Judge for yourself. Watching for only the first minute is sufficient. Must see to believe!
In 18 minutes of watching this video tour along Irvine’s streets, you find only one or two people on the unwalkable sidewalks. A rare member of our species who lived in Irvine without a car wrote this about his carless experience in “State of Place”:
Only for people who have no choice but to walk is the presence of sidewalks enough (even if they are only three feet wide and abut what is essentially a freeway).
Clichy Compared to Irvine
Let’s do a wrong-right contrast between the walkability of Irvine and the Parisian suburb city of Clichy-la-Garenne.
WRONG: At my grandson’s Irvine cluster, there is no public transportation. When he becomes 16, he will require a car, which is a hidden expense for parents living within the invisible wall of sprawl.
RIGHT:
Irvine has the space and revenue for tramways, but as a representative of “Irvine Shares the Way” reminded me, “We are car-centric.”
WRONG: Housing tracts have residence-only zoning. My grandson’s parents cannot say, “Son, here’s some money. Can you go get us a loaf of bread?” because the nearest store is more than two miles away! Either drive or don’t survive.
RIGHT:
No matter where you live in Clichy, you can walk to shopping.
WRONG and RIGHT: As seen in the earlier linked video, all Irvine main thoroughfares have bike lanes. But they’re narrow and not protected. It’s thus rare to see anyone doing an errand by bike. On weekends you see MAMILS, middle-aged men in lycra, using those lanes.
RIGHT:
WRONG: Widened streets morph into roads. Long crosswalk red lights with short crossing countdowns demoralize foot traffic. Sidewalks remain empty because of the sensory deprivation.
A street is a place to be. A road, as in this Irvine picture, goes from A to B and nothing happens along the way. It becomes a non-place. That’s why no one wants to walk here even though it has a sidewalk.
RIGHT:
WRONG: Parking lots are built in front of shopping, rendering sidewalks artless and depriving pedestrians of protective shade that comes with streetfront shopping. Even Andy Warhol failed to create pop art from a parking lot.
There’s one particular shopping-entertainment center, Irvine Spectrum, that does have apparent streets designed for walking from one store to another. But this cannot become a convivial neighborhood because nobody lives there.
WRONG: Low-density sprawling neighborhoods with schools beyond walking distance. Add chauffeur to the job title of mom and dad. It’s a 40-minute walk to my grandson’s school, but when I visit I don’t let mom or dad drive him. We walk. When we arrive at school we confront a line of parent-chauffeurs: a manufactured traffic jam that did not have to be.
RIGHT:
In the Clichy street shown in the preceding photo, parents pick up kids on foot. The street belongs to the kids and their parents (and the café in the background).
WRONG: Streets with no sidewalks are the ultimate “f — k you” to the pedestrian. Irvine does have sidewalks, mostly empty. I once walked six miles through the city with my daughter, and we only saw two people along the way.
And RIGHT: But Irvine does have the Jeffrey Trail, a pleasure walk. Superb job, Irvine! But it’s of little use for purposeful walking. (I’ve never seen anyone on the Jeffrey Trail with a shopping caddy walking to the supermarket.)
RIGHT:
In the street pictured above, cars are forced to slow down. Walkers and bike riders are safe!
WRONG: Incessant advertising that links the car to sex, freedom and nature. In the Irvine driving video, “nature” is simply a band-aid to cover up walls of incommunication that leave the pedestrian in solitary confinement.
RIGHT:
In Clichy the hours saved by not getting stuck in traffic are recaptured by the citizen in the form of free time to hang out…after enjoying getting there by foot!
“We have designed cities to suppress walking,” wrote David Goldberg of Smart Growth America. (“Car-driven society poses health risks to Americans,” Matthew Bigg, Health News, 29 May 2009).
The sprawl scam’s bogeyman is named “Congestion.” Congestion is to the housing developer what “the Russians” are to the Cold War militarist. Charles Marohn notes, “The only thing worse than having congestion is not having congestion.” (“Dealing with Congestion”, Strong Towns, 19 Oct 2015). “Curing congestion by adding more lanes is like curing obesity by buying bigger pants,” said Marohn, borrowing from an anonymous humorist.
Sprawl has completed our evolution from hunter-gatherer erectus to consumer quadroplectus.
Anti-sprawl movements have triggered a building-industry response: the “walk score,” which is a numerical rating of how near a property is to commerce.
The walk score functions like a feel-good nutrition label. Its algorithm fails to consider that “near” is not enough if it involves crossing wide boulevards with dismal parking lots.
As walking becomes trendy, walkable communities become a valuable scarcity. Yet developers remain addicted to sprawl. No, Mr Rogers, it’s not “a beautiful day in the neighborhood.”
In 2017, 20% of American car trips were less than a mile, or easily walkable. (“Facts of the week”)
Short car trips add up to 10 billion miles per year in the USA. “If we chose to power half of these short trips with our feet instead of petroleum…we would save about $575 million in fuel costs and about 2 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per year,” according to an EPA report (“What If We Kept Our Cars Parked for Trips Less Than One Mile?”).
The more energy we spend accommodating cars, the quicker we deplete our human energy. Let’s get legitimately selfish about our own health. If we rebuild cities for useful and pleasurable walking, without even aiming to, we’ll be helping the environment.
