Driving ourselves to death
You can see two opposite trends at work in Central Iowa these days. We’re trying to get more people to live downtown within walking distance of their workplaces, and at the same time we’re building houses and stores farther and farther out into the cornfields.
If it were up to Michael Broshar, we would emphasize the downtown idea, fill in the blank spots in our neighborhoods and leave the cornfields alone.
Broshar, a principal at InVision Architecture in Waterloo and vice president of the American Institute of Architects, spoke at the recent “Designing Cool Communities” meeting in Des Moines. His topic: “Are Our Communities Killing Us?”
Improvements in urban design have contributed to a doubling of U.S. life spans, Broshar contends. “Seven years of the increase is due to medical care; 33 from public health writ large,” he said.
But recent design choices have put us on a path that isn’t just careless or unrealistic, but actually a threat to our health. Our cities have been shaped for motor vehicle use, not walking or bicycling, and we’re paying a price.
Every time a huge new school is built at the edge of a town, every time we put in a development full of cul-de-sacs and an impenetrable maze of fenced lawns, we’re committing ourselves to driving the kids where they want to go for years to come. In his talk, Broshar said researchers have found that 66 percent of American schoolchildren walked or rode their bicycles to school in 1974, but by 2000, the figure had dropped to 13 percent.
Not that we want them walking in some of the places that have been built as if nobody has legs. According to statistics presented by Broshar, in addition to 42,000 annual traffic deaths among drivers and passengers, the nation experiences 5,000 pedestrian deaths and 80,000 injuries per year that are caused by motor vehicles.
Iowa still seems like a place where everyone should have plenty of elbow room if they want it, and that leads to driving. But it’s also a place that likes to think it has common sense, and common sense says we have taken a wrong turn.