HER HAIR GOT EVERYWHERE
A Little Story
By
Joaquin Torrans
I have a friend--she's really great,
whose story I have to relate.
You’d like her, my friend, everyone does.
She’s a happy person, chatty from her coffee-buzz.
Some girls worry that they’re fat,
That their noses are too big, or their chins are too small
My friend doesn’t have those concerns at all.
But there is one thing about which she is obsessive in her care:
her bright red ENORMOUS HAIR!
Really, I think she must have the hugest hair on all of Earth.
And she’s had it right from her birth.
Her mother told me once that Nikki was born a little late,
and she figured that was because her hair needed a longer while to incubate.
Of course, the doctor said that can’t be true,
but doctors always say things like that when they haven’t got a clue
as to why things happen the way they do.
He said that she was unusual, though.
You see, most kids are born with hair that’s black and fine,
but Nikki’s looked like a ball of twine.
The doc was nearly scared to death as he tried to start her breath.
With all that hair he couldn’t find her butt to pat (don’t worry—it’s how they do that). He pushed in this way, and then in there,
but all he could find was hair!
Eventually, though, perhaps from all the patting to and fro,
she started to cry, and a friendly, clever nurse began to comb her dry!
And then, her mother said, right after that,
Nikki’s hair got REALLY big and fat.
Her poor mother had a time, trying to keep that hair in line.
It grew faster than she did, faster and more than any kid.
One night Nikki raised such a squall!
Her mother rushed in and found that the crib was now too small.
When Nikki began to crawl, their dogs were frightened of the big red ball.
And as a toddler, she had to learn to walk with care,
because so many things got knocked over by her hair.
It wasn’t her fault she had such a mess of tress,
just as no one’s to blame if they’re tall or not.
But her mother emphasized that Nikki was still responsible
For all the havoc that her hair wrought.
So, little Nikki learned the hard way to keep her hair in stay.
(And to this day, she molds clay—she’s still trying to replace her mother’s favorite vase!)
When Nikki started school, she learned that some kids can be cruel
You see, her hair attracted so much attention from everyone
that some were jealous, so they made fun.
She could see that she was different, and it really made her grieve.
And for a long time she was embarrassed and sad.
And seeing her that way made her teachers feel bad.
The depth of her despair about her hair is difficult to conceive.
When she was old enough to read,
and her hair was so big it had its own seat,
Nikki’s misery was complete.
But she was so smart and so sweet,
that her teacher couldn’t stand to let her sadness grow.
Miss Blotkin wrote a note that made Nikki positively glow.
It read:
Don’t worry your pretty little head,
The things that made us unique
are always easy to critique.
We have to make these special traits our own,
and love ourselves—and others, too. Forgive them;
show them the humor isn’t lost you.
And if you do, then other people will love you,
no matter how your hair has grown!
The tears that were always near dried right up,
and from then on she really brightened up.
Nikki got some books on hairstyles, and some ribbons to tie it up,
and with her hair off her face, the world seemed to lighten up.
Of course, her hair still got bigger every day,
but it never again made her sad that way.
She just set her mind to what to do
when her hair got up to whatever it got up to.
Like her first time at the zoo:
The day was hot and humid, too,
so her hair got all frizzy and stretched out really far.
In fact, it stretched out right through the bars!
And though she tried to hold it back,
it scared the lions, who fled as from attack
and cowered in the grass until Nikki had gone past.
Things got hairy by the aviary, when some starlings tried to use it for a nest.
And the peacocks thought it was some kind of test.
The biggest male from the peacock flock spread his tail feathers
in competition with her crimson locks.
The other peacocks then cooed really loud,
and so he sauntered off, quite proud.
But the orangutans knew just what to do,
for you see, they have long red hair, too.
Instead of climbing to the top of her tree, as orangs are wont to do,
the big female pulled off two twigs, about chopstick-size
and she thrust them out before Nikki’s eyes.
By now, of course, Nik could take a hint, and into her hair they went.
The twigs worked just like a trellis does,
supporting her rosy hair and holding up the fuzz!
One time Nik and I went camping, and we had quite a scare.
We left out the food and it attracted a big brown bear.
As we hid in fear, protected only by a thin nylon veneer,
he took a swipe at the tent
and FOOMPF! out her hair went
with such a sudden hurry
that the bear ran off, frightened of something so big and furry.
During her last year of high school, Nikki went downtown to see a play.
But before the curtain went up, the man behind her leaned in to say,
“Excuse me, Miss, but could you move your hair?
“These tickets were so expensive, and my wife and I can’t see down there!”
Nikki felt bad that her hair was in the way;
she didn’t want them to miss the play. So she moved to the very back row, so that everyone could see the show.
The couple who had been behind her were so impressed by her graciousness,
that at intermission they bought her one of those sodas that are mostly ice,
and told her, “We wish everyone acted so nice!”
Those kind words made her feel so warm, she thought,
“Boy! Was I lucky to be born with such a special form!
“I’m so grateful that Miss Blotkin helped me see myself as I ought!”
And then she wondered,
“What can I do to help other people feel this good, too?”
Then the lights flashed, signaling it was time for the second act of the play.
And Nikki knew that would be her way.
She went to college that next fall, choosing Dramatic Arts to major in,
because that’s the field that plays are in.
There’s a moral in this story, I’ve been telling you.
Her hair, you see, while never doing exactly what she wanted it to,
helped her find herself and what she wanted to do.
And to like herself, too.
See, that’s a very grown-up thing, you being comfortable with you.
-30-
Monday, October 15, 2007
This was published in the ezine "La Silencia"
Death on a Thursday Morning
Quiet, slow, almost listless: it’s Thursday morning and I’m walking to work. As I pass the schoolyard, I hear a weak squawk, a ruffle of feathers going still.
It is a crow lying on its back in the shady gutter, convulsing. I know that it is too late already. But still, I rush to the bird, touch its talon questioningly. It seems to know what I’m asking, and seems to reassure me that I won’t be scratched.
I pick up the crow by the legs, cradling its back, and lay it on the grass as gently as I can. The convulsions are strong. And I am no doctor.
But the bird doesn’t die. There are no wounds that I can find through the sweaty feathers. I stand it on its feet, hoping that perhaps the crow only is stunned from some fall. There is a squawk of pain; the bird is unable to support itself so I lay it back down.
On her way in to work, a matronly woman stops to ask me, in a thick New Orleans drawl, “Wha’s wrawn wid ’im?”
“I dunno. I just found him in the street.”
“Oh. Maybe a car hit ’im, den.”
And with that, I realize that maybe a car can save him. But mine is still at home, where I left it because I walk to work. I pick up the crow, say, “Hold on,” and I start walking. Fast. I try to run, but it shakes him so, that I must slow down again. If only I were stronger.
When I was very young, my father and I took our walk up to the elementary school. We strolled by my classroom, an annex building just before the playground and the track. Near the steps to my classroom’s door, I spotted a red hawk lying among the leaves in the gutter. He was young and smallish, I was able to carry him in my arms.
Dad and I hurried back to the house and to the car so that we could hurry to the vet. But all the while we were hurrying along, I think Dad knew.
The hawk died in my arms before we got to our street. I buried him in a pile of earth that later was incorporated into the sidewalk around that park, where my father and I walked until we moved away.
I whisper to the crow again, “Hold on, little guy,” but I remember, and I know I’m not going to make it. His convulsions have stopped and his body has stiffened. But his eyes still blink, somewhat inwardly, a muted screech still gasping from his beak. He’s still holding on.
I make it to my street, one of the very few places Uptown without enough trees to blot out the sky. And maybe that is why this poor old crow has been placed in my path. Maybe his soul couldn’t find the sun to wing on towards. As the sunlight fell on him, and he looked up at the spot of clear blue sky, his body shook a last time, his eyes seemed to shut from the inside, his body became rigid. We were right at the boneyard.
I bury him in my backyard, where there’s enough soil to hold him down the next time it floods. I’m grieving that I know no songs to sing for him. A good shaman would have spread his voice on the wind, a companion for the crow on his last journey. He leaves this world without ceremony, for I know none to make.
But I mourn for him. At work, I tell the first person I meet about him. I call my father, so much an old crow himself, and tell him about this one. My dad—more zen a man than most monks—vows to say a prayer for him, and I know that my father will do this. I vow to do the same.
This is it:
Crow
Watchful, ever present
friend
I have heard your calls all my life
And so, I answer.
As one of your kind cries his last
I bring his spirit to the sky
To soar once again
-30-
Quiet, slow, almost listless: it’s Thursday morning and I’m walking to work. As I pass the schoolyard, I hear a weak squawk, a ruffle of feathers going still.
It is a crow lying on its back in the shady gutter, convulsing. I know that it is too late already. But still, I rush to the bird, touch its talon questioningly. It seems to know what I’m asking, and seems to reassure me that I won’t be scratched.
I pick up the crow by the legs, cradling its back, and lay it on the grass as gently as I can. The convulsions are strong. And I am no doctor.
But the bird doesn’t die. There are no wounds that I can find through the sweaty feathers. I stand it on its feet, hoping that perhaps the crow only is stunned from some fall. There is a squawk of pain; the bird is unable to support itself so I lay it back down.
On her way in to work, a matronly woman stops to ask me, in a thick New Orleans drawl, “Wha’s wrawn wid ’im?”
“I dunno. I just found him in the street.”
“Oh. Maybe a car hit ’im, den.”
And with that, I realize that maybe a car can save him. But mine is still at home, where I left it because I walk to work. I pick up the crow, say, “Hold on,” and I start walking. Fast. I try to run, but it shakes him so, that I must slow down again. If only I were stronger.
When I was very young, my father and I took our walk up to the elementary school. We strolled by my classroom, an annex building just before the playground and the track. Near the steps to my classroom’s door, I spotted a red hawk lying among the leaves in the gutter. He was young and smallish, I was able to carry him in my arms.
Dad and I hurried back to the house and to the car so that we could hurry to the vet. But all the while we were hurrying along, I think Dad knew.
The hawk died in my arms before we got to our street. I buried him in a pile of earth that later was incorporated into the sidewalk around that park, where my father and I walked until we moved away.
I whisper to the crow again, “Hold on, little guy,” but I remember, and I know I’m not going to make it. His convulsions have stopped and his body has stiffened. But his eyes still blink, somewhat inwardly, a muted screech still gasping from his beak. He’s still holding on.
I make it to my street, one of the very few places Uptown without enough trees to blot out the sky. And maybe that is why this poor old crow has been placed in my path. Maybe his soul couldn’t find the sun to wing on towards. As the sunlight fell on him, and he looked up at the spot of clear blue sky, his body shook a last time, his eyes seemed to shut from the inside, his body became rigid. We were right at the boneyard.
I bury him in my backyard, where there’s enough soil to hold him down the next time it floods. I’m grieving that I know no songs to sing for him. A good shaman would have spread his voice on the wind, a companion for the crow on his last journey. He leaves this world without ceremony, for I know none to make.
But I mourn for him. At work, I tell the first person I meet about him. I call my father, so much an old crow himself, and tell him about this one. My dad—more zen a man than most monks—vows to say a prayer for him, and I know that my father will do this. I vow to do the same.
This is it:
Crow
Watchful, ever present
friend
I have heard your calls all my life
And so, I answer.
As one of your kind cries his last
I bring his spirit to the sky
To soar once again
-30-
A Reject from NPR's "This I Believe"
I Believe in the American Holiday
I believe the Fourth of July should be no holiday from Liberty. I believe in the spirit of our founders, in liberty, and its defense. I believe all men are created equal—all men, all people—beget by their mothers and fathers in the same humble way. And no matter what color people are, no matter what religion people have, no matter where people are, the rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness extend to them. I believe, as a loyal American, that a person does not have to be an American to be endowed a few certain unalienable Rights.
Our Liberty didn’t just spring up because we declared independence and revolted. Like charity, Liberty must, in a way, be given to us by others, the same way that our individual rights must be recognized by others for them to be asserted. It’s said that charity begins at home, and I believe Liberty does, as well, for you see, both require practice. The great thing about America is that you can practice anytime.
Here’s a simple example: the next time you’re driving, let a car enter the roadway ahead of you instead of speeding up. Give them the freedom to use our transit system. When you feel ready to advance in your practice of Active Liberty, try this at your local bank: move over a few inches when someone else arrives in line. Give them the freedom to use the ridiculously narrow writing table while filling out their slips. At the Liberty Expert level you can try listening to different points of view. And to really stretch those freedom muscles, be sure not to dismiss those views out of hand.
Seriously though, Liberty is no laughing matter, and we cheapen it when we only pay lip service to it. I believe it is every patriotic American’s duty to practice Liberty every day, not just exercise it.
So, this Fourth of July, in between the barbecues and fireworks, and the ceremonial breaking of water restrictions, I believe we should celebrate America by practicing Liberty: hold open a door for somebody; offer your place in the checkout line to somebody with just one or two items; give the TV remote to your girlfriend.
End a war. Whatever your level of fitness, practice Liberty and be an American Patriot! This I believe.
-30-
I believe the Fourth of July should be no holiday from Liberty. I believe in the spirit of our founders, in liberty, and its defense. I believe all men are created equal—all men, all people—beget by their mothers and fathers in the same humble way. And no matter what color people are, no matter what religion people have, no matter where people are, the rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness extend to them. I believe, as a loyal American, that a person does not have to be an American to be endowed a few certain unalienable Rights.
Our Liberty didn’t just spring up because we declared independence and revolted. Like charity, Liberty must, in a way, be given to us by others, the same way that our individual rights must be recognized by others for them to be asserted. It’s said that charity begins at home, and I believe Liberty does, as well, for you see, both require practice. The great thing about America is that you can practice anytime.
Here’s a simple example: the next time you’re driving, let a car enter the roadway ahead of you instead of speeding up. Give them the freedom to use our transit system. When you feel ready to advance in your practice of Active Liberty, try this at your local bank: move over a few inches when someone else arrives in line. Give them the freedom to use the ridiculously narrow writing table while filling out their slips. At the Liberty Expert level you can try listening to different points of view. And to really stretch those freedom muscles, be sure not to dismiss those views out of hand.
Seriously though, Liberty is no laughing matter, and we cheapen it when we only pay lip service to it. I believe it is every patriotic American’s duty to practice Liberty every day, not just exercise it.
So, this Fourth of July, in between the barbecues and fireworks, and the ceremonial breaking of water restrictions, I believe we should celebrate America by practicing Liberty: hold open a door for somebody; offer your place in the checkout line to somebody with just one or two items; give the TV remote to your girlfriend.
End a war. Whatever your level of fitness, practice Liberty and be an American Patriot! This I believe.
-30-
This was for a contest in The Economist. I didn't win--but I like the essay anyhow.
Do We Need Nature?:
Questioning Ecology and Economics to Nurture Nature
“Do We Need Nature?”
ABSTRACT
One question prompts five others in this essay on economic perspectives of ecology. Examining the use of natural phenomena in a cross-cultural comparison, the essay emphasizes that human thought shapes cultural responses to the environment. The economic values assigned to ecological resources can be reevaluated in accordance with their life-sustaining functions on this planet. Economic valuations must encompass more data than the market prices of finished products to accurately assess the true value of natural areas.
Urban settings do not have to be completely removed from nature to be functional. City plans like those of ancient Rome and modern day Amsterdam exemplify how nature can be incorporated into urban design as revenue-generating and recreational features. Suburban sprawl, by contrast, dilutes financial and social resources.
Site planning, construction methods, and politics must change to ensure the sustainability of industrialized society. These changes are wide-sweeping, but are more a matter of perspective than technology. In fact, the thrust of the essay is the benefit derived from knowing when to use technology, and when to let nature take its course.
The question “Do we need nature?” has been raised, prompting another: “Are you kidding?”
The question itself reveals a bias in human thinking: that humanity is somehow separate from all the rest of nature. Whether at its mercy, or lording over it our perceived mastery, we don’t view ourselves as being part of nature. Worse, we don’t recognize the economic potential of nature.
We see human industry as opposed to the capricious whims of nature; we carve a living out of nature despite its complete indifference towards us. We sometimes imbue nature with malice, as news broadcasts declare the plight of deluged flood victims, or children mauled by animals; homes are destroyed by “raging” forest fires, seaside homes swept away by hurricanes with human names. What we overlook is that people have foolishly built homes in floodplains, wildernesses, the eroding mountains of cliff-side beaches. One may admire such idyllic residential settings, but hardly can be surprised that seaside homes get smashed by ocean storms, that hillsides become mudslides in torrential rains, that rain-swollen rivers inundate floodplains, or that predators who eat kid-sized animals might eat kids. A more relevant question may be “Do we need developers who build in floodplains, the hunting grounds of large predatory animals, or California?”
Rarely do we avail ourselves of the ready power of nature.
In Asia, many farmers rely on geese to keep their fields free of insects, instead of pesticides. Cheaper than crop-dusting, and easier to fuel than machinery—the geese feed themselves on the pests—geese are also non-toxic, and the European Union has no sanctions against Geese-Modified foods. But Westerners see the world through our machinist’s eyes. Our culture’s axiom is that technology not only saves human labor, it yields superior results. In many cases technology is the only means we have of accomplishing a task, but its use is so rooted in the psyche of the industrialized world that we may overlook the obvious solutions to problems—the aforementioned flood victims would need much less relief if their houses had been built above the river valley.
Even out of the floodplain, the typical new American house is not well thought-out: built on a razed lot on which an inflexible concrete slab is laid, nailed to that is a wooden structure, poorly insulated but sealed airtight, requiring a forced air ventilation system. These heat-absorbing boxes lie unshaded in the sun, bounded by rivers of concrete that soak up more heat from the sun than they can dissipate after dark. They’re called “urban heat islands,” but are more like spheres and they envelop our cities, our homes, and us, as we rest encased by polyurethane furniture, wondering why it gets so hot, how the electric bill can get so high, and what did they used to do to get by in the old days?
In the old days, builders capitalized on natural instead of technological processes. Ancient Roman architects oriented their bathhouses toward the sun, built them on hillsides, using gravity to move water and the sun to help heat it. Our English word atrium is a Latin word that Romans used to symbolize the large opening in the centers of their roofs. The atrium let in light, ventilated their quarters, and allowed them to grow plants more-or-less indoors, the plants in turn helping to clean the air inside, but realtors would be sure to point out the sliding glass doors surrounding a modern one. Roman architects built aqueducts and atriums not only as impressive monuments, but of necessity. Without electric power, the Romans were utterly dependent on natural forces to do work. Sunlight, gravity, atriums, and cross-breezes were their ducts, fans, coils, and pumps.
Nature and urbanity need not be mutually exclusive. Amsterdam’s waterways were praised by the eminent professor of urban planning, Lewis Mumford, who admired their beauty and their utility. The canals are vital to shipping interests, but also serve noncommercial needs such as private transit. New Jersey, he contrasted with regret, had missed the boat, their canals being “covered up by . . . express highways.” Canals are no substitute for streets if waiting for an ambulance, but had they been utilized as “the backbone of a system of regional parks,” one easily can imagine lucrative tourist trades associated with watercraft, as well as more eco-friendly freight and transit alternatives to the turnpike.
Technology allows us to import foreign solutions to local problems, instead of devising new ones more appropriate to the locale. Many Arizona homeowners, new to the desert, solve the problem of ground cover by planting grass sod. In Kentucky, that’s sensible, but planting grass in Arizona causes problems. The smell of manure fertilizer permeates entire neighborhoods and allergies are at an all-time high. The non-native plantings around homes, luxury resort golf courses, and businesses have hydrologic demands so high that to supply them, the state of Arizona made plans to divert some of the Colorado River from its natural course into California, where it long has been used for agricultural irrigation. Growing grass in Arizona reduces produce grown in California, reducing jobs for migrant agricultural workers and providing a de facto control on the influx of illegal immigrants, who typically fill those seasonal agricultural jobs. It also keeps produce prices up, diverting more middle-income money back to the banks via mortgage payments on the farms, and to the Feds in the form of FFA loan payments. Ecology and commerce are linked like a capillary system, and all parts affect all other parts.
Do we need nature?
That’s like asking Wall Street, “Do we need capitalism?”
Forget the despoilment of natural beauty arguments—we can survive without beauty. But we cannot survive without a worldwide ecosystem. Already, carbon dioxide emissions are severe enough to prompt “ozone alert” days announced by weather forecasters who advise people to limit their exposures to being outside. This pollution is somewhat mitigated by the respiration of large ecosystems like the Amazon rain forest, but forests are steadily being cut down. Rates of deforestation are debated, but it is undisputed that wilderness areas are shrinking. Also undisputed is the fact that all of the breathable oxygen on Earth is created by plants.
The savvy analyst sees the economic value of ecological functions; Costa Rican rain forests provide environmental services worth an estimated $1,092 per acre per year. However, Costa Rica can’t bottle air, like the French do spring water. So farmers cut down this more valuable resource because on the cleared land they can raise crops or livestock, much more market-ready commodities. In the form of emissions quotas, as suggested by the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, Costa Rica could “sell” clean air back to polluting countries, compensating locals for preserving the forests. The rain forests are cleaning the air, after all, an invaluable service to us all, but one for which Costa Rica is not actually compensated, leaving the farmers with little choice but to clear more land, and clean less air.
Nature is the foundation of all human industry. We harvest nature’s resources, are sheltered by its geologic actions, and dependent on its bounty. Our biologic and economic functions are inextricably tied. A better question might be, “How well can we manage nature?”
What we must do is obvious: preserve enough nature to keep ourselves going.
What we can do is bounded only by our perspective. We can choose, as individuals and as societies, to enhance our economic profits by enhancing our planet’s ecologic well-being. Humans make culture and assign values to all things encompassed by their cultures. We can choose to re-value ecological assets, as Costa Rica has done.
Residents of Portland, Oregon, recognizing that the natural setting of their city enhanced its appeal, was moved to confine its urban development; civic regulations prohibit construction outside the city’s perimeter. Their revitalization projects have made for a high standard of living and attract industry to the “Silicon Forest” (Nike is headquartered there, among others). Light-rail and bus services allowed the removal of a four-lane highway and the creation of a downtown riverfront park, at which community events generate revenue instead of smog.
Unregulated development of areas outlying established communities destroys ecologically valuable natural areas. Furthermore, the practice draws development resources away from inner-city areas, promoting decay and urban blight, as well as throwing the residents of the “new homes in a natural setting” into the company of wolves, cougars and bears, floods, forest fires and mudslides, as mentioned earlier. Instead of consolidating tax revenues into better public services, the tax base is split between bedroom communities and city centers, much of it to construct and maintain roads that would be unnecessary if people lived nearer to where they work. The cost of extending municipal services such as water, waste collection, ambulance, fire and police, to the newly developed area is a further drain on the resources of the greater metropolitan areas.
There are only three possible situations in which life can exist: symbiosis, parasitism, and predation. The last two spell certain doom, for they attack the host. Our future on this planet must be symbiotic, for the Earth cannot sustain the current industrial practices. As it stands today, we are predatory; we eat up nature to sustain ourselves, without contributing anything to sustain the environment. Ten thousand years ago we were parasitic. We didn’t contribute anything then, but there were so few of us that nature easily could recover from the damage we cause. There are six billion of us now, and with us, an untold number of machines, manufacturing plants, and strip mines. The level of damage is exponential. But not irreversible.
We can choose to change our situation. We can choose to nurture nature so that it will continue to nurture us. This is a great challenge, for it requires us to do the two things most difficult for us: change our thinking, and change our habits. But we can change those things. We should.
Indeed, we must change.
Because the question we have to keep in mind is, “Does nature need us?”
-30-
Questioning Ecology and Economics to Nurture Nature
“Do We Need Nature?”
ABSTRACT
One question prompts five others in this essay on economic perspectives of ecology. Examining the use of natural phenomena in a cross-cultural comparison, the essay emphasizes that human thought shapes cultural responses to the environment. The economic values assigned to ecological resources can be reevaluated in accordance with their life-sustaining functions on this planet. Economic valuations must encompass more data than the market prices of finished products to accurately assess the true value of natural areas.
Urban settings do not have to be completely removed from nature to be functional. City plans like those of ancient Rome and modern day Amsterdam exemplify how nature can be incorporated into urban design as revenue-generating and recreational features. Suburban sprawl, by contrast, dilutes financial and social resources.
Site planning, construction methods, and politics must change to ensure the sustainability of industrialized society. These changes are wide-sweeping, but are more a matter of perspective than technology. In fact, the thrust of the essay is the benefit derived from knowing when to use technology, and when to let nature take its course.
The question “Do we need nature?” has been raised, prompting another: “Are you kidding?”
The question itself reveals a bias in human thinking: that humanity is somehow separate from all the rest of nature. Whether at its mercy, or lording over it our perceived mastery, we don’t view ourselves as being part of nature. Worse, we don’t recognize the economic potential of nature.
We see human industry as opposed to the capricious whims of nature; we carve a living out of nature despite its complete indifference towards us. We sometimes imbue nature with malice, as news broadcasts declare the plight of deluged flood victims, or children mauled by animals; homes are destroyed by “raging” forest fires, seaside homes swept away by hurricanes with human names. What we overlook is that people have foolishly built homes in floodplains, wildernesses, the eroding mountains of cliff-side beaches. One may admire such idyllic residential settings, but hardly can be surprised that seaside homes get smashed by ocean storms, that hillsides become mudslides in torrential rains, that rain-swollen rivers inundate floodplains, or that predators who eat kid-sized animals might eat kids. A more relevant question may be “Do we need developers who build in floodplains, the hunting grounds of large predatory animals, or California?”
Rarely do we avail ourselves of the ready power of nature.
In Asia, many farmers rely on geese to keep their fields free of insects, instead of pesticides. Cheaper than crop-dusting, and easier to fuel than machinery—the geese feed themselves on the pests—geese are also non-toxic, and the European Union has no sanctions against Geese-Modified foods. But Westerners see the world through our machinist’s eyes. Our culture’s axiom is that technology not only saves human labor, it yields superior results. In many cases technology is the only means we have of accomplishing a task, but its use is so rooted in the psyche of the industrialized world that we may overlook the obvious solutions to problems—the aforementioned flood victims would need much less relief if their houses had been built above the river valley.
Even out of the floodplain, the typical new American house is not well thought-out: built on a razed lot on which an inflexible concrete slab is laid, nailed to that is a wooden structure, poorly insulated but sealed airtight, requiring a forced air ventilation system. These heat-absorbing boxes lie unshaded in the sun, bounded by rivers of concrete that soak up more heat from the sun than they can dissipate after dark. They’re called “urban heat islands,” but are more like spheres and they envelop our cities, our homes, and us, as we rest encased by polyurethane furniture, wondering why it gets so hot, how the electric bill can get so high, and what did they used to do to get by in the old days?
In the old days, builders capitalized on natural instead of technological processes. Ancient Roman architects oriented their bathhouses toward the sun, built them on hillsides, using gravity to move water and the sun to help heat it. Our English word atrium is a Latin word that Romans used to symbolize the large opening in the centers of their roofs. The atrium let in light, ventilated their quarters, and allowed them to grow plants more-or-less indoors, the plants in turn helping to clean the air inside, but realtors would be sure to point out the sliding glass doors surrounding a modern one. Roman architects built aqueducts and atriums not only as impressive monuments, but of necessity. Without electric power, the Romans were utterly dependent on natural forces to do work. Sunlight, gravity, atriums, and cross-breezes were their ducts, fans, coils, and pumps.
Nature and urbanity need not be mutually exclusive. Amsterdam’s waterways were praised by the eminent professor of urban planning, Lewis Mumford, who admired their beauty and their utility. The canals are vital to shipping interests, but also serve noncommercial needs such as private transit. New Jersey, he contrasted with regret, had missed the boat, their canals being “covered up by . . . express highways.” Canals are no substitute for streets if waiting for an ambulance, but had they been utilized as “the backbone of a system of regional parks,” one easily can imagine lucrative tourist trades associated with watercraft, as well as more eco-friendly freight and transit alternatives to the turnpike.
Technology allows us to import foreign solutions to local problems, instead of devising new ones more appropriate to the locale. Many Arizona homeowners, new to the desert, solve the problem of ground cover by planting grass sod. In Kentucky, that’s sensible, but planting grass in Arizona causes problems. The smell of manure fertilizer permeates entire neighborhoods and allergies are at an all-time high. The non-native plantings around homes, luxury resort golf courses, and businesses have hydrologic demands so high that to supply them, the state of Arizona made plans to divert some of the Colorado River from its natural course into California, where it long has been used for agricultural irrigation. Growing grass in Arizona reduces produce grown in California, reducing jobs for migrant agricultural workers and providing a de facto control on the influx of illegal immigrants, who typically fill those seasonal agricultural jobs. It also keeps produce prices up, diverting more middle-income money back to the banks via mortgage payments on the farms, and to the Feds in the form of FFA loan payments. Ecology and commerce are linked like a capillary system, and all parts affect all other parts.
Do we need nature?
That’s like asking Wall Street, “Do we need capitalism?”
Forget the despoilment of natural beauty arguments—we can survive without beauty. But we cannot survive without a worldwide ecosystem. Already, carbon dioxide emissions are severe enough to prompt “ozone alert” days announced by weather forecasters who advise people to limit their exposures to being outside. This pollution is somewhat mitigated by the respiration of large ecosystems like the Amazon rain forest, but forests are steadily being cut down. Rates of deforestation are debated, but it is undisputed that wilderness areas are shrinking. Also undisputed is the fact that all of the breathable oxygen on Earth is created by plants.
The savvy analyst sees the economic value of ecological functions; Costa Rican rain forests provide environmental services worth an estimated $1,092 per acre per year. However, Costa Rica can’t bottle air, like the French do spring water. So farmers cut down this more valuable resource because on the cleared land they can raise crops or livestock, much more market-ready commodities. In the form of emissions quotas, as suggested by the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, Costa Rica could “sell” clean air back to polluting countries, compensating locals for preserving the forests. The rain forests are cleaning the air, after all, an invaluable service to us all, but one for which Costa Rica is not actually compensated, leaving the farmers with little choice but to clear more land, and clean less air.
Nature is the foundation of all human industry. We harvest nature’s resources, are sheltered by its geologic actions, and dependent on its bounty. Our biologic and economic functions are inextricably tied. A better question might be, “How well can we manage nature?”
What we must do is obvious: preserve enough nature to keep ourselves going.
What we can do is bounded only by our perspective. We can choose, as individuals and as societies, to enhance our economic profits by enhancing our planet’s ecologic well-being. Humans make culture and assign values to all things encompassed by their cultures. We can choose to re-value ecological assets, as Costa Rica has done.
Residents of Portland, Oregon, recognizing that the natural setting of their city enhanced its appeal, was moved to confine its urban development; civic regulations prohibit construction outside the city’s perimeter. Their revitalization projects have made for a high standard of living and attract industry to the “Silicon Forest” (Nike is headquartered there, among others). Light-rail and bus services allowed the removal of a four-lane highway and the creation of a downtown riverfront park, at which community events generate revenue instead of smog.
Unregulated development of areas outlying established communities destroys ecologically valuable natural areas. Furthermore, the practice draws development resources away from inner-city areas, promoting decay and urban blight, as well as throwing the residents of the “new homes in a natural setting” into the company of wolves, cougars and bears, floods, forest fires and mudslides, as mentioned earlier. Instead of consolidating tax revenues into better public services, the tax base is split between bedroom communities and city centers, much of it to construct and maintain roads that would be unnecessary if people lived nearer to where they work. The cost of extending municipal services such as water, waste collection, ambulance, fire and police, to the newly developed area is a further drain on the resources of the greater metropolitan areas.
There are only three possible situations in which life can exist: symbiosis, parasitism, and predation. The last two spell certain doom, for they attack the host. Our future on this planet must be symbiotic, for the Earth cannot sustain the current industrial practices. As it stands today, we are predatory; we eat up nature to sustain ourselves, without contributing anything to sustain the environment. Ten thousand years ago we were parasitic. We didn’t contribute anything then, but there were so few of us that nature easily could recover from the damage we cause. There are six billion of us now, and with us, an untold number of machines, manufacturing plants, and strip mines. The level of damage is exponential. But not irreversible.
We can choose to change our situation. We can choose to nurture nature so that it will continue to nurture us. This is a great challenge, for it requires us to do the two things most difficult for us: change our thinking, and change our habits. But we can change those things. We should.
Indeed, we must change.
Because the question we have to keep in mind is, “Does nature need us?”
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My First Geography Writings
Human Geography Exercises for Independent Study
The following questions have been taken from the book, Human Geography: Places and Region in Global Context. Page numbers on which the questions are to be found are noted in parentheses.
Chapter One, question five (53): The Evolving Landscape of Oakland Lake Park
Oakland Lake Park is a popular place to walk or jog, feed ducks, and picnic. The lake, like almost all in Texas, was created artificially. An earthen dam blocks the natural stream that once trickled northward into White Lake, a former cow tank on the site of the old White dairy farm, now glorified by real estate developers. The stream-bed still exists, and parts of it hold water year-round, but it is now fed only by run-off from Oakland Lake.
Nearly seventy years old, the dam was constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps, along with the original sidewalks and the Pavilion, the park being one of many projects launched by the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s. Typical of the CCC’s practices, the Pavilion was built from local materials—stones of varying kinds, probably extracted as part of the dam-building process. Two water fountains, of the same masonry construction, once provided stone-cold water on even the hottest summer afternoons, but were removed by the city almost twenty years ago.
Cattle once grazed where lovers now tryst, and cheapskate golfers practice their swings along the edge of the grove of native post oaks. Squirrels play on the metal box that recently had housed U.S. Geological Survey sensing equipment, removed after a year’s survey, the box now abandoned. Teenagers sneak down by the storm drains to smoke marijuana unobserved by the car patrols of police officers. The drains feed storm water runoff into the lake, dumping lawn fertilizers and pesticides along with a strange silt that has formed a large sandbar at the lake’s southern end. Ducks and turtles nest around and behind the shallows formed by the sandbar, a natural windbreak that shelters them from the prevailing north-south winds channeled by the treeline.
A mile-long sidewalk circles the lake, inlaid marble tiles marking its quarter miles. Three signs also decorate this jogging circuit, each warning of the contamination of the lake’s fish. Possession of said fish is punishable by up to a $2,000 fine, but this does not deter sport fishermen from practicing their casting. Some even take home their poisoned and meager catches. Twenty-five years ago, the lake was a popular spot for retired men to fish the day away, sometimes sharing their knowledge of the art with children passing through the park on their way home from the nearby elementary and secondary schools.
More than one hundred years ago, the park was a lightly wooded grassy area. Local cowmen grazed their stock here, before taking them to auction at the downtown stockyards. As houses began to dot the prairie, and dirt roads became paved, the lands were parceled off to stave off foreclosing banks, the locale found new life as this neighborhood park. To say it has been modified by human activity is an understatement. The squirrels inhabiting the oaks are descended from ones brought in by a local resident for game, more than two generations ago—two human generations.
No cattle remain. But the lake is now a stopping point for migrating ducks, of no less than eight varieties, and some years, as many as twenty. Songbirds also thrive here, as well as two varieties of gulls seeking fairer weather from the coast, and juvenile blue herons fish along the marshy southern shore. Catfish, sunperch, and carp live, are poisoned, and die where once no lake existed.
From the vantage point of the Pavilion’s stone wall, one can watch intramural softball games, bicyclists, and the nocturnal muskrats that gnaw, beaver-like, on the trees lining the lakeshore. From the vantage of the mind’s eye, one cannot so easily imagine buffalo, quail, and white-tail deer.
Disease is slowly taking the oaks. Concrete is taking the grass, as law enforcement vies for better sightlines from the street. The contamination of the lake is taking the fish, and probably also damages the birds that eat them. And humans, it is suspected, are eating the geese—three remain from a gaggle of more than twelve.
Already, the park is off-limits for twelve hours of every day, a curfew having been enacted shortly after the murder of an off-duty police officer. A last vestige of nature in this part of east Fort Worth, Oakland Lake Park may soon pass altogether.
Chapter two, question 3 (101): Specialty Products
The main economic specialties for the countries listed below were obtained through the Encarta Online encyclopedia. All currency figures are in U.S. dollars.
BOLIVIA—mineral extractions of tin, gold, zinc, and silver; 1995 exports were estimated at $1.186 billion.
GHANA—mineral extractions and agricultural products, exporting gold, cacao, lumber, and electricity (to nearby countries); 2000 exports totaled $1.94 billion.
GUINEA—mineral extractions, with agriculture as the principal economic activity, exporting foodstuffs such as pineapples, peanuts, palm kernels, and coffee, as well as the chief mineral exports of bauxite, diamonds, and gold. Export revenues were not listed.
LIBYA—petroleum contributes 95% of Gross Domestic Product, exporting 504 million barrels of crude oil, and 6.2 billion cubic meters of natural gas. Other exports included marine salt and potash, however, revenue figures from exportation were listed as “unavailable.”
NAMIBIA—mineral extractions included 1.5 million carats of gem-quality diamonds, as well as uranium, copper, tin, lead, silver, vanadium, tungsten, and salt. Export revenues were not listed.
PERU—world’s leading exporter of fish meal, but also mineral extractions of copper, silver, lead, and zinc. A “significant” export is petroleum, at 35.5 million barrels, and 0.37 billion cubic meters of natural gas, as well as iron ore and sugar. Export revenues for 2000 were $6.8 billion.
ZAMBIA—copper mining accounted for nearly half of its export earnings of $0.8 billion, comprising 241, 200 metric tons. Other exported mineral included cobalt, gold, silver, and gem-quality emeralds.
Chapter three, question one (150): Population Distribution in My Home State
By 1990, 80% of the Texan population resided in urban areas. Texas had few natural lakes, the largest being Caddo Lake, along what is now the Louisiana border. Settlements therefore followed the river systems. Settlements grew into towns, towns grew into cities, and the rivers that once flowed freely now are mostly dammed, serving as municipal reservoirs.
But it was the railroads, not the waterways, that drove settlement. Texas became a major producer of cotton as rail lines opened the West, linking it to major national and international markets. Cattle production, too, exploited this rapid transit, as barbed wire began to criss-cross the nation, interfering with the Chisholm, and other cattle trails. Cow towns, like the nickname of my hometown of Fort Worth, were the hubs of rail activity, and the end-destinations of cattle. Meat-packing became a significant industry, and Fort Worth was home to both the Swift and Armor companies, which later merged. In its heyday, over 100, 000 head of cattle passed into the Fort Worth Stockyards per day.
In 1901, oil was tapped at Spindletop, changing the destiny of Texas forever. Texas became the leading state in the production of petroleum products. The industry spurred the growth of the Texas economy with forward linkages to petrochemicals and related manufacturing, especially of industrial machinery and sheet metals. Increasingly, the economy shifted from an agricultural and ranching base to an urban one related to and supporting the petroleum industry. Commercial shipping was widely developed along the Gulf Coast, a leading factor in the growth of Houston’s population, the state’s most populous city at almost two million.
Overall, Texas is the second most-populous state in the Union, not surprising being the largest geographic one of the lower forty-eight. Numbering approximately three million in 1900, by 2000, Texas had swarmed to over twenty million residents. Though they do not rival the density of such great cities as New York City or Mexico City, Texas cities like Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio contain over one million each, and many more number in the hundreds of thousands. Fort Worth, still affectionately known as Cowtown, has more than a half-million humans, and is the thirty-first fastest growing city in the U.S., with a rate of 2.6%.
Most Texans are descended from pioneers who migrated from other states in the nineteenth century. Many of these were of questionable character. One of my own ancestors fled from the Carolinas after faking his own death to avoid the vengeance of a cuckolded gun-duelist. However, significant immigration came from across the seas, as well, including Germans, who founded Fredericksburg, Irish rail workers who settled Donegal near the Oklahoma border, and many from China and Vietnam, among other Asian countries.
The aforementioned Houston is the home of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, named for the great Texan and U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson, is a major facility in the U.S. space program. With the potential development of space-related industries, Houston, and all of Texas may play an increasingly important role in the world economy, spurring even greater population growth.
Chapter four, question two (191): Paleolithic Denton
Chapter five, question two (233): Little Vietnam in Haltom City
Chapter six, question one (272): My Home Town
The city of Fort Worth is Where the West Begins, as the motto has it. The city capitalizes on its Old West image. For example, The Fort Worth Livestock Show and Rodeo is internationally famous, drawing tourists to the Will Rogers Memorial Complex, the stock show’s home since it grew too large for the original location in Fort Worth’s historic Stockyards. The Will Rogers complex is a marvelous example of art-deco architecture, all the more grand after its recent renovation.
Nearby Casa Mañana Theater was one of only three true theaters-in-the-round in the U.S. Two generations of schoolchildren were introduced to live theatre under Casa’s famous geodesic dome roof, based on designs by the famous architect, Buckminster Fuller. I, myself, apprenticed there for six years before rising to a staff position.
Across West Lancaster, the Kimbell Art Museum exhibits works of Picasso and Rembrandt in its permanent collection. The world-class museum also houses tours that travel to museums the like of Paris’s Louvre and the New York Metropolitan. Tours that include the Kimbell sometimes include as few as three museums in the world. The moving sculpture of the Kimbell’s reflecting pool is a favored spot of art lovers as well as young lovers on dates.
West of the Kimbell, is the Amon G. Carter Museum of Western Art. Besides its near life-size sculptures of cowboys bulldoggin’, and Native Americans in mournful isolation, it is the home of one the finest collections of western photographs.
To complete the circuit, and recrossing Lancaster to the west of Will Rogers, one finds the Fort Worth Museum of Natural Science and History, home of the Omni Theatre. In my childhood, one could pass from the scenic sculpture of a Paleolithic surgery, through an Old West town, and onto the most technologically sophisticated theater of its time. The Omni is still one of the few Omnimax screens in the world.
Returning to my childhood, we made our way home via Interstate 30 east, and would pass by the Mrs. Baird’s Bread Factory, shortly after the neck-craning attempt to read the Episcopal Church’s thoughts for the week, usually an obscure and enigmatic passage from the Bible. The tantalizing aroma of baking bread permeated the area from the Trinity Bridge to the hospital district. Like Casa Mañana, schoolchildren toured the Mrs. Baird’s facility every year. At the end of the tour, the children were rewarded with a free snack, freshly packaged. Sadly, the factory moved out of town almost ten years ago.
The last stop, for me at least, was my grandmother’s house. Her homemade rice-crispy treats beat the hell out of those fake Twinkies from Mrs. Baird’s, though I still miss the smell of the place.
Chapter seven, question three (325): Agglomeration Effects in a Local Business Park
Riverbend Business Park is a commercial-light-industrial business park along the Trinity River, though its location exploits the river in name only. The river is not large enough to support barge traffic, though there once were such grandiose plans for it. Instead, the business park is situated at the intersection of Loop 820 and State Highway 121, as well as their junctures with U.S. 377 and Interstate 30. A major rail line passes by the north side, but unfortunately no rail traffic exploits this opportunity. The major agglomeration effect functioning here is the convenience to the highway system, utilized by workers, customers, and large trucks.
The park was designed with large passages, easily navigable by box-trucks and even tractor-trailer rigs. All of the resident storefronts possess at least one full-size loading bay with a floor-level dock. This feature seems to be the major reason for the businesses’ proximity to one another.
Unlike the model for agglomeration outlined in the book, Riverbend’s raison d’être as a hub is the industrial use of space. The large warehouse-type construction of the buildings attracts businesses with a need for large open work spaces or storage needs. Half-Price Books, for example, maintains an operation here, though not as part of its retail sales operation. The park also is home to Motorola, Otis Elevator, and Johnson Limousine.
Perhaps as many as one hundred businesses operate here. They are an eclectic collection: Veterinarian Solutions is next to Tool Supply; the limousine service next to an embroiderer’s; Harris Dental just down from Lonestarr Recording studios—a boon, perhaps for teeth-grinding audio technicians, but other linkages are not so apparent.
There is a sports and athletics consultant, and the enigmatic Answers, Etc., alongside the Bar Mart. The D/FW Regional Office of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality sits across from a U.S. Post Office, the latter an ancillary service for the whole park, no doubt. So, too, the drop boxes for Fed/Ex, UPS, Airborne Express, and the probably local Lone Star Express.
Other ancillary businesses should include the Catered for You Café, which looks to be a storefront eatery as well as catering service, and the healthy-sounding Obee’s Soup and Salads. But the less directly related services are outside the park proper. Nearby is a McDonald’s restaurant, several gas stations, a day-care facility, and a ladies-only gym. Within the development is a regional bank, but the extent to which it is available to the park’s workers is undetermined—it has no “drive-thru” operation, and the storefront is secluded.
Despite the presence of firms such as Business Forms and Tyco Fire and Security, there seem to be few linkages between the businesses. The most notable seems to be one between Westbridge Printing and Impression Inks, though admittedly, my impression of their linkage is due to their sharing of a common wall. In truth, the printers may have more truck with obviously misnamed Oceanside Graphics, at the opposite end of the park.
The park’s businesses do not even benefit from a contract with a single waste management company, for both Waste Management and Trinity Waste dumpsters were observed, though the one may subcontract with the other. Presumably the grounds are kept by one firm, but no evidence of this was apparent.
Open space attracted the developers Newell and Newell, as well as the likely lower property tax rates, for the property falls within Richland Hills, not Fort Worth. But access is its selling point. The test of this will be when a change to the mode of transit and shipping reduces the cost-benefit of trucking and highway travel.
Chapter eight, question three (360): USDA Subsidies
Chapter nine, question one (410): U.S.-Mexico Border Issues
A survey of more than two hundred articles on international news reveals that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Migration across the U.S.-Mexico border is the single most important issue between the two countries. One historian has called the border a “fictional frontier,” and indeed, the fiction of its boundary is read only by governments.
Maquiladoras pepper the southern edge of Texas, taking advantage of tax-free zones in Mexico as well as the low-wage workforce. Easily trucked back into the lucrative markets of the U.S., the multinational businesses running such productions enjoy the best of both worlds—low wages and high sales. Indeed, the line between these two worlds—the first world and the second—are blurred like lines drawn in the windswept sand. The city of El Paso, Texas, has sprawled into Mexico, where it is known as Ciudad Juárez, but the “two” cities in reality comprise one metropolitan area, the melding raising political issues over wages, housing and municipal water rights.
Nationally, water rights have become frustratingly confused. Mexico owes the U.S. billions of gallons from the water of the Rio Grande, while the water of the Colorado, dammed in the U.S. state of Arizona, and diverted for irrigation in California, scarcely reaches Mexico at all.
Extradition is another troubling aspect of this international flow. Mexico consistently refuses to extradite fugitives who would face the death penalty in the U.S. Some bounty hunters face charges in Mexico for kidnapping such fugitives.
Drug trafficking and gun-running stories frequent the pages of the international desk. Drug production in Mexico is cheap and involves little risk, most of that being part of the smuggling operations. Lucrative drug markets in the U.S. create enormous profit incentives, while guns flow south to help protect the cartels from rivals and the Federales.
Such flows of illegal goods and peoples constrain both countries to tighten border security. Especially after the incidents on 9/11/2001, border security on both sides has increased. Non-Mexican migrants seek entrance into the U.S. through Mexico’s borders. Central and South Americans view Mexico as a “stepping stone” into the U.S., but so do people from abroad—most notably from the Middle East.
Not surprising, then, is the contention over the validity of visas and other identification documents. U.S. authorities warn that the Mexican federal identity card is so easily forged that it should no longer be accepted by U.S. banks or housing management. False U.S. Social Security cards have become one of the most forged in the world.
Increasingly, restricting access along the border makes little practical sense. The AFL-CIO has been working to unionize workers in Mexico. Operating under the principle that Mexican low wages steal U.S. jobs, or at least drive down American wages, the union organizers have begun visiting Mexico for the first time since 1924.
Of course, soccer is important, too. World cup rivals, the U.S. and Mexico use the unlikely sport of soccer as an arena for international diplomacy—an inspiration for the U.K.
Mexico’s government has a reputation for graft and corruption that is unrivaled by any except Louisiana’s. Mexico remains seen as a haven for fugitives, a getaway destination for the wanted and get-to destination for the sexually unwanted who seek the pleasures of brothels and cheap liquor. It is perhaps this image of Mexico that keeps the border a firm barrier to its barrios. More’s the pity.
Chapter ten, question one (448): The Ten Fastest-Growing U.S. Cities
The ten fastest growing cities in the U.S. are:
1. Gilbert, AZ 6. Chandler, AZ
2. North Las Vegas, NV 7. Chula Vista, CA
3. Rancho Cucamonga, CA 8. Olathe, KS
4. Henderson, NV 9. Cape Coral, FL
5. Joliet, IL 10. Peoria, AZ
See the attached table from the U.S. Census Bureau for percentage increases.
Chapter eleven, question four (500): Haltom Plaza, An Ordinary Cityscape
Despite its provocative nomenclature, the strip mall is meant for shopping. Haltom Plaza is one of the more appealing of such places, with a uniform single roof-line and vintage neon lighting. It is more than a mere strip, in fact, with several shops housed in freestanding storefronts, one at either end, and one in the middle, landmarks for the major driveways in and out of the strip mall’s parking lot. The black asphalt parking lot is neatly apportioned with white parking slot outlines and yellow lane markings that coordinate well with its lima-bean-colored roof and mauve stucco-like buildings.
This tenth-of-a-mile strip of U.S. Highway 377 is an oasis of commerce in the predominantly residential city of Haltom City—a redundant name proudly displayed on city documents, but sadly, not featured in the plaza of Haltom Plaza. Across the highway, a few auto mechanics specialize in wheels and mufflers, alongside such other greasy operations as Taco Bell, Papa John’s, and Twisters Tenders. These small independent buildings contrast with the comparatively stately colonnade of the plaza, an almost historic site due to its long-time existence.
A variety of retail stores inhabit the plaza. There is an optical clinic, Taylor’s Dry-Cleaners with an on-site seamstress, a secondhand store, a hardware store. Big Lots! discounts housewares; Smoke City trades in tobacco products. Video and pc games can be found with one GameStop. There is a newly opened ladies’ gym, the appropriately named Curves, as well as the beauty boutique of Smart Looks, appealing, perhaps, to multi-tasking persons who place themselves in the good hands of Allstate Insurance. Those with time on their hands as they await treatment at the Med Alert industrial health clinic might window shop at the store whose fashions have but OnePrice.
The working-class neighborhoods surrounding Haltom Plaza also support a Hancock’s fabric store, as well as a Radio Shack, and the discount grocery, Sack ’N Save. To pay for it all, one may get Checks Cashed at the middle island storefront, while credit is extended at the Rentacenter.
There is a family dental practice, and two other satellite medical centers provide alternate choices to the pain and injury management of the previously mentioned Med Alert. Pro Cuts is the choice of those not so concerned with Smart Looks.
Busy shoppers, medical patients, and miscellaneous errandrunners may sneak a dozen rings at one of the two donut shops, catch an early or late breakfast at The Café, a late lunch at Joe’s Pasta and Pizza, whose slightly schizophrenic store-window sign reminds passersby it is the home of Joe’s Pizza & Pasta, or grab a drive-thru dinner from the local Pizza Hut, the spice of life not flavoring food in Haltom City (indeed, leaving the Plaza, one could also stop for pizza at the ironically named Mugger’s Pizza, Mr. Jim’s, or the newly opened Enzo’s Pizza and Subs). For more special occasions, one can gorge on the Jumbo China Buffet, the misleadingly named restaurant with normally sized plates.
The strip mall identifies its surroundings as suburbia as much as do the tract homes and school zones and churches that intermingle with the muffler shops, banks, and quick-lube service shops that front along the highway. The stores of Haltom Plaza provide the basic needs of the suburban home, rather than the luxury items destined for greater retail sales at the more manorly North Hills shopping mall, several miles east. It is a bazaar for those in need of specific items to complete their chores at home, the bizarre solution to sprawl.
Chapter twelve, question three (539): Effects of Economic Globalization on Fort Worth, Texas
The last meat-packing plant in Fort Worth closed in 1971. Yet, the Fort Worth Stockyards is still home to animal auctions, albeit much reduced in number. The advent of satellite television and communications created a new and different market for these sales. Ostrich farms in Oklahoma competed with ones in Australia over television airwaves while businessmen bid on them in Texas.
Change is resplendent all along Hell’s Half-Acre, the section of downtown Fort Worth that led to the Stockyards. Once inhabited by the cheapest of hotels, domino parlors, bars, and their rough and sometimes murderous patrons, it is now a place for shopping tourists and traveling business conventioneers. Walking tours of the Stockyards area entertained travelers from Japan to Norway. Billy Bob’s Texas boasts of being the largest honky-tonk in the world as well as having the world’s only permanent indoor rodeo.
Sadly, globalization often means the loss of jobs. A long-time Fort Worth-based book publisher, ultimately Harcourt College Publishers, had survived many mergers and name changes since its origins. Acquired by a Canadian firm more than five years ago, the operations in Fort Worth were suspended. Many fine editors were forced into unwanted relocation and retirement, or the ranks of the unemployed.
Some changes have been good. Local grocery store delis now serve box sushi, an alternative to red meat and pork products that once ruled here. Indeed, since Oprah won the lawsuit launched by Texas cattlemen, sushi restaurants have become relatively commonplace. Likewise, Indian and Mediterranean foods have begun to show themselves.
International films have but a single outlet, near Hulen mall, but that is more than there once was. Mainly appealing to patrons of independent and arthouse films, the Hulen 10 theater presents exclusive engagements, and enjoys an exclusive hold on that market.
The Sierra Club once held an office downtown. Though focusing mainly on U.S. environmental policy, it also has engaged in world realty. The Sierra Club has bought rainforest lands in South America for preservation.
The Fort Worth Zoo has also been of great importance in this arena. As a “world-class” zoo, it has been a pioneer in naturalized habitats. The zoo also is a leading research facility in veterinarian medicine. Far superior to its only nearby rival, the Dallas Zoo, Fort Worth’s is a frequent stop for touring exhibits such as China’s panda bears, and the infamous Komodo Dragons.
The Kimbell Art Museum recently presented works by Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani. Other tours have been presented there such as the Figures of the Buddha, which displayed works from ancient India, Japan, Myanmar, and Thailand among others. The increasing global reach of the Kimbell has grasped cryptedl treasures from China, ancient Egypt, and pre-Columbian Mexico.
Texas has no state income tax, and the appeal of this has attracted many upper-income bracket families to the state. The flavor of Fort Worth is changing to take advantage of their disposable incomes, reflecting their broader tastes. No longer merely a cow town, Fort Worth rather successfully blends its Old West image with world cuisines and cultures, Where the West Begins, and the rest fit in.
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The following questions have been taken from the book, Human Geography: Places and Region in Global Context. Page numbers on which the questions are to be found are noted in parentheses.
Chapter One, question five (53): The Evolving Landscape of Oakland Lake Park
Oakland Lake Park is a popular place to walk or jog, feed ducks, and picnic. The lake, like almost all in Texas, was created artificially. An earthen dam blocks the natural stream that once trickled northward into White Lake, a former cow tank on the site of the old White dairy farm, now glorified by real estate developers. The stream-bed still exists, and parts of it hold water year-round, but it is now fed only by run-off from Oakland Lake.
Nearly seventy years old, the dam was constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps, along with the original sidewalks and the Pavilion, the park being one of many projects launched by the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s. Typical of the CCC’s practices, the Pavilion was built from local materials—stones of varying kinds, probably extracted as part of the dam-building process. Two water fountains, of the same masonry construction, once provided stone-cold water on even the hottest summer afternoons, but were removed by the city almost twenty years ago.
Cattle once grazed where lovers now tryst, and cheapskate golfers practice their swings along the edge of the grove of native post oaks. Squirrels play on the metal box that recently had housed U.S. Geological Survey sensing equipment, removed after a year’s survey, the box now abandoned. Teenagers sneak down by the storm drains to smoke marijuana unobserved by the car patrols of police officers. The drains feed storm water runoff into the lake, dumping lawn fertilizers and pesticides along with a strange silt that has formed a large sandbar at the lake’s southern end. Ducks and turtles nest around and behind the shallows formed by the sandbar, a natural windbreak that shelters them from the prevailing north-south winds channeled by the treeline.
A mile-long sidewalk circles the lake, inlaid marble tiles marking its quarter miles. Three signs also decorate this jogging circuit, each warning of the contamination of the lake’s fish. Possession of said fish is punishable by up to a $2,000 fine, but this does not deter sport fishermen from practicing their casting. Some even take home their poisoned and meager catches. Twenty-five years ago, the lake was a popular spot for retired men to fish the day away, sometimes sharing their knowledge of the art with children passing through the park on their way home from the nearby elementary and secondary schools.
More than one hundred years ago, the park was a lightly wooded grassy area. Local cowmen grazed their stock here, before taking them to auction at the downtown stockyards. As houses began to dot the prairie, and dirt roads became paved, the lands were parceled off to stave off foreclosing banks, the locale found new life as this neighborhood park. To say it has been modified by human activity is an understatement. The squirrels inhabiting the oaks are descended from ones brought in by a local resident for game, more than two generations ago—two human generations.
No cattle remain. But the lake is now a stopping point for migrating ducks, of no less than eight varieties, and some years, as many as twenty. Songbirds also thrive here, as well as two varieties of gulls seeking fairer weather from the coast, and juvenile blue herons fish along the marshy southern shore. Catfish, sunperch, and carp live, are poisoned, and die where once no lake existed.
From the vantage point of the Pavilion’s stone wall, one can watch intramural softball games, bicyclists, and the nocturnal muskrats that gnaw, beaver-like, on the trees lining the lakeshore. From the vantage of the mind’s eye, one cannot so easily imagine buffalo, quail, and white-tail deer.
Disease is slowly taking the oaks. Concrete is taking the grass, as law enforcement vies for better sightlines from the street. The contamination of the lake is taking the fish, and probably also damages the birds that eat them. And humans, it is suspected, are eating the geese—three remain from a gaggle of more than twelve.
Already, the park is off-limits for twelve hours of every day, a curfew having been enacted shortly after the murder of an off-duty police officer. A last vestige of nature in this part of east Fort Worth, Oakland Lake Park may soon pass altogether.
Chapter two, question 3 (101): Specialty Products
The main economic specialties for the countries listed below were obtained through the Encarta Online encyclopedia. All currency figures are in U.S. dollars.
BOLIVIA—mineral extractions of tin, gold, zinc, and silver; 1995 exports were estimated at $1.186 billion.
GHANA—mineral extractions and agricultural products, exporting gold, cacao, lumber, and electricity (to nearby countries); 2000 exports totaled $1.94 billion.
GUINEA—mineral extractions, with agriculture as the principal economic activity, exporting foodstuffs such as pineapples, peanuts, palm kernels, and coffee, as well as the chief mineral exports of bauxite, diamonds, and gold. Export revenues were not listed.
LIBYA—petroleum contributes 95% of Gross Domestic Product, exporting 504 million barrels of crude oil, and 6.2 billion cubic meters of natural gas. Other exports included marine salt and potash, however, revenue figures from exportation were listed as “unavailable.”
NAMIBIA—mineral extractions included 1.5 million carats of gem-quality diamonds, as well as uranium, copper, tin, lead, silver, vanadium, tungsten, and salt. Export revenues were not listed.
PERU—world’s leading exporter of fish meal, but also mineral extractions of copper, silver, lead, and zinc. A “significant” export is petroleum, at 35.5 million barrels, and 0.37 billion cubic meters of natural gas, as well as iron ore and sugar. Export revenues for 2000 were $6.8 billion.
ZAMBIA—copper mining accounted for nearly half of its export earnings of $0.8 billion, comprising 241, 200 metric tons. Other exported mineral included cobalt, gold, silver, and gem-quality emeralds.
Chapter three, question one (150): Population Distribution in My Home State
By 1990, 80% of the Texan population resided in urban areas. Texas had few natural lakes, the largest being Caddo Lake, along what is now the Louisiana border. Settlements therefore followed the river systems. Settlements grew into towns, towns grew into cities, and the rivers that once flowed freely now are mostly dammed, serving as municipal reservoirs.
But it was the railroads, not the waterways, that drove settlement. Texas became a major producer of cotton as rail lines opened the West, linking it to major national and international markets. Cattle production, too, exploited this rapid transit, as barbed wire began to criss-cross the nation, interfering with the Chisholm, and other cattle trails. Cow towns, like the nickname of my hometown of Fort Worth, were the hubs of rail activity, and the end-destinations of cattle. Meat-packing became a significant industry, and Fort Worth was home to both the Swift and Armor companies, which later merged. In its heyday, over 100, 000 head of cattle passed into the Fort Worth Stockyards per day.
In 1901, oil was tapped at Spindletop, changing the destiny of Texas forever. Texas became the leading state in the production of petroleum products. The industry spurred the growth of the Texas economy with forward linkages to petrochemicals and related manufacturing, especially of industrial machinery and sheet metals. Increasingly, the economy shifted from an agricultural and ranching base to an urban one related to and supporting the petroleum industry. Commercial shipping was widely developed along the Gulf Coast, a leading factor in the growth of Houston’s population, the state’s most populous city at almost two million.
Overall, Texas is the second most-populous state in the Union, not surprising being the largest geographic one of the lower forty-eight. Numbering approximately three million in 1900, by 2000, Texas had swarmed to over twenty million residents. Though they do not rival the density of such great cities as New York City or Mexico City, Texas cities like Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio contain over one million each, and many more number in the hundreds of thousands. Fort Worth, still affectionately known as Cowtown, has more than a half-million humans, and is the thirty-first fastest growing city in the U.S., with a rate of 2.6%.
Most Texans are descended from pioneers who migrated from other states in the nineteenth century. Many of these were of questionable character. One of my own ancestors fled from the Carolinas after faking his own death to avoid the vengeance of a cuckolded gun-duelist. However, significant immigration came from across the seas, as well, including Germans, who founded Fredericksburg, Irish rail workers who settled Donegal near the Oklahoma border, and many from China and Vietnam, among other Asian countries.
The aforementioned Houston is the home of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, named for the great Texan and U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson, is a major facility in the U.S. space program. With the potential development of space-related industries, Houston, and all of Texas may play an increasingly important role in the world economy, spurring even greater population growth.
Chapter four, question two (191): Paleolithic Denton
Chapter five, question two (233): Little Vietnam in Haltom City
Chapter six, question one (272): My Home Town
The city of Fort Worth is Where the West Begins, as the motto has it. The city capitalizes on its Old West image. For example, The Fort Worth Livestock Show and Rodeo is internationally famous, drawing tourists to the Will Rogers Memorial Complex, the stock show’s home since it grew too large for the original location in Fort Worth’s historic Stockyards. The Will Rogers complex is a marvelous example of art-deco architecture, all the more grand after its recent renovation.
Nearby Casa Mañana Theater was one of only three true theaters-in-the-round in the U.S. Two generations of schoolchildren were introduced to live theatre under Casa’s famous geodesic dome roof, based on designs by the famous architect, Buckminster Fuller. I, myself, apprenticed there for six years before rising to a staff position.
Across West Lancaster, the Kimbell Art Museum exhibits works of Picasso and Rembrandt in its permanent collection. The world-class museum also houses tours that travel to museums the like of Paris’s Louvre and the New York Metropolitan. Tours that include the Kimbell sometimes include as few as three museums in the world. The moving sculpture of the Kimbell’s reflecting pool is a favored spot of art lovers as well as young lovers on dates.
West of the Kimbell, is the Amon G. Carter Museum of Western Art. Besides its near life-size sculptures of cowboys bulldoggin’, and Native Americans in mournful isolation, it is the home of one the finest collections of western photographs.
To complete the circuit, and recrossing Lancaster to the west of Will Rogers, one finds the Fort Worth Museum of Natural Science and History, home of the Omni Theatre. In my childhood, one could pass from the scenic sculpture of a Paleolithic surgery, through an Old West town, and onto the most technologically sophisticated theater of its time. The Omni is still one of the few Omnimax screens in the world.
Returning to my childhood, we made our way home via Interstate 30 east, and would pass by the Mrs. Baird’s Bread Factory, shortly after the neck-craning attempt to read the Episcopal Church’s thoughts for the week, usually an obscure and enigmatic passage from the Bible. The tantalizing aroma of baking bread permeated the area from the Trinity Bridge to the hospital district. Like Casa Mañana, schoolchildren toured the Mrs. Baird’s facility every year. At the end of the tour, the children were rewarded with a free snack, freshly packaged. Sadly, the factory moved out of town almost ten years ago.
The last stop, for me at least, was my grandmother’s house. Her homemade rice-crispy treats beat the hell out of those fake Twinkies from Mrs. Baird’s, though I still miss the smell of the place.
Chapter seven, question three (325): Agglomeration Effects in a Local Business Park
Riverbend Business Park is a commercial-light-industrial business park along the Trinity River, though its location exploits the river in name only. The river is not large enough to support barge traffic, though there once were such grandiose plans for it. Instead, the business park is situated at the intersection of Loop 820 and State Highway 121, as well as their junctures with U.S. 377 and Interstate 30. A major rail line passes by the north side, but unfortunately no rail traffic exploits this opportunity. The major agglomeration effect functioning here is the convenience to the highway system, utilized by workers, customers, and large trucks.
The park was designed with large passages, easily navigable by box-trucks and even tractor-trailer rigs. All of the resident storefronts possess at least one full-size loading bay with a floor-level dock. This feature seems to be the major reason for the businesses’ proximity to one another.
Unlike the model for agglomeration outlined in the book, Riverbend’s raison d’être as a hub is the industrial use of space. The large warehouse-type construction of the buildings attracts businesses with a need for large open work spaces or storage needs. Half-Price Books, for example, maintains an operation here, though not as part of its retail sales operation. The park also is home to Motorola, Otis Elevator, and Johnson Limousine.
Perhaps as many as one hundred businesses operate here. They are an eclectic collection: Veterinarian Solutions is next to Tool Supply; the limousine service next to an embroiderer’s; Harris Dental just down from Lonestarr Recording studios—a boon, perhaps for teeth-grinding audio technicians, but other linkages are not so apparent.
There is a sports and athletics consultant, and the enigmatic Answers, Etc., alongside the Bar Mart. The D/FW Regional Office of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality sits across from a U.S. Post Office, the latter an ancillary service for the whole park, no doubt. So, too, the drop boxes for Fed/Ex, UPS, Airborne Express, and the probably local Lone Star Express.
Other ancillary businesses should include the Catered for You Café, which looks to be a storefront eatery as well as catering service, and the healthy-sounding Obee’s Soup and Salads. But the less directly related services are outside the park proper. Nearby is a McDonald’s restaurant, several gas stations, a day-care facility, and a ladies-only gym. Within the development is a regional bank, but the extent to which it is available to the park’s workers is undetermined—it has no “drive-thru” operation, and the storefront is secluded.
Despite the presence of firms such as Business Forms and Tyco Fire and Security, there seem to be few linkages between the businesses. The most notable seems to be one between Westbridge Printing and Impression Inks, though admittedly, my impression of their linkage is due to their sharing of a common wall. In truth, the printers may have more truck with obviously misnamed Oceanside Graphics, at the opposite end of the park.
The park’s businesses do not even benefit from a contract with a single waste management company, for both Waste Management and Trinity Waste dumpsters were observed, though the one may subcontract with the other. Presumably the grounds are kept by one firm, but no evidence of this was apparent.
Open space attracted the developers Newell and Newell, as well as the likely lower property tax rates, for the property falls within Richland Hills, not Fort Worth. But access is its selling point. The test of this will be when a change to the mode of transit and shipping reduces the cost-benefit of trucking and highway travel.
Chapter eight, question three (360): USDA Subsidies
Chapter nine, question one (410): U.S.-Mexico Border Issues
A survey of more than two hundred articles on international news reveals that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Migration across the U.S.-Mexico border is the single most important issue between the two countries. One historian has called the border a “fictional frontier,” and indeed, the fiction of its boundary is read only by governments.
Maquiladoras pepper the southern edge of Texas, taking advantage of tax-free zones in Mexico as well as the low-wage workforce. Easily trucked back into the lucrative markets of the U.S., the multinational businesses running such productions enjoy the best of both worlds—low wages and high sales. Indeed, the line between these two worlds—the first world and the second—are blurred like lines drawn in the windswept sand. The city of El Paso, Texas, has sprawled into Mexico, where it is known as Ciudad Juárez, but the “two” cities in reality comprise one metropolitan area, the melding raising political issues over wages, housing and municipal water rights.
Nationally, water rights have become frustratingly confused. Mexico owes the U.S. billions of gallons from the water of the Rio Grande, while the water of the Colorado, dammed in the U.S. state of Arizona, and diverted for irrigation in California, scarcely reaches Mexico at all.
Extradition is another troubling aspect of this international flow. Mexico consistently refuses to extradite fugitives who would face the death penalty in the U.S. Some bounty hunters face charges in Mexico for kidnapping such fugitives.
Drug trafficking and gun-running stories frequent the pages of the international desk. Drug production in Mexico is cheap and involves little risk, most of that being part of the smuggling operations. Lucrative drug markets in the U.S. create enormous profit incentives, while guns flow south to help protect the cartels from rivals and the Federales.
Such flows of illegal goods and peoples constrain both countries to tighten border security. Especially after the incidents on 9/11/2001, border security on both sides has increased. Non-Mexican migrants seek entrance into the U.S. through Mexico’s borders. Central and South Americans view Mexico as a “stepping stone” into the U.S., but so do people from abroad—most notably from the Middle East.
Not surprising, then, is the contention over the validity of visas and other identification documents. U.S. authorities warn that the Mexican federal identity card is so easily forged that it should no longer be accepted by U.S. banks or housing management. False U.S. Social Security cards have become one of the most forged in the world.
Increasingly, restricting access along the border makes little practical sense. The AFL-CIO has been working to unionize workers in Mexico. Operating under the principle that Mexican low wages steal U.S. jobs, or at least drive down American wages, the union organizers have begun visiting Mexico for the first time since 1924.
Of course, soccer is important, too. World cup rivals, the U.S. and Mexico use the unlikely sport of soccer as an arena for international diplomacy—an inspiration for the U.K.
Mexico’s government has a reputation for graft and corruption that is unrivaled by any except Louisiana’s. Mexico remains seen as a haven for fugitives, a getaway destination for the wanted and get-to destination for the sexually unwanted who seek the pleasures of brothels and cheap liquor. It is perhaps this image of Mexico that keeps the border a firm barrier to its barrios. More’s the pity.
Chapter ten, question one (448): The Ten Fastest-Growing U.S. Cities
The ten fastest growing cities in the U.S. are:
1. Gilbert, AZ 6. Chandler, AZ
2. North Las Vegas, NV 7. Chula Vista, CA
3. Rancho Cucamonga, CA 8. Olathe, KS
4. Henderson, NV 9. Cape Coral, FL
5. Joliet, IL 10. Peoria, AZ
See the attached table from the U.S. Census Bureau for percentage increases.
Chapter eleven, question four (500): Haltom Plaza, An Ordinary Cityscape
Despite its provocative nomenclature, the strip mall is meant for shopping. Haltom Plaza is one of the more appealing of such places, with a uniform single roof-line and vintage neon lighting. It is more than a mere strip, in fact, with several shops housed in freestanding storefronts, one at either end, and one in the middle, landmarks for the major driveways in and out of the strip mall’s parking lot. The black asphalt parking lot is neatly apportioned with white parking slot outlines and yellow lane markings that coordinate well with its lima-bean-colored roof and mauve stucco-like buildings.
This tenth-of-a-mile strip of U.S. Highway 377 is an oasis of commerce in the predominantly residential city of Haltom City—a redundant name proudly displayed on city documents, but sadly, not featured in the plaza of Haltom Plaza. Across the highway, a few auto mechanics specialize in wheels and mufflers, alongside such other greasy operations as Taco Bell, Papa John’s, and Twisters Tenders. These small independent buildings contrast with the comparatively stately colonnade of the plaza, an almost historic site due to its long-time existence.
A variety of retail stores inhabit the plaza. There is an optical clinic, Taylor’s Dry-Cleaners with an on-site seamstress, a secondhand store, a hardware store. Big Lots! discounts housewares; Smoke City trades in tobacco products. Video and pc games can be found with one GameStop. There is a newly opened ladies’ gym, the appropriately named Curves, as well as the beauty boutique of Smart Looks, appealing, perhaps, to multi-tasking persons who place themselves in the good hands of Allstate Insurance. Those with time on their hands as they await treatment at the Med Alert industrial health clinic might window shop at the store whose fashions have but OnePrice.
The working-class neighborhoods surrounding Haltom Plaza also support a Hancock’s fabric store, as well as a Radio Shack, and the discount grocery, Sack ’N Save. To pay for it all, one may get Checks Cashed at the middle island storefront, while credit is extended at the Rentacenter.
There is a family dental practice, and two other satellite medical centers provide alternate choices to the pain and injury management of the previously mentioned Med Alert. Pro Cuts is the choice of those not so concerned with Smart Looks.
Busy shoppers, medical patients, and miscellaneous errandrunners may sneak a dozen rings at one of the two donut shops, catch an early or late breakfast at The Café, a late lunch at Joe’s Pasta and Pizza, whose slightly schizophrenic store-window sign reminds passersby it is the home of Joe’s Pizza & Pasta, or grab a drive-thru dinner from the local Pizza Hut, the spice of life not flavoring food in Haltom City (indeed, leaving the Plaza, one could also stop for pizza at the ironically named Mugger’s Pizza, Mr. Jim’s, or the newly opened Enzo’s Pizza and Subs). For more special occasions, one can gorge on the Jumbo China Buffet, the misleadingly named restaurant with normally sized plates.
The strip mall identifies its surroundings as suburbia as much as do the tract homes and school zones and churches that intermingle with the muffler shops, banks, and quick-lube service shops that front along the highway. The stores of Haltom Plaza provide the basic needs of the suburban home, rather than the luxury items destined for greater retail sales at the more manorly North Hills shopping mall, several miles east. It is a bazaar for those in need of specific items to complete their chores at home, the bizarre solution to sprawl.
Chapter twelve, question three (539): Effects of Economic Globalization on Fort Worth, Texas
The last meat-packing plant in Fort Worth closed in 1971. Yet, the Fort Worth Stockyards is still home to animal auctions, albeit much reduced in number. The advent of satellite television and communications created a new and different market for these sales. Ostrich farms in Oklahoma competed with ones in Australia over television airwaves while businessmen bid on them in Texas.
Change is resplendent all along Hell’s Half-Acre, the section of downtown Fort Worth that led to the Stockyards. Once inhabited by the cheapest of hotels, domino parlors, bars, and their rough and sometimes murderous patrons, it is now a place for shopping tourists and traveling business conventioneers. Walking tours of the Stockyards area entertained travelers from Japan to Norway. Billy Bob’s Texas boasts of being the largest honky-tonk in the world as well as having the world’s only permanent indoor rodeo.
Sadly, globalization often means the loss of jobs. A long-time Fort Worth-based book publisher, ultimately Harcourt College Publishers, had survived many mergers and name changes since its origins. Acquired by a Canadian firm more than five years ago, the operations in Fort Worth were suspended. Many fine editors were forced into unwanted relocation and retirement, or the ranks of the unemployed.
Some changes have been good. Local grocery store delis now serve box sushi, an alternative to red meat and pork products that once ruled here. Indeed, since Oprah won the lawsuit launched by Texas cattlemen, sushi restaurants have become relatively commonplace. Likewise, Indian and Mediterranean foods have begun to show themselves.
International films have but a single outlet, near Hulen mall, but that is more than there once was. Mainly appealing to patrons of independent and arthouse films, the Hulen 10 theater presents exclusive engagements, and enjoys an exclusive hold on that market.
The Sierra Club once held an office downtown. Though focusing mainly on U.S. environmental policy, it also has engaged in world realty. The Sierra Club has bought rainforest lands in South America for preservation.
The Fort Worth Zoo has also been of great importance in this arena. As a “world-class” zoo, it has been a pioneer in naturalized habitats. The zoo also is a leading research facility in veterinarian medicine. Far superior to its only nearby rival, the Dallas Zoo, Fort Worth’s is a frequent stop for touring exhibits such as China’s panda bears, and the infamous Komodo Dragons.
The Kimbell Art Museum recently presented works by Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani. Other tours have been presented there such as the Figures of the Buddha, which displayed works from ancient India, Japan, Myanmar, and Thailand among others. The increasing global reach of the Kimbell has grasped cryptedl treasures from China, ancient Egypt, and pre-Columbian Mexico.
Texas has no state income tax, and the appeal of this has attracted many upper-income bracket families to the state. The flavor of Fort Worth is changing to take advantage of their disposable incomes, reflecting their broader tastes. No longer merely a cow town, Fort Worth rather successfully blends its Old West image with world cuisines and cultures, Where the West Begins, and the rest fit in.
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On the Commodification of Human Beings
For-Profit Prisons and the Social Production of Criminality
INTRODUCTION
Although the overall crime rate in the U.S. has fallen since 1980 (Western, Beckett, 1999, p. 1033), the rate of incarceration and the length of sentences has increased. Along with this, the prosecution of such “victimless crimes” as drug offenses, also has increased. Also on the rise is the rate of recidivism. The only substantive decrease has been in rehabilitation.
This paper argues there is a correlation between the development of a penal system that has a profit motive and the subsequent rise in rates of incarceration. Under the guise of “getting tough on crime,” prisons are expected to defray their own costs, even turn a profit. Private entrepreneurs warehouse prisoners from other districts, as well as hire out prison labor for industries such as telephone operations, demolition, and manufacture.
Social institutions have the understood purpose of benefiting and protecting the individual members of society, as well as society itself. To such ends, prison reform through most of the twentieth century has focused on the rehabilitation of criminals. Having served their time in a rehabilitating fashion, ex-convicts were expected to be reincorporated into society as productive members. However, the introduction of a profit motive for the incarceration of people has greatly reduced the role of rehabilitation. Furthermore, incarceration produces long-term difficulties to reentry into the workforce (Western and Beckett, 1999, p.1041).
Not only ethically questionable (Anderson, 2000, p.12), for-profit prisons are contrary to the objective of reducing the public burden of supporting prison populations. Instead, for-profit prisons reduce the population of potential workers, change them from tax-payers to tax-consumers, contribute to a decline in wages for free workers, and shrink the overall economy.
Society must create new members to propagate itself. To the extent that society produces criminals instead of productive citizens, society fails to adequately reproduce itself. It could be argued that society also fails the criminals, who have somehow not been properly enculturated into becoming productive citizens.
Reformation of criminals long has been a tenet of American penology (Conley, 1980, p. 257). This notion presupposes that criminals are rational actors. If then, crime is a choice and not a pathology, it is arguable that the social mechanisms that inculcate positive or non-criminal choices in “good” citizens have failed to work that same magic on criminals. Society has failed to provide the means by which criminals can rationally choose to act in non-criminal ways. Therefore, it is more practical to socialize prisoners in a manner that will allow them to participate in productive society rather than to punish them for crimes against it.
Revenge is costly. Supplanting rehabilitation with punishment prevents real restitution. Worse, punitive measures have not been demonstrated to effectively deter crime nor lessen recidivism (Harvard Law Review, 1996, p.876).
Unscrupulous entrepreneurs have “absolutely hoodwinked” (Hallinan, 2001, p.176) society into thinking that the privatization of prisons or the introduction of a profit incentive reduces the cost of imprisonment to society. It has not been proven that private prisons are less costly than publicly managed ones (Perrone and Pratt, 2003, passim). Most importantly, the fact that profits can be generated by incarceration shifts the economic objective from producing good citizens to producing bad ones.
Sociology is a powerful tool for understanding the human condition. Yet its full benefit cannot be felt unless this understanding is applied to the construction of society and its social institutions. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is not to present new data, but to advocate the use of existing data to guide social change. Sociologists are privy to the science of society; implicit in this is the charge to improve it.
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
Obtaining information relevant to this topic has been difficult. No literature reviews or meta-analyses on the specific topic were discovered. The difficulty may be partly due to the nature of the topic of for-profit prisons, to which there is an ethical as well as an economic component. While the field of sociology is ideally suited to the convergence of these two aspects, a wider-ranging search of scholarly work may be necessary to service such a topic. Journals of ethics and works on criminal justice theory might enhance further research.
Though a survey of the literature has failed to turn up a scholarly review of prisons for profit and the prison-building spree occurring since 1980, useful material does exist. Of this, the preeminent work is the book Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation by the journalist Joseph T. Hallinan. This work has been the primary source for this paper’s background in the history of U.S. prisons, as well as their current social and economic settings.
Hallinan mixes history in with his interviews of wardens, prison guards, and locals from the towns that are home to some notable U.S. prisons he visits. This strange travelogue describes the “prison-industrial complex” at local, state and federal levels, as Hallinan peppers the work with attention-grabbing statistics.
For instance, in 1939, the U.S. incarcerated 137 out of every 100,000 of its citizens. Sixty years later, that ratio had increased to 476 out of every 100,000 (Hallinan, 2001 p.xiii). Hallinan (2001) goes on to cite a federal government prediction that one man in eleven will do time in prison (p.xiii).
Much of the work follows the rise of the Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA, “which controls 55 percent of the private penal facilities in the U.S.” (Hallinan, 2001, p.164) and more abroad. In 1995, it housed a little better than two percent of the incarcerated population (Hallinan, 2001, p.165), which sounds trivial, but it was better than thirty-seven thousand people.
The thrust of Hallinan’s work reconstructs the social world of the prison boom. There is complex interplay between rural poverty, political insiders, and the big business of private prisons.
Poor rural towns are homes to most of the prisons built today. Building prisons means jobs for their depressed local economies, and so “powerful state legislators had wanted them in their districts” (Hallinan 2001, p.84). One of Hallinan’s sources in this area comes from Daniel L. Feldman’s Twenty Years of Prison Expansion: A Failing National Strategy. The article develops the relationship between party politics and the siting of prison facilities, drawing on Mr. Feldman’s experience as a New York state legislator. Feldman noted that nearly ninety percent of his state’s prison inmates were in rural, Republican districts. These districts also received nearly ninety percent of Department of Corrections expenditures (Feldman, 1993, p.561-562).
This coincided with the Republican ideology of getting tough on crime, especially drug offenders. Feldman (1993) faults the war on drugs for much of the population explosion in U.S. prisons. Drug offenders in New York state prisons swelled from 12,000 to 63,000 in twenty years (562).
Prisons for Profit was the title to no less than three separate articles by three different authors, a fact that in itself shows the lack of literature review on the subject. The first was published in the spring 1992 Journal of Human Rights. It draws attention to the questionable practices of CCA, citing political land pandering as well as human rights violations.
The second article, from the UNESCO Courier, shows the plain conflict of interest that for-profit prisons have. It predicts that a “criminal justice industrial complex” could, as a political force, “affect incarceration rates, length of term, and conditions of confinement based not upon societal interest but the profit motive.” (Cavise, 1998, p.21)
The last article of this name also questions the ethics, but goes further, attacking the very premise that the private firms are cheaper. Underbidding is a foreseeable danger, “when the contract came up for renewal, the firm might raise its per diem fees for the inmates by 20 or 30 percent.” (Anderson, 2000, p.12) Not having its prison space to house the inmates, the state has no choice but to pay the higher fees.
Once entrenched, the for-profit prison is difficult to remove. The article quotes Oklahoma State Senator Cal Hobson, pointing out that for-profit prisons are politically protected by being sited in poor rural areas, whose communities decry their closing: “The local chamber of commerce and the mayor complain, then the local legislator says to the government, ‘You can’t do that.’ So the private prison becomes the equivalent of the community’s junior college, and you’re stuck with it because of the jobs.” (Anderson, 2000, p.13)
But more germane to this paper is another aspect of political lobbying. Anderson (2000) writes, that in addition “to seeking a greater flow of prisoners to the beds of private prisons, lobbyists also work to increase the level of inmates classification . . . because the higher the classification, the greater the level of the state’s payment.” (p.13) The growth in spending is staggering—Oklahoma’s annual spending on corrections went from three million dollars to one-hundred million in just five years (Anderson, 2000, p.13).
Perhaps most insightful to the aspect of for-profit prisons as “bastions of cheap labor” is Nicholas Stein’s Fortune magazine article, “Business Behind Bars,” which draws on Reagan-appointed former Attorney General Edwin Meese. For years, Meese lobbied to utilize prison labor for more than “stamping license plates or building courthouse furniture.” (Stein, 2003, p.161)
Prison labor is proposed as an alternative to overseas labor exportation. Stein (2003) notes that labor-intensive work such as computer recycling or the manufacture of hardwood floors can be performed by prison labor (p.161-162), instead of foreign labor.
Stein rightly points out there are rehabilitative as well as economic benefits to the use of prison labor. Theoretically, businesses “get cheap, reliable workers; inmates receive valuable job training.” (Stein, 2003, p.161) But the marketability of such training is questionable. Stein (2003) himself mentions that the hardwood floors “would be prohibitively expensive to make outside the prison fence.” (p.162)
Another advocate of prison labor is Jeremy Travis, director of the National Institute of Justice, research branch of the U.S. Department of Justice. Though it does not “necessarily represent official positions or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice (Travis, 1999, p.106),” his article in Corrections Today proposes measures to increase participation in prison work programs that are fraught with barriers (passim).
Among the barriers Travis proposes to surmount are issues of prison design, management policies, and work programs. Travis (1999) first recommends that prisons be redesigned “to accommodate factory, workshop and office-like areas.” (p.103)
Travis also suggests that the mind-sets of wardens and staff be re-oriented away from “population control and housing.” To accomplish this, he suggests building “profit-sharing and promotional opportunities for correctional staff engaged in prison industries.” (Travis, 1999, p.103) This topic is treated in greater detail by Hallinan (pp.173-176).
Yet the most chilling of Travis’s (1993) proposals is centered on a single conjunction in this quote: “[Proposed] grants would require prisons to demonstrate new production methods, target new portions of their inmate populations, support some new part of their prison needs through internal production, develop restorative justice enterprises for nearby communities or try new marketing approaches (p.104, italics added).”
Marxist theory is borne out with the first “moral and economic viewpoint” that Travis (1993) cites as rationale for prison labor: “In a full-employment economy, America must invest in bringing all of its human capital to market (p.102).”
Full employment is challenged in Bruce Western’s and Katherine Beckett’s (1999) article for The American Journal of Sociology, entitled “How Unregulated Is the U.S. Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution.” Western and Beckett (1999) construct a statistical model that shows U.S. unemployment rates are kept artificially lower through incarceration (p.1041).
The folly of U.S. penal policy is characterized by its comparison to Europe’s. By concentrating funds on incarceration, the U.S. “deepens market inequalities,” while the European model of welfare “lifted about half the nonelderly poor out of poverty (Western and Beckett, 1999, p.1042).”
Faulty economics continue to bear out Marx’s notion of the upward spiral of investment in human capital. Western and Beckett (1999) conclude that for the U.S., sustained “low unemployment depends, in part, not just on large stage intervention through incarceration but on a continuous increase in the magnitude of this intervention (p.1042).”
Passing use was made of “Comparing the Quality of Confinement and Cost-Effectiveness of Public Versus Private Prisons: What We Know, Why We Do Not Know More, and Where to Go from Here” by Dina Perrone and Travis C. Pratt (2003). Their research illustrates the difficulties in comparing the actual costs of privatization.
The major flaw Perrone and Pratt discovered in their review of cost assessments is the mismatch of compared institutions. The authors note that some studies compare private facilities to public ones of a greater security level (Perrone and Pratt, 2003, p.306). Three studies compared real costs to hypothetical ones (Perrone and Pratt, 2003, p.313). Other methodological problems included hidden costs, incomplete lists of expenditure, and lack of control for differences in managerial style (passim).
In the best light, their research showed a savings of $3.40 per diem over public facilities. This savings is meager even when multiplied by the 2.1 million inmates (Stein, 2003, p.161) incarcerated in the U.S.—which yields $7,140,000 in savings, a mere 0.238 percent of the $3 billion (Stein, 2003, p.161) expended twenty years ago. But when taken with a grain of methodological salt, as Perrone and Pratt suggest, this savings is questionable.
Contrasting views on the issue of privatization were found in Privatizing Correctional Institutions, a compilation of essays edited by Gary W. Bowman, Simon Hakim, and Paul Seidensat.
This work offers a comprehensive view of the issues raised by the aforementioned articles. It can be said that some of the noblest intentions pave the road to privatization—indeed as former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger states in his forward to the book, no person “should leave a correctional institution without . . . vocational training that will be salable in the employment market (Bowman, 1993, p.ix).”
But to believe in the power of profit to redeem or rehabilitate is naïve. Indeed, the jeopardy to an inmate’s Constitutional rights is pointed out by Harold J. Sullivan. Private prisons cannot be legally accountable in the way that public institutions are, because they are not subject to the U.S. Constitution, which “restrains state power not private conduct. The liberties protected by the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment are protected only from infringement attributable to government action (Bowman, 1993, p.140).” Case law requires proof that any deprivation result from “state action (Bowman, 1993, p.140).”
Other background was obtained from the Harvard Law Review, and “Prisons, Production, and Profit: Reconsidering the Importance of Prison Industries” by John A. Conley, which appeared in the Journal of Social History.
THEORY
All private prisons currently seek a profit. Most of this is obtained by the per diem fees the facility charges for housing inmates. This is perfectly fitted to Marx’s ideas on the commodification of human beings. But it is more insidious than even Marx imagined, because some 94 percent of the incarcerated are not engaged in commercially rewarding labor (Travis, 1999, p.103). To allow profit to be obtained through mere incarceration, though makes space the commodity being sold, not the human inmate that is being warehoused within it.
To more accurately apply a Marxist perspective to the for-profit prison, attention must be focused on labor. Specifically, Marxist sociology concentrates on the relationship between labor and capital. In respect to the private for-profit prison the variables translate into the relationship between inmates and taxes.
Marxism reduces the cost of production to its lowest common denominator, the “cost of existence and reproduction of the worker” (Marx, 1831, p.176). Within the for-profit prison, the cost of the worker’s existence is borne not by the company that employs this labor, but by the taxpayer. It is tax money that provides the prisoner’s food, housing, and clothing, whether the inmate serves time in a public facility or a private one. The costs of the worker are distributed amongst society. Furthermore, the reproduction of the worker is no longer a biological process, it has become a social one.
Marxist economics shows that a capitalist must replace the wages of a worker “out of the price at which he sells the product produced by the worker . . . at a surplus over the cost of production (Marx, 1831, p.182).” By reducing wages, therefore, profit can be increased. “Profit,” Marx (1831) emphasized, “rises to the extent that wages fall (p.182).”
The for-profit prison in the U.S. gains an economic advantage in the marketplace because of its lower compensation for labor. Competing with companies that must compensate workers at the lowest level of the federal minimum wage, the producer who employs prison labor can cut costs without sacrificing the advantages of expensive machinery or high-quality materials. Such reduction in the costs of labor, allows the producer to sell products at lower prices. Lower prices enable the for-profit prison to outcompete their free market competitors. This is why labor movements lobbied against them early in the twentieth century (Conley, 1980, p.263).
But privatization has begun to erode trade barriers against prison-manufactured goods. Prominent retail companies such as The Home Depot and Lowe’s rank among the some two-hundred-fifty companies that employ U.S. prison labor (Stein, 2003, p.161). Thus, for-profit prisons have an economic incentive for increasing their populations.
However, industriousness is not a quality that is shared equally by prisoners. Therefore, the for-profit prison that employs its inmates in the manufacture of saleable commodities has a vested interest in the conviction of tractable, diligent workers. Violent offenders can detract from the production of those commodities by enacting violence on the other workers. Any disruption can also increase the costs of production by removing workers from their occupations, whether from injury or insurrection. The for-profit prison then, also has an economic incentive to expel the violent and disruptive prisoners.
If these forces influence U.S. jurisprudence, some particular trends may be visible. First, longer sentences are assigned to nonviolent crimes. Second, more acts become criminalized. Lastly, violent criminals will be removed from the penal system. Of special concern is that a profile may be developed for a certain type of offender—one that resembles very much that of the most profitable prison worker—and that this profile may influence society to devalue the cultural practices attached to the offender’s social group.
METHODS
To test these ideas one might best start with a survey that asks the following questions:
1. With what offenses have current prison workers been convicted?
2. Has the prosecution of these charges increased since correctional facilities have begun to employ prison workers?
3. What is the level of employment for violent offenders vs. non-violent offenders? Has this ratio changed since the advent of employment, and if so, in what way?
4. What are the social profiles of the workers? Are some represented in greater numbers than others? If so, has that profile grown in representation, and is it a continuing trend?
5. What percentage of the revenues generated by prison labor is reinvested in the rehabilitation of the inmate?
6. Do recidivists return to the labor in which they had been engaged prior to release? If so, in what percentage? If not, do they return to labor at all?
7. Are revenues derived from prison labor used to reduce the costs of incarceration to the tax-payer?
Furthermore, a review of for-profit prison tax records should be included in the research. This should include records on stock transactions, for the publicly traded companies, political campaign contributions, and a list of assets for both parent and spin-off companies. Employee and consultant lists should be reviewed along with lists of contractors and sub-contractors. And finally, reviewing the lists of customers engaged in convict labor leases should be compared on the basis of post-release employment of former prison workers.
All but the tax records would be matters of public record, and a case could be made that the taxes should be as well, as the private companies are engaged in the public’s business. However, such an investigation would require legal specialists along with economic and social ones. This kind of study would best be conducted by a multi-disciplinary panel.
DISCUSSION
There should be no doubt that work is a primary component of criminal rehabilitation. Indeed, it is one of habilitation among the free. We all must learn skills which we can employ to sustain ourselves. Reform teaches the criminal to rely on socially acceptable skills instead of criminal ones. This paper finds no fault with the idea that prisoners should work.
The objection is to the introduction of a social system that allows and perpetuates private individuals to profit from the incarceration of others. The very notion of prison labor is akin to forced labor, to slavery. American political ideology is predicated on and dedicated to individual liberty. This must be reflected in not only our penal policies, but our economic ones as well.
The material collected for this paper reveals one indisputable fact: prisons breed more prisoners. Public monies are better spent on education. Hallinan (2001) quotes a study by the Rand Corporation estimated that for every million dollars “spent on incarcerating repeat felons prevented sixty-one serious crimes,” while spending it on “high school graduation incentives prevented 258 serious crimes (p.105).”
Since 1983, state spending on incarceration has increased by $37 billion, and rather than reducing the number of inmates, the number has increased from 300,000 to 2.1 million (Stein, 2003, p.161). The U.S. incarcerates more of its population than any other nation in the world (Feldman, 1993, p.562). This is quite contrary to any notion of liberty.
Reviewing the literature showed that the prosecution of victimless crimes such as prostitution and drug possession was rising (May, 1999, p.337; Feldman, 1993, passim). It is difficult to imagine how acts that create no victims could impinge the rights of another, which is a legal test common to theories of ethics. Difficult unless one uses a Marxist imagination.
FUTURE RESEARCH
The most telling sign of Marxist exploitation in the prison would be the passage of legislation that allows prison-manufactured goods to compete on the open market. Such a proposition was advanced by Travis (199, p.103). Coupled with relaxation of the Prison Industry Enhancement guaranties of equal wages, there would be an indication of deliberate and concerted efforts to exploit inmates for their labor, rather than to rehabilitate them through work program incentives.
REFERENCES
Anderson, George M. (2000). Prisons for profit. America, 183 (16), 12-17. Retrieved November 26, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database (3775053).
Bowman, G. W., Hakim, S., & Seidenstat, P. (Eds.). (1993). Privatizing correctional institutions. New Brunswick, U.S.A.: Transaction Publishers.
Conley, John A. (1980). Prisons, production, and profit: Reconsidering the importance of prison industries. Journal of Social History, 14 (2), 257-275. Retrieved December 3, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database (5010156).
Cavise, Leonard L. (1998). Prisons for profit. UNESCO Courier, 51 (6), 20-22. Retrieved December 1, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database (726288).
Feldman, Daniel L. (1993). 20 Years of prison expansion: A failing national strategy. Public Administration Review, 53 (6), 561-566. Retrieved December 3, 2003, from ProQuest database (709144).
Florida reintroduces chain gangs (1996). Harvard Law Review, 109, 876-881: Author.
Hallinan, Joseph T. (2001). Going up the river: Travels in a prison nation. New York: Random House.
Marx, Karl. Wage labor and capital. The Critique of Capital. Friedrich Engels (Ed.). Photocopy for classroom purposes.
May, David C. (1999). Prisons, production, and profit: Reconsidering the importance of prison industries. Deviant Behavior, 20 (4), 260-275. Retrieved December 8, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database (3860717).
Perrone, Dina, & Pratt, Travis C. (2003). Comparing the quality of confinement and cost-effectiveness of public versus private prisons: What we know, why we do not know more, and where to go from here. The Prison Journal, 83 (3), 301-322. Retrieved November 26, 2003, from Rightslink database.
Simon, Ellen (1992). Prisons for profit. The Journal of Human Rights, 19 (2), 22-25. Retrieved December 1, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database (9312081931).
Stein, Nicholas (2003). Business behind bars. Fortune, 148 (5), 161-165. Retrieved November 26, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database (10754094).
Travis, Jeremy (1999). Prisons, work, and re-entry. Corrections Today, 61 (6), 102-106. Retrieved December 3, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database (2796115).
Western, Bruce, & Beckett, Katherine (1999). The American Journal of Sociology, 104 (4), 1031-1061. Retrieved December 3, 2003, from ProQuest database (41050300).
INTRODUCTION
Although the overall crime rate in the U.S. has fallen since 1980 (Western, Beckett, 1999, p. 1033), the rate of incarceration and the length of sentences has increased. Along with this, the prosecution of such “victimless crimes” as drug offenses, also has increased. Also on the rise is the rate of recidivism. The only substantive decrease has been in rehabilitation.
This paper argues there is a correlation between the development of a penal system that has a profit motive and the subsequent rise in rates of incarceration. Under the guise of “getting tough on crime,” prisons are expected to defray their own costs, even turn a profit. Private entrepreneurs warehouse prisoners from other districts, as well as hire out prison labor for industries such as telephone operations, demolition, and manufacture.
Social institutions have the understood purpose of benefiting and protecting the individual members of society, as well as society itself. To such ends, prison reform through most of the twentieth century has focused on the rehabilitation of criminals. Having served their time in a rehabilitating fashion, ex-convicts were expected to be reincorporated into society as productive members. However, the introduction of a profit motive for the incarceration of people has greatly reduced the role of rehabilitation. Furthermore, incarceration produces long-term difficulties to reentry into the workforce (Western and Beckett, 1999, p.1041).
Not only ethically questionable (Anderson, 2000, p.12), for-profit prisons are contrary to the objective of reducing the public burden of supporting prison populations. Instead, for-profit prisons reduce the population of potential workers, change them from tax-payers to tax-consumers, contribute to a decline in wages for free workers, and shrink the overall economy.
Society must create new members to propagate itself. To the extent that society produces criminals instead of productive citizens, society fails to adequately reproduce itself. It could be argued that society also fails the criminals, who have somehow not been properly enculturated into becoming productive citizens.
Reformation of criminals long has been a tenet of American penology (Conley, 1980, p. 257). This notion presupposes that criminals are rational actors. If then, crime is a choice and not a pathology, it is arguable that the social mechanisms that inculcate positive or non-criminal choices in “good” citizens have failed to work that same magic on criminals. Society has failed to provide the means by which criminals can rationally choose to act in non-criminal ways. Therefore, it is more practical to socialize prisoners in a manner that will allow them to participate in productive society rather than to punish them for crimes against it.
Revenge is costly. Supplanting rehabilitation with punishment prevents real restitution. Worse, punitive measures have not been demonstrated to effectively deter crime nor lessen recidivism (Harvard Law Review, 1996, p.876).
Unscrupulous entrepreneurs have “absolutely hoodwinked” (Hallinan, 2001, p.176) society into thinking that the privatization of prisons or the introduction of a profit incentive reduces the cost of imprisonment to society. It has not been proven that private prisons are less costly than publicly managed ones (Perrone and Pratt, 2003, passim). Most importantly, the fact that profits can be generated by incarceration shifts the economic objective from producing good citizens to producing bad ones.
Sociology is a powerful tool for understanding the human condition. Yet its full benefit cannot be felt unless this understanding is applied to the construction of society and its social institutions. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is not to present new data, but to advocate the use of existing data to guide social change. Sociologists are privy to the science of society; implicit in this is the charge to improve it.
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
Obtaining information relevant to this topic has been difficult. No literature reviews or meta-analyses on the specific topic were discovered. The difficulty may be partly due to the nature of the topic of for-profit prisons, to which there is an ethical as well as an economic component. While the field of sociology is ideally suited to the convergence of these two aspects, a wider-ranging search of scholarly work may be necessary to service such a topic. Journals of ethics and works on criminal justice theory might enhance further research.
Though a survey of the literature has failed to turn up a scholarly review of prisons for profit and the prison-building spree occurring since 1980, useful material does exist. Of this, the preeminent work is the book Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation by the journalist Joseph T. Hallinan. This work has been the primary source for this paper’s background in the history of U.S. prisons, as well as their current social and economic settings.
Hallinan mixes history in with his interviews of wardens, prison guards, and locals from the towns that are home to some notable U.S. prisons he visits. This strange travelogue describes the “prison-industrial complex” at local, state and federal levels, as Hallinan peppers the work with attention-grabbing statistics.
For instance, in 1939, the U.S. incarcerated 137 out of every 100,000 of its citizens. Sixty years later, that ratio had increased to 476 out of every 100,000 (Hallinan, 2001 p.xiii). Hallinan (2001) goes on to cite a federal government prediction that one man in eleven will do time in prison (p.xiii).
Much of the work follows the rise of the Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA, “which controls 55 percent of the private penal facilities in the U.S.” (Hallinan, 2001, p.164) and more abroad. In 1995, it housed a little better than two percent of the incarcerated population (Hallinan, 2001, p.165), which sounds trivial, but it was better than thirty-seven thousand people.
The thrust of Hallinan’s work reconstructs the social world of the prison boom. There is complex interplay between rural poverty, political insiders, and the big business of private prisons.
Poor rural towns are homes to most of the prisons built today. Building prisons means jobs for their depressed local economies, and so “powerful state legislators had wanted them in their districts” (Hallinan 2001, p.84). One of Hallinan’s sources in this area comes from Daniel L. Feldman’s Twenty Years of Prison Expansion: A Failing National Strategy. The article develops the relationship between party politics and the siting of prison facilities, drawing on Mr. Feldman’s experience as a New York state legislator. Feldman noted that nearly ninety percent of his state’s prison inmates were in rural, Republican districts. These districts also received nearly ninety percent of Department of Corrections expenditures (Feldman, 1993, p.561-562).
This coincided with the Republican ideology of getting tough on crime, especially drug offenders. Feldman (1993) faults the war on drugs for much of the population explosion in U.S. prisons. Drug offenders in New York state prisons swelled from 12,000 to 63,000 in twenty years (562).
Prisons for Profit was the title to no less than three separate articles by three different authors, a fact that in itself shows the lack of literature review on the subject. The first was published in the spring 1992 Journal of Human Rights. It draws attention to the questionable practices of CCA, citing political land pandering as well as human rights violations.
The second article, from the UNESCO Courier, shows the plain conflict of interest that for-profit prisons have. It predicts that a “criminal justice industrial complex” could, as a political force, “affect incarceration rates, length of term, and conditions of confinement based not upon societal interest but the profit motive.” (Cavise, 1998, p.21)
The last article of this name also questions the ethics, but goes further, attacking the very premise that the private firms are cheaper. Underbidding is a foreseeable danger, “when the contract came up for renewal, the firm might raise its per diem fees for the inmates by 20 or 30 percent.” (Anderson, 2000, p.12) Not having its prison space to house the inmates, the state has no choice but to pay the higher fees.
Once entrenched, the for-profit prison is difficult to remove. The article quotes Oklahoma State Senator Cal Hobson, pointing out that for-profit prisons are politically protected by being sited in poor rural areas, whose communities decry their closing: “The local chamber of commerce and the mayor complain, then the local legislator says to the government, ‘You can’t do that.’ So the private prison becomes the equivalent of the community’s junior college, and you’re stuck with it because of the jobs.” (Anderson, 2000, p.13)
But more germane to this paper is another aspect of political lobbying. Anderson (2000) writes, that in addition “to seeking a greater flow of prisoners to the beds of private prisons, lobbyists also work to increase the level of inmates classification . . . because the higher the classification, the greater the level of the state’s payment.” (p.13) The growth in spending is staggering—Oklahoma’s annual spending on corrections went from three million dollars to one-hundred million in just five years (Anderson, 2000, p.13).
Perhaps most insightful to the aspect of for-profit prisons as “bastions of cheap labor” is Nicholas Stein’s Fortune magazine article, “Business Behind Bars,” which draws on Reagan-appointed former Attorney General Edwin Meese. For years, Meese lobbied to utilize prison labor for more than “stamping license plates or building courthouse furniture.” (Stein, 2003, p.161)
Prison labor is proposed as an alternative to overseas labor exportation. Stein (2003) notes that labor-intensive work such as computer recycling or the manufacture of hardwood floors can be performed by prison labor (p.161-162), instead of foreign labor.
Stein rightly points out there are rehabilitative as well as economic benefits to the use of prison labor. Theoretically, businesses “get cheap, reliable workers; inmates receive valuable job training.” (Stein, 2003, p.161) But the marketability of such training is questionable. Stein (2003) himself mentions that the hardwood floors “would be prohibitively expensive to make outside the prison fence.” (p.162)
Another advocate of prison labor is Jeremy Travis, director of the National Institute of Justice, research branch of the U.S. Department of Justice. Though it does not “necessarily represent official positions or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice (Travis, 1999, p.106),” his article in Corrections Today proposes measures to increase participation in prison work programs that are fraught with barriers (passim).
Among the barriers Travis proposes to surmount are issues of prison design, management policies, and work programs. Travis (1999) first recommends that prisons be redesigned “to accommodate factory, workshop and office-like areas.” (p.103)
Travis also suggests that the mind-sets of wardens and staff be re-oriented away from “population control and housing.” To accomplish this, he suggests building “profit-sharing and promotional opportunities for correctional staff engaged in prison industries.” (Travis, 1999, p.103) This topic is treated in greater detail by Hallinan (pp.173-176).
Yet the most chilling of Travis’s (1993) proposals is centered on a single conjunction in this quote: “[Proposed] grants would require prisons to demonstrate new production methods, target new portions of their inmate populations, support some new part of their prison needs through internal production, develop restorative justice enterprises for nearby communities or try new marketing approaches (p.104, italics added).”
Marxist theory is borne out with the first “moral and economic viewpoint” that Travis (1993) cites as rationale for prison labor: “In a full-employment economy, America must invest in bringing all of its human capital to market (p.102).”
Full employment is challenged in Bruce Western’s and Katherine Beckett’s (1999) article for The American Journal of Sociology, entitled “How Unregulated Is the U.S. Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution.” Western and Beckett (1999) construct a statistical model that shows U.S. unemployment rates are kept artificially lower through incarceration (p.1041).
The folly of U.S. penal policy is characterized by its comparison to Europe’s. By concentrating funds on incarceration, the U.S. “deepens market inequalities,” while the European model of welfare “lifted about half the nonelderly poor out of poverty (Western and Beckett, 1999, p.1042).”
Faulty economics continue to bear out Marx’s notion of the upward spiral of investment in human capital. Western and Beckett (1999) conclude that for the U.S., sustained “low unemployment depends, in part, not just on large stage intervention through incarceration but on a continuous increase in the magnitude of this intervention (p.1042).”
Passing use was made of “Comparing the Quality of Confinement and Cost-Effectiveness of Public Versus Private Prisons: What We Know, Why We Do Not Know More, and Where to Go from Here” by Dina Perrone and Travis C. Pratt (2003). Their research illustrates the difficulties in comparing the actual costs of privatization.
The major flaw Perrone and Pratt discovered in their review of cost assessments is the mismatch of compared institutions. The authors note that some studies compare private facilities to public ones of a greater security level (Perrone and Pratt, 2003, p.306). Three studies compared real costs to hypothetical ones (Perrone and Pratt, 2003, p.313). Other methodological problems included hidden costs, incomplete lists of expenditure, and lack of control for differences in managerial style (passim).
In the best light, their research showed a savings of $3.40 per diem over public facilities. This savings is meager even when multiplied by the 2.1 million inmates (Stein, 2003, p.161) incarcerated in the U.S.—which yields $7,140,000 in savings, a mere 0.238 percent of the $3 billion (Stein, 2003, p.161) expended twenty years ago. But when taken with a grain of methodological salt, as Perrone and Pratt suggest, this savings is questionable.
Contrasting views on the issue of privatization were found in Privatizing Correctional Institutions, a compilation of essays edited by Gary W. Bowman, Simon Hakim, and Paul Seidensat.
This work offers a comprehensive view of the issues raised by the aforementioned articles. It can be said that some of the noblest intentions pave the road to privatization—indeed as former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger states in his forward to the book, no person “should leave a correctional institution without . . . vocational training that will be salable in the employment market (Bowman, 1993, p.ix).”
But to believe in the power of profit to redeem or rehabilitate is naïve. Indeed, the jeopardy to an inmate’s Constitutional rights is pointed out by Harold J. Sullivan. Private prisons cannot be legally accountable in the way that public institutions are, because they are not subject to the U.S. Constitution, which “restrains state power not private conduct. The liberties protected by the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment are protected only from infringement attributable to government action (Bowman, 1993, p.140).” Case law requires proof that any deprivation result from “state action (Bowman, 1993, p.140).”
Other background was obtained from the Harvard Law Review, and “Prisons, Production, and Profit: Reconsidering the Importance of Prison Industries” by John A. Conley, which appeared in the Journal of Social History.
THEORY
All private prisons currently seek a profit. Most of this is obtained by the per diem fees the facility charges for housing inmates. This is perfectly fitted to Marx’s ideas on the commodification of human beings. But it is more insidious than even Marx imagined, because some 94 percent of the incarcerated are not engaged in commercially rewarding labor (Travis, 1999, p.103). To allow profit to be obtained through mere incarceration, though makes space the commodity being sold, not the human inmate that is being warehoused within it.
To more accurately apply a Marxist perspective to the for-profit prison, attention must be focused on labor. Specifically, Marxist sociology concentrates on the relationship between labor and capital. In respect to the private for-profit prison the variables translate into the relationship between inmates and taxes.
Marxism reduces the cost of production to its lowest common denominator, the “cost of existence and reproduction of the worker” (Marx, 1831, p.176). Within the for-profit prison, the cost of the worker’s existence is borne not by the company that employs this labor, but by the taxpayer. It is tax money that provides the prisoner’s food, housing, and clothing, whether the inmate serves time in a public facility or a private one. The costs of the worker are distributed amongst society. Furthermore, the reproduction of the worker is no longer a biological process, it has become a social one.
Marxist economics shows that a capitalist must replace the wages of a worker “out of the price at which he sells the product produced by the worker . . . at a surplus over the cost of production (Marx, 1831, p.182).” By reducing wages, therefore, profit can be increased. “Profit,” Marx (1831) emphasized, “rises to the extent that wages fall (p.182).”
The for-profit prison in the U.S. gains an economic advantage in the marketplace because of its lower compensation for labor. Competing with companies that must compensate workers at the lowest level of the federal minimum wage, the producer who employs prison labor can cut costs without sacrificing the advantages of expensive machinery or high-quality materials. Such reduction in the costs of labor, allows the producer to sell products at lower prices. Lower prices enable the for-profit prison to outcompete their free market competitors. This is why labor movements lobbied against them early in the twentieth century (Conley, 1980, p.263).
But privatization has begun to erode trade barriers against prison-manufactured goods. Prominent retail companies such as The Home Depot and Lowe’s rank among the some two-hundred-fifty companies that employ U.S. prison labor (Stein, 2003, p.161). Thus, for-profit prisons have an economic incentive for increasing their populations.
However, industriousness is not a quality that is shared equally by prisoners. Therefore, the for-profit prison that employs its inmates in the manufacture of saleable commodities has a vested interest in the conviction of tractable, diligent workers. Violent offenders can detract from the production of those commodities by enacting violence on the other workers. Any disruption can also increase the costs of production by removing workers from their occupations, whether from injury or insurrection. The for-profit prison then, also has an economic incentive to expel the violent and disruptive prisoners.
If these forces influence U.S. jurisprudence, some particular trends may be visible. First, longer sentences are assigned to nonviolent crimes. Second, more acts become criminalized. Lastly, violent criminals will be removed from the penal system. Of special concern is that a profile may be developed for a certain type of offender—one that resembles very much that of the most profitable prison worker—and that this profile may influence society to devalue the cultural practices attached to the offender’s social group.
METHODS
To test these ideas one might best start with a survey that asks the following questions:
1. With what offenses have current prison workers been convicted?
2. Has the prosecution of these charges increased since correctional facilities have begun to employ prison workers?
3. What is the level of employment for violent offenders vs. non-violent offenders? Has this ratio changed since the advent of employment, and if so, in what way?
4. What are the social profiles of the workers? Are some represented in greater numbers than others? If so, has that profile grown in representation, and is it a continuing trend?
5. What percentage of the revenues generated by prison labor is reinvested in the rehabilitation of the inmate?
6. Do recidivists return to the labor in which they had been engaged prior to release? If so, in what percentage? If not, do they return to labor at all?
7. Are revenues derived from prison labor used to reduce the costs of incarceration to the tax-payer?
Furthermore, a review of for-profit prison tax records should be included in the research. This should include records on stock transactions, for the publicly traded companies, political campaign contributions, and a list of assets for both parent and spin-off companies. Employee and consultant lists should be reviewed along with lists of contractors and sub-contractors. And finally, reviewing the lists of customers engaged in convict labor leases should be compared on the basis of post-release employment of former prison workers.
All but the tax records would be matters of public record, and a case could be made that the taxes should be as well, as the private companies are engaged in the public’s business. However, such an investigation would require legal specialists along with economic and social ones. This kind of study would best be conducted by a multi-disciplinary panel.
DISCUSSION
There should be no doubt that work is a primary component of criminal rehabilitation. Indeed, it is one of habilitation among the free. We all must learn skills which we can employ to sustain ourselves. Reform teaches the criminal to rely on socially acceptable skills instead of criminal ones. This paper finds no fault with the idea that prisoners should work.
The objection is to the introduction of a social system that allows and perpetuates private individuals to profit from the incarceration of others. The very notion of prison labor is akin to forced labor, to slavery. American political ideology is predicated on and dedicated to individual liberty. This must be reflected in not only our penal policies, but our economic ones as well.
The material collected for this paper reveals one indisputable fact: prisons breed more prisoners. Public monies are better spent on education. Hallinan (2001) quotes a study by the Rand Corporation estimated that for every million dollars “spent on incarcerating repeat felons prevented sixty-one serious crimes,” while spending it on “high school graduation incentives prevented 258 serious crimes (p.105).”
Since 1983, state spending on incarceration has increased by $37 billion, and rather than reducing the number of inmates, the number has increased from 300,000 to 2.1 million (Stein, 2003, p.161). The U.S. incarcerates more of its population than any other nation in the world (Feldman, 1993, p.562). This is quite contrary to any notion of liberty.
Reviewing the literature showed that the prosecution of victimless crimes such as prostitution and drug possession was rising (May, 1999, p.337; Feldman, 1993, passim). It is difficult to imagine how acts that create no victims could impinge the rights of another, which is a legal test common to theories of ethics. Difficult unless one uses a Marxist imagination.
FUTURE RESEARCH
The most telling sign of Marxist exploitation in the prison would be the passage of legislation that allows prison-manufactured goods to compete on the open market. Such a proposition was advanced by Travis (199, p.103). Coupled with relaxation of the Prison Industry Enhancement guaranties of equal wages, there would be an indication of deliberate and concerted efforts to exploit inmates for their labor, rather than to rehabilitate them through work program incentives.
REFERENCES
Anderson, George M. (2000). Prisons for profit. America, 183 (16), 12-17. Retrieved November 26, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database (3775053).
Bowman, G. W., Hakim, S., & Seidenstat, P. (Eds.). (1993). Privatizing correctional institutions. New Brunswick, U.S.A.: Transaction Publishers.
Conley, John A. (1980). Prisons, production, and profit: Reconsidering the importance of prison industries. Journal of Social History, 14 (2), 257-275. Retrieved December 3, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database (5010156).
Cavise, Leonard L. (1998). Prisons for profit. UNESCO Courier, 51 (6), 20-22. Retrieved December 1, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database (726288).
Feldman, Daniel L. (1993). 20 Years of prison expansion: A failing national strategy. Public Administration Review, 53 (6), 561-566. Retrieved December 3, 2003, from ProQuest database (709144).
Florida reintroduces chain gangs (1996). Harvard Law Review, 109, 876-881: Author.
Hallinan, Joseph T. (2001). Going up the river: Travels in a prison nation. New York: Random House.
Marx, Karl. Wage labor and capital. The Critique of Capital. Friedrich Engels (Ed.). Photocopy for classroom purposes.
May, David C. (1999). Prisons, production, and profit: Reconsidering the importance of prison industries. Deviant Behavior, 20 (4), 260-275. Retrieved December 8, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database (3860717).
Perrone, Dina, & Pratt, Travis C. (2003). Comparing the quality of confinement and cost-effectiveness of public versus private prisons: What we know, why we do not know more, and where to go from here. The Prison Journal, 83 (3), 301-322. Retrieved November 26, 2003, from Rightslink database.
Simon, Ellen (1992). Prisons for profit. The Journal of Human Rights, 19 (2), 22-25. Retrieved December 1, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database (9312081931).
Stein, Nicholas (2003). Business behind bars. Fortune, 148 (5), 161-165. Retrieved November 26, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database (10754094).
Travis, Jeremy (1999). Prisons, work, and re-entry. Corrections Today, 61 (6), 102-106. Retrieved December 3, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database (2796115).
Western, Bruce, & Beckett, Katherine (1999). The American Journal of Sociology, 104 (4), 1031-1061. Retrieved December 3, 2003, from ProQuest database (41050300).
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).
Bignal, Keeley L., Mike Ashmore, Alistair Headley, Kirstin Stewart, and Katherina Weigert. 2007. Ecological impacts of air pollution from road transport on local vegetation. Applied Geochemistry 22: 1265-1271.
Brockfeld, Elmar, Robert Barlovic, Andreas Schadschneider, and Michael Schreckenberg. 2001. Optimizing traffic lights in a cellular automaton model for city traffic. Physical Review E 64: 056132 1-12
Bureau of Transportation Statistics. 2007. Table 2-1: Transportation fatalities by mode. http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/2002/html/table_02_01.html (last accessed 8 August 2007).
Christopherson, Robert W. 2006. Geosystems: An Introduction to Physical Geography, 77. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Chozick, Amy. 2007. Nissan pairs with Beijing on system to avoid jams. The Wall Street Journal July 31.
Cox, Wendell and Jean Love. 1996. 40 Years of the US Interstate Highway System: An analysis the best investment a nation ever made. The Public Purpose 38 pp. http://www.publicpurpose.com/freewaypdf.pdf (last accessed 8 August 2007).
Durkheim, Emile. 1951. Suicide. New York: The Free Press.
Federal Highway Administration. Federal Highway Aid 1998 Table. 2 pp. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/hs98/tables/hm33.pdf (last accessed 8 August 2007).
Fishman, Robert. 1977. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier. New York: Basic Books.
Forman, Richard T. T. and Lauren E. Alexander. 1998. Roads and their major ecological effects. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 29: 207-231.
Gardezi, Fauzia, Keith G. Wilson, Malcolm Man-Son-Hing, Shawn C. Marshall, Frank J. Molnar, Bonnie M. Dobbs, and Holly A. Tucker. 2006. Qualitative research on older drivers. Clinical Gerontologist 30 (1): 5-22.
Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition. London and New York: Routledge.
Gruen, Victor. 1956. Plan for Fort Worth, 18-19. Urban development plan proposal to City of Fort Worth. Los Angeles: Victor Gruen and Associates.
Gruen, Victor. 1964. The Heart of Our Cities. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Hamilton, Edith. 1942. Mythology, 139-152. New York: The New American Library.
Hawbaker, Todd J. and Volker C. Radeloff. 2004. Roads and landscape pattern in northern Wisconsin based on a comparison of four road data sources. Conservation Biology 18 (5):1233-1244.
Hennessy, Dwight A. and David L. Wiesenthal. 1999. Traffic congestion, driver stress, and driver aggression. Aggressive Behavior 25:409-423.
Hensher, David A. and Sean M. Puckett. 2007. Congestion and variable user charging as an effective travel demand management instrument. Transportation Research Part A 41: 615-626.
Howard, Ebenezer. 1946. Garden Cities of To-Morrow. London: Faber and Faber LTD.
Jacobs, Jane. 1992. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books.
Kaur, S., M.J. Nieuwenhuijsen, and R.N. Colvile. 2007. Fine particulate matter and carbon monoxide exposure concentrations in urban street microenvironments. Atmospheric Environment 41 (23): 4781-4810.
Maynard, Dan, Brent A. Couli, Alexandros Gryparis, and Joel Schwartz. 2007. Mortality risk associated with short-term exposure to traffic particles and sulfates. Environmental Health Perspectives 115 (5): 751-755.
Mumford, Lewis. 1970. The Culture of Cities, 13-64. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Publishers.
Pescador, Moises and Salvador Peris. 2007. Influence of roads on bird nest predation: An experimental study in the Iberian Peninsula. Landscape and Urban Planning 82 (1-2): 66-71.
Texas Department of Transportation. 2007. Statewide transportation improvement program FY 2008-2011. NCTCOG proposal. 543 pp. http://www.dot.state.tx.us/publications/transportation_planning/stip_08_11/dallftworth.pdf (last accessed 8 August 2007).
Veteran and Military Combat Casualty Digest. 2007. Table: Numbers of Americans killed/wounded, by action. http://members.aol.com/usregistry/allwars.htm (Last accessed 8 August 2007).
Wikipedia. 2007. Car chase. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_chase, passim (last accessed 8 August 2007).
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.
-30-
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