Another Bad Thing about Sprawl

Madness of the Minotaur: from Myth to Mode of Transit
A Survey of Roads’ Adverse Effects on Space

Literature Review
Research on Problems of the Car Culture

August 8, 2007



ABSTRACT
Literature is cited supporting the claim that use of personal vehicles leads to adverse conditions that ultimately tend to discourage travel. Thus movement is restricted and personal contacts limited to those within home communities, often segregated along socio-economic means reinforced by social pressures of conformity. The network of roads thus precluding aspects important to human social life is compared to the mythical prison called the labyrinth.

INTRODUCTION
Driving personal vehicles has become the prevailing mode of transit in the U.S., and a symbol of national and personal wealth. The historic and economic reasons for this are myriad but the consequences of it are increasingly clear. As much of the rapidly industrializing world emulates American technology and the culture that surrounds it, in particular, the adoption of personal cars, the problems associated with cars and the culture that surrounds them presents a truly global problem.
Cars in and of themselves as mechanical devices pose great danger to other motorists on the roadways, pedestrians on or near the roadways, and increasingly to people within structures such as storefronts and even private residences. Furthermore, there are indirect dangers in the form of pollution. The burning of fossil fuels, both gasoline and diesel, as power sources for the cars leads to a dramatic rise in pollution, notably SO2 and CO2. Sulfur dioxide causes respiratory diseases and chronic ailments such as asthma, and CO2 pollution is linked to environmental problems, notably global climate change—in the U.S., 71% of the CO2 pollution is linked to transportation (Cristopherson 2006).
Cars engender enormous expense, and not just for the individual, but for the government, as well, at the city, county, state, and the federal level. This paper explores the various problems in expense, resources, health, and safety that the car culture has developed for the individual and for society. Apart from finances, both personal and public, cars take a toll on two other resources, space and time. It is in these that the greatest cost is borne.



BACKGROUND ON PLANNING
To understand the intricacies of road development and why cars have come to dominate the minds of urban planners, some background in town planning was necessary. Much of urban planning from the ancient world is understated in the academic literature. It would be of some use to study also Rome, China, the linear arrangement of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico and the extraordinary rope bridges and roads of the Inca. From this early vantage, however, it seems urban planning begins with Ebenezer Howard.
The UNT Library has a copy of the revised 1902 edition of Garden Cities of To-Morrow, the standard compared to Howard’s original 1898 work. The essay is a utopian financial plan for urban development. The geography is scant except for Howard’s theory of the Town-Country Magnet, wherein he argues that the combination of town and country’s best elements will attract the most residents. This supposition underpins his financial plan, promising that rents will quickly repay the capital investment.
Moreover, the Town-Country Magnet explains the physical plan of concentric circles, or rings, intersected by long through-streets, “magnificent boulevards” as Howard calls them, a hub-and-spoke system that provides transitions between primary land-usage areas. An urban core is the hub, and the town ring is surrounded by agricultural land that fades into the undeveloped wilderness. Ultimately, Howard’s plan could be connected to a network of ten Garden Towns to develop a Garden City.
For further research on Howard’s influence, it would be of some interest to compare Howard’s plan to a modern suburban development and see how the financial plans may be similar. Howard reasons that the residents can buy their properties in the form of rents from the town founders who initially acquire the land. This seems comparable to a home mortgage loan for a suburban “planned community” developed by private builders. Home Owners Associations resemble Howard’s Central Council more than do city councils.
There is between them, one notable geographic distinction—Howard expected people to walk, and suburbia does not. In many subdivisions, like my own, no sidewalks are present, and transit accommodation is completely dominated by the car. It is this complete subordination of human existence to cars that so rankled Victor Gruen, who argued that the built environment was increasingly being adapted to the needs and uses of cars at the expense of human uses of space.
While Gruen lamented the intrusion of cars, he struggled to incorporate them by separating their space from that inhabited by people. Gruen invokes medieval town planning for his solution; he was from Vienna, and discusses its ability to repel invaders with a concentric series of fortified ring roads. By placing similar severe constraints on the car space and its location, Gruen can defend urban space, freeing it for human uses such as walking and shopping.
The nightmare for Victor Gruen, Cassandra-like in his vision of the future, is that the space required by the cars was disproportionately large compared to the space attracting the drivers of the cars to the city—five times as much space, according to his Fort Worth Plan (1956). To accommodate them would so riddle the city with roads that it could no longer function because of surface parking and traffic congestion. This in turn spurs further road building. The domination of the cars over the pedestrians leads to a decrease in foot traffic near the shops. Eventually, the congestion, inconvenient or insufficient parking, and the commute itself discourage shoppers from driving to the store, so the store moves to them. The exurban migration of both residents and retail causes a feedback loop of sprawl, roads, and parking that engenders an expanded need for cars. As Graham and Marvin (2001) point out, “most cities now devote over half their entire land area to the car.”
What seems idyllic in Howard’s Garden City is that there are no cars, and so the wide roads are filled with people. It evokes images of impressionist paintings of gentlemen and ladies strolling along the Champs Elysées, as protecting leisure time was a cornerstone of Howard’s utopian social thinking. The expansive roads were to be gathering places for the community, filled with opportunities for chance encounters, what Gruen, Jacobs, and others have argued to be the essence of the urban experience. Howard’s plan represents an ideal from which walking space has been shrinking, as Jacobs notes in the other classic on planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
At 420 feet in width, Howard’s boulevards certainly are magnificent. The Champs Elysées is only 229 feet wide. Compared to the 75 feet of Manhattan sidewalks for which Jane Jacobs pleaded, Howard’s boulevards are splendorous—in Fort Worth the sidewalks are only three feet wide. What might be considered the first national highway, Rome’s Appian Way “queen of the long roads,” as the Roman poet Statius put it, was wide enough for a legion to march down, shoulder to shoulder, and averages a mere twenty feet in width—about five feet more narrow than the average two-way road in the U.S. The highways, of course, have more than these two lanes, and take up more even space. This brief historical comparison of great roadways shows by width that because of their demands on space, cars have come to displace humans from the places that humans create.
The impetus for the U.S. interstate highway system was to provide a method of rapid military deployment across the nation by connecting urban core areas, but primarily to offer metropolitan transit. The official name is the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways—they’re part of that complex he warned everybody about. However, their creation had their beginnings in 1937 under Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was also involved at the time in creating programs for individual home loans that helped drive suburban development. And so, a need was developing to move people into the urban core for work, and then out of it for residence—the beginnings of the modern commute (AASHTO 2006).
Cars were seen as the answer to suburban transit needs, but they needed a specialized environment for safety and efficiency—roads. Therefore, according to the Interstate Highway System’s brief history, “need was seen not just to deliver travelers to the edge of the city but to provide direct access to the center both for commercial and later for defense purposes.” The highways have had their own effects on urban development, often disruptive (Graham and Marvin 2001, also Jacobs 1992).
For more on Howard and his influence use was made of the book Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century by Robert Fishman, which compared him to two other influential planners, Frank Lloyd Wright and Edouard Le Corbusier. While Howard emphasized roads, Le Corbusier did away with them in favor of mixed-use skyscrapers, which employed elevators to connect people. Le Corbusier substituted horizontal space for vertical, with functions separated by floors. The towers themselves, only fifteen percent of the land area, were set as islands in park and agricultural land.
Frank Lloyd Wright, somewhat in between the two other planners, envisioned an optimistically orderly mixture of pedestrians and small cars along roads of suburban landscaping. Referring to their designs in the introduction, Fishman finds the language for which this researcher searched in his first graduate interview, indicated by the italics added: “These ideal cities are perhaps the most ambitious and complex statements of the belief that reforming the physical environment can revolutionize the total life of a society.”
Sum it up as “bad design leads to bad behavior,” which connects to an anecdote from the great sociologist, Emile Durkheim. He noted in the classic work Suicide, that a succession of hangings ended once the lone hook was removed from a passageway where patients were left alone briefly during their admission—a psychologically vulnerable time in which stress and fear caused a susceptibility to suggestion. Removing the hook eliminated the physical means for hanging, but it did more, perhaps, psychologically, to remove the symbol which spawned the idea. Durkheim concludes that the physical environment can influence the mind because its obsessions “cease with the disappearance of the material object which evoked the idea.”
Howard’s belief is opposite but not contrary, that a beautified environment wherein man can live close to the clean air of nature will lead men to become prosperous and civilized because they’re sanitized. Good design leads to good behavior.

HEALTH AND SAFETY CONCERNS
There are literally thousands of articles and books that relate to cars and roads. It must be pointed out that this researcher is not the first to recognize the harmful effects of cars, and one should not be surprised that there abound numerous studies of disease related to their use, no further surprise that there is a great focus on respiratory ailments and pollution from cars. While the pollution effects are cumulative, long exposure times are not a requirement for negative impacts. Dan Maynard, et al. (2007) used GIS to study the acute effects of traffic particles on mortality in Boston, and found that “the effects of traffic particles were seen for respiratory, cardiovascular, and stroke deaths.” Unlike much of the literature, the Maynard group focuses on the short term, showing that chronic exposure is not required for an adverse effect on mortality.
Yet, even this level of exposure is less than that for the drivers of the cars themselves. Kaur, Nieuwenhuijsen, and Colvile (2007) compared people using the same street, observing the “pedestrians and cyclists to experience lower fine particulate matter and CO exposure concentrations in comparison to those inside vehicles—the vehicle shell provided no protection to the passengers.”
Pollution also interferes with the health of plants. Bignal, et al. (2007) reviewed three studies that independently observed ecological damage across plant species from trees to lichens, and as far as one kilometer from the road surface, but with the heaviest impact (greater than sixty percent) within 50 to 100 meters. Even Gruen did not factor in this kind of information, but his perspective on how cars’ ancillary effects on space are plain here, and the lateral extent from the road shows their creeping effect. Coupled to a conservationist perspective, the space to be considered is then 200 meters plus the width of the road.
What is the width the road? Well, of course, it varies. A 1998 report of federal aid for highways (http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/hs98/tables/hm33.pdf) listed some total miles by lane widths. The widths were from 9-12 feet, with less than 9 and greater than 12 thrown in, which, respectively, were valued at 8 and 13 feet in the following estimate. The area of the roads that got federal money in 1998 was 2,183 square miles. That by no means includes all the paved roads in the U.S., much less all the unpaved, too, the inclusion of which is cartographically problematic (Hawbaker and Radeloff, 2004), as many publicly available maps and GIS files lack information on smaller paved and unpaved roads. By comparing different maps so as to include all existing roads, Hawbaker and Radeloff establish grounds that estimates of the physical space of road networks currently may be significantly undervalued.
According to the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHTO), there are 3,267,717 linear miles of the paved roads, so, at 12 feet wide, what AASHTO calls the “typical width” that’s 48,274 square miles. Out of the 3.5 million or so square miles in the U.S., that’s not a great percentage, about 1.3. However, the space to be considered is more than just where the rubber meets the road.
The oft-cited Richard T. T. Forman, along with Lauren E. Alexander, conducted a detailed study of the effects of road networks on a variety of non-human species. The authors estimate that 15-20% of the U.S. ecology is affected by the mere existence of roads.
Not surprisingly, there is for other animals, as the authors describe, a range of benefits and detriments, just as there is for humans. There are some animals that scavenge carrion along the roadways. In less-frequently mowed roadsides, animals may even den or nest. Some species utilize roads as transit corridors (for short distances), although, most do not. In particular, Forman and Alexander note the movement of some beetles parallel to the roadside, which is deceptive, for while there is significant movement along the road, it may be because the beetles, unlike the proverbial chicken, cannot cross the road.
This supposition on my part parallels other studies that show roads to be major inhibitors to the natural movement of animals and plants, from one of which (Pescador and Peris, 2007) I borrow this line: “Roads and highways should be considered as ecological systems with a character of their own: i.e., as specific barriers that separate the habitats of different plant and animal communities.” Qualitatively, that word “barrier” is important to the interpretation of prison-like conditions that surround the car culture and its consequent built-environment, so, again, the italics in the quote above were added. Do other animals suffer from “prison-like” environments? Probably not in the human sense of the term, but if their movement is restricted they do suffer ill effects at least in that their habitat has become fragmented and inaccessible—at least the part across the road.
Animals can’t cross the road because they get hit by cars. Forman and Alexander extrapolate from small-scale studies that one million vertebrates are killed on U.S. roads per day. One simple descriptive statistic from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics makes a clear case for the danger of cars to humans:
Transportation Fatalities by Mode
Mode 1980 1990 2000 2005
Highway 51,091 44,599 41,945 43,443

For the sake of raising rabble, it should be pointed out that in 2005 alone better than 40,000 more people were killed in an act of transit than were killed in the act of terror perpetrated on 9/11, and that this happens every year. And yet, Detroit hasn’t been invaded. Victor Gruen wrote in 1964 that since the invention of the automobile more people had been killed in auto-accidents “than have been killed in all the wars fought by this country to date.” Including what’s been going on since Gruen left off, the war casualties are a little under 1.3 million for the two-hundred-and-thirty-or-so years, 1776-2005. From 1986-2005—less than twenty years—there were almost as many roadway casualties: 938,593 (http://members.aol.com/usregistry/allwars.htm and Bureau of Traffic Statistics).

QUALITATIVE ASSESSMENTS OF DRIVING
The weight of the preponderance of evidence has not fallen on completely deaf ears, either, as the Texas Department of Transportation’s 2008-2011 transportation improvement plan for the DFW Region reveals:
regarding quality-of-life issues . . . participants discussed how investment in transportation projects and C.5 programs impacts various areas of urban living, not just mobility. It is recognized that, while transportation investment directly impacts such things as urban mobility, air quality, and economic development, there are other less direct, but equally important, impacts of transportation systems and services

The problem is at least alluded to by TXDOT, but Gruen stated the car-induced suburban crisis with more dramatic flair:
Instead of the city with its rooted citizens, we will have urban sprawl with its drifting nomadic inhabitants. . . . containing only traffic with which inhabitants must battle.

This theme is explored in much of the qualitative literature encountered. Mainly, these are psychological studies that investigate driver aggression, which, in a way, conforms to Durkheim’s theory of stress-related suggestibility, in this case the imitations not of suicide, but of aggressive driving commonly rewarded in video games or auto-racing, and glamorized in films such as The Fast and the Furious or its sequels, or any string of examples of Hollywood movies that presents a car chase—and for a complete list, please refer to Wikipedia’s entry on them, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_chase, noteworthy in itself that there is an entry specifically for car chases.
Just as a quick cultural linguistics example, think of the phrase “cut to the chase,” which comes out of this standard movie scene, and encourages one to quickly and saliently make one’s point, underscoring the idea that the car chase is the main point of entertainment in a movie. Cars dominate our very thought.
One of the leading causes of driver aggression, noted in the well-documented article “Traffic Congestion, Driver Stress, and Driver Aggression” (Hennessy and Wiesenthal, 1999) is frustration at impedances like driving slowly [citations are those of the authors]:

High congestion typically involves a greater number of vehicles that travel at a slower pace. According to Broome [1985], such impediments represent the greatest source of driving irritation, frustration, and goal blocking, which are precursors to driver stress . . . [and] to aggressive behavior [Blanchard and Blanchard, 1984]. Within the confines of a highly irritable, highly stressful congested situation, anger and its expression through aggression are becoming more common. Reported incidents of road rage have been escalating worldwide, particularly under conditions of heightened demands on drivers [Taylor, 1997]. . . . The target of such aggression is typically other drivers who are perceived as the source of frustration [Gulian et al., 1989a]. Driving “vengeance,” in the form of reciprocal driver aggression, may present a special form of “escalation potential” [Gibson and Wiesenthal, 1996]. Aggression toward another driver may elicit return, or revenge-oriented, aggression.

That’s a long quotation, included at length because it syllogistically makes the connection between the qualitative aspects of the driving environment and its influence on behavior. This connection also can be seen on HWY 377 where the road shrinks from the two lanes surrounding major intersections back down to the one travel lane between them. The shrinking space causes alarm at the prospect of being last in line, and people race not to end up so as the two lanes merge into one. An altercation may extend to, perhaps, several intersections, at each of which the highway widens, and the parties jockey for pole position before the highway again narrows.
One reason people drive slowly is that there are stoplights. Before going further with a brief review of the literature on stoplights, there should be noted one thing that is representative of their strategic implementation and that should be kept in one’s mind while reading about “the green wave,” and that is these devices aren’t called golights.

TRAFFIC ENGINEERING, SPACE, AND TIME
My mind keeps returning to the final lecture of my undergraduate physics class, where the good professor concluded by demonstrating how space and time are “the same—they share the same unit of measure,” he said, 1 second. That boggles my mind still, but I began to understand it a little as I endlessly drove up and down HWY 377 for grad school.
As traffic gets up to speed, drivers sort themselves out by rates of speed, and that translates as different travel times. It also affects the physical distances between cars, as the faster moving cars accelerate away from the slower-moving cars. But this physical distance is absorbed again at the next stoplight, which delays the faster-moving traffic at the head of the line of cars between intersections until their slower-moving fellows can rejoin them. It seems to keep traffic as a whole moving at an average speed near the speed limit, but it’s not the most efficient way to travel, as demonstrated in an article on traffic modeling by Elmar Brockfeld, et al.
Their article is expansive, and includes a lot of math, graphs, and diagrams, which make it seem impressive, but amid them are a quite a few words—useful to researchers like myself. Brockfeld, et al. refer to what was news to me—“For almost half a century, there were strong attempts to develop a theoretical framework of traffic science”—there’s actually a theory at work in all this!
The Brockfeld study presented a familiarity with the work done on traffic engineering the extent of which in itself is worthy of comment, and explains that the traffic models fall into two concepts. The earlier models viewed traffic as a “coarse-grained compressible fluid,” but the later “microscopic model” sees traffic as interacting particles. Cellular automata (CA) techniques make computer models of urban traffic wherein the traffic behaves as individual units consisting of one cell. If you wade through a lot of explanatory technical references to other models, you may eventually find that the Brockfeld study
indicates that synchronizing the traffic lights is an ineffective strategy that is not capable of bringing an additional gain out of the network topology. Further, it was shown that . . . there are strong oscillations in the throughput of the network depending on the chosen traffic light periods. Another disadvantage is that . . . the first maxima are located at unrealistic short cycle times for the chosen street length.

That last bit refers to the space-time continuum-thing mentioned earlier. In this case, if the green lights are too short in the time they are illumined, traffic backs up, because the line of cars cannot pass through the intersection uninterrupted. Those cars held back are then joined by the next group, enlarging that line of cars, and requiring more time to pass through the next light. Delayed traffic means longer commute times.
The Brockfeld group determines that a “green wave” strategy offers greater flow capacity by allowing cross-traffic to move, causing a red light, while traffic is approaching but distant, and converting to a green light, thereby ending the cross-traffic, whose light then turns red, as traffic arrives in the intersection. The green wave is the succession of traffic lights, which occurs in series, as opposed to the synchronous model where all the lights in one direction are green while all the cross-traffic is stopped at red.
Italics were added to the word chosen in the quotation earlier, leading up to the idea that wherever such human-choice control systems exist, there also exists the opportunity for manipulation and exploitation. In fact, there’s an economic incentive to badly manage the public motorways because, as Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin point out in their book, Splintering Urbanism, many roads are going private,
profit-oriented and customized to the needs of affluent commuters on particular urban corridors. . . . superimposed on old public highway grids. . . . allowing paying commuters to ‘wormhole’ through some of the most congested public highways

FOR WHOM THE TOLLS ROSE
“Drivers will soon have the option of bypassing congestion by using Texas Tollways,” says the Texas Department of Transportation. To make it look like Texas motorists aren’t being herded into some kind of driving tax, TXDOT adds, “And drivers who prefer not to pay a toll will always have a non-tolled alternative.” But that alternative remains contending with the congested, rage-filled traffic on the older public roadways, which the department itself recognizes are overburdened, confessing that “our highways look like parking lots. When it comes to roads, drivers need a choice to get them out of congestion and gridlock.”
The choice they’re presenting is to pay the extra money for one-time uses of what is, ostensibly, still a public roadway. It’s a win-win situation for government, which can enjoy revenues, and for politicians, who do not have to sell a tax hike to the public. The argument, from TXDOT, for toll roads goes like this:
The population in Texas is continuing to grow, and so is the demand for new and better roads. Gas taxes alone cannot fund all the roads the public wants and needs. Tolls can supplement highway funds to get a head start on dealing with traffic congestion. With cash upfront, miles of toll roads can be finished faster than highways funded simply by gas taxes. Fees that drivers pay to use toll lanes will repay the money borrowed to build them. Tolling gets roads built quicker and gets people moving. It also provides motorists more routes and more time-saving choices.

It sounds like Howard’s Garden City plan, easing congestion and offering choice, and the quick repayment of investment money. It’s not a new idea, either; the history of roads is one of toll roads. Yet the studies commissioned by FDR and later used by Eisenhower to create the federal highway system showed that tolls could pay for the roads only on areas of high volume. The need for federal subsidy for the low volume areas was inescapable, and provided additional rationale for making the roadways free of charge to motorists, thereby encouraging travel. Despite this historic view, toll roads, TXDOT will tell you, are the future. There is just not enough tax money to pay for all the roads government proposes:
Highways in Texas have traditionally been funded with gas taxes. But state and federal gas taxes no longer generate enough money to keep up with the costs of building new roads, upgrading current ones and paying for upkeep of 79,500 miles of state highways.

The introduction of a revenue generator changes the roadways from a debt-ridden public utility into a profitable, privately acquired commodity. But it is one that sells only if the “free”ways become frustratingly unnavigable. Granting that they already are is why, presumably, a bidding contest developed over a contract to construct an express tollway off TX 121, won by the North Texas Travel Authority’s bid of 3.5 billion dollars plus construction costs.
Of course, that kind of thinking is reserved for the comparatively inefficient and unsafe state highways. The interstate system, according to the 40-year report on the U.S. interstate highway system by Wendell Cox and Jean Love, (who wrote the Orwellian chronicle for the American Highway Users Alliance) at around 350 billion dollars, is the best investment in history. Clearly, the idea of user-pay schemes conflicts with this historic interpretation of the freeways. Indeed, according to the 50-year history of the system (http://www.interstate50th.org/docs/techmemo1.pdf), had tolls been the funding source for interregional roads, “it appears clear that a national network would have been unlikely to arise.”
It is the opportunity for quick, easy, and uncharged transit that made the highway system successful. Perhaps it has been too successful, as congestion has increased as the volume of use has increased. The obvious solution, of course, is to decrease the number of cars using the roadways. User-pay schemes are specifically designed to discourage travel. The Wall Street Journal (Chozick 2007) reports that cities such as Dallas, Miami, and New York are considering plans based on London’s rush hour toll, which relies on sophisticated surveillance equipment for enforcement. Examine this statement, part of an economic recommendation to alleviate traffic congestion through user-pay combined with other transit operations designed
to present travelers with a choice between their a priori desired trip . . . and, not to be forgotten, the choice not to travel at all

The second set of italics indicates the most damning evidence of all. Although this quote came from an Australian journal article (Hensher and Puckett, 2006), Americans face the same choice. The irony of using cars as the primary mode of individual transit is that it is ultimately self-defeating as it leads to schemes discouraging travel.

THE LABYRINTH
One might think of prisons as spaces that absorb people’s time. So are roads. At the risk of philosophic fallacy, whether by accident or design, roads function as prison space.
Return to the myth of King Minos and his fearsome, inescapable prison, the labyrinth, the name is a word taken from the Greek for “alley” or “lane.” Designed with a complex network of tunnels, footpaths, and dead-ends, the labyrinth was a maze to confuse and stymie inmates forever—or until the minotaur, a mythical monster of human and bovine parentage, could kill them. Cars, one might be reminded by the often-seen longhorns of various motifs (including the University of Texas at Austin’s own) attached to hoods, tow hitches, windshields—cars are the minotaur.
Encounters with the Minotaur
Mode 1980 1990 2000 2005
Highway 51,091 44,599 41,945 43,443

Commuting time is the prison—one’s daily journey through the labyrinth. The longer your commute, the more time you lose. And the more likely it is that you won’t escape. But there is another hidden, secret prison environment—suburbia.
By discouraging travel, people conversely are encouraged to stay in their homes. Each suburban house is a cell, connected to personal identification information, and readily surveilled by helicopter. The streets are monitored by the guards—police in their patrol cars, in a way of thinking. Mumford, like Gruen, mentioned how medieval towns were constructed with a network of streets to slow the progress of invaders, trapping them where residents could mount a defense. It can work the other way, too, keeping people in—Graham and Marvin (alluding to Pope) observe that in new development road networks “branch in cul-de-sac, ‘laddered’ fashion, with each strand leading to a singular destination, to ensure maximum closure of the social network.” This is a complaint in the feminist literature on suburban planning. The car “actually worked to restrict women’s mobility and reinforce their confinement to the home.” (Graham and Marvin, 2001)
As the suburbs opened up from the 1930s through the 1970s, in conjunction with the rise in detached housing, of car ownership and road building, urban space became separated from suburban space by sex as well as—and because of—function. Men worked in the city and women worked in the home. Transport planning was “geared to the male breadwinner’s commute to work. All others found it hard to escape the . . . spatial and technical forms,” (Graham and Marvin, 2001) because it was accessible only by car, and hubby had taken the car to work. As the suburbs generally were not connected to core areas via public transit, the road network became a barrier to the car-less suburban resident, namely, the housewife. Although this situation has changed as women have entered the workforce, their commutes only exacerbate the transit problem.
Graham and Marvin quote from King, saying that the feminists viewed the suburban household as “the prominent locus of confinement. Its street—the milieu of quiet, discreet, respectful surveillance.” This is a who-watches-the-watchers sort of scenario, wherein conformity is maintained through external scrutiny. The benefit of having “more eyes on the street” as Jacobs put it in regard to an urban setting becomes somewhat paranoia-inducing in the suburban setting because the dearth of street activity results in more eyes being turned on each other. It was this theme of suburban conformity and deference to the male ego that would be played out in the science fiction/psychological thriller, The Stepford Wives. The theme of suburban isolation was alluded to in BBC’s The Prisoner, who was incarcerated in what seemed a very posh suburban community called “The Village,” a typical suburban moniker.
However, it is not only women caught in the suburban trap, but anyone without a car, “the poor and the working class in general,” (Wajcman, 1981, quoted in Graham and Marvin, 2001) or, as with the elderly, those who no longer can drive. In particular, driving cessation is a difficult change-of-life issue as people must adapt to the loss of what they felt was independence.
Gardezi, et al. show that the inevitability of driving cessation has little effect on individual planning, however, citing Burkhardt (2000) for this quote of a driving study participant contemplating that the “day is going to come–have to give up or cut back. Haven’t thought about that day.” Dispossession of the ability to drive makes the only available mode of transit inaccessible. Gardezi, et al. record that
Drivers and non-drivers in many studies refer to the experience or the prospect of driving cessation in strong terms, often using language that equates driving cessation with loss of self, death, and imprisonment (Eisenhandler, 1990; Johnson, 1999; Rothe, 1990). As noted by participants in focus groups conducted by Yassuda et al. (1997), “It would be like dying,” “It would be like being in prison.”

CONCLUSION
There is a falsity to the image of the car providing freedom of mobility, and yet it seems impossible to dispel its myth. Access to the system is limited by economic means. Further, having no access to a car can mean having no access to city functions such as employment, shopping, and government. Even with access, for example, Alexander Pope writes that a highway system “eliminates choice by enforcing a strict, hierarchical movement,” that reduces interconnectivity of urban functions (Graham and Marvin, 2001). The road network is a harbor for and also creates filth, ailments, and violence. Vehicular traffic is both high-risk and high-cost, but it is also low-yield in two important ways. First, the system inhibits the physical movement of human bodies in favor of the physical demands of cars. Second, use of the system results in congestion that leads to schemes designed to discourage travel. It has been demonstrated by many studies that cars and their road network interfere with the professed desires for social life such as health, community spirit, and cohesion of the urban core wherein social life takes place. Casualties matched in number only by war are meekly accepted.
One is left to wonder why in the fifty years since the presentation of Gruen’s Fort Worth Plan there has been so little progress creating pedestrian-oriented space. For example, the mixed-use retail and residence conversion of the historic Montgomery Ward building on West 7th Street has a pedestrian grand colonnade through which car traffic must pass entering the parking area, demonstrating how good ideas can be flawed by concessions to the car culture. As Gruen would have pointed out, however, with the location so far removed from downtown there is little danger of pedestrians being attracted to the space, and thus, the view persists that concessions must be made. Like Daedalus in his labyrinth, and with irony appropriate to myth, we find ourselves in a cage of our own construction.
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LITERATURE CITED
American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. 2006. The Interstate and national highway system: A brief history and lessons learned. Future Options for the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. NCHRP Project 20-24 Document. 28 pp. http://www.interstate50th.org/docs/techmemo1.pdf (last accessed 8 August 2007).
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