Comparing Sprawl In U.S. And Canadian Cities

Thank you for the great article and comments, all of them. I lived in a small town outside of Brussels Belgium from ages 9-12. Spent most of my time with the sons of American foreign service brats. One of the best times of my life. We lived on foot and bicycle, totally autonomous kids in a very safe environment. We were either in town or country, agriculture land or urban neighborhood; never in that abstract gulf of suburban indecision. The only time my parents had to drive us anywhere was to the suburban shopping mall, which by the way had a fantastic toy store :) If that experience doesn't represent freedom, family values and the American dream, I don't know what does. Most of my American friends reminisce about their childhoods and the best times were usually in inspired, mixed use environments. I had the same experience spending the greater part of the rest of my youth in Reston, Virginia, recognized as one of the worlds most successful live/work/play new towns. All my friends there lived in townhomes with low or no fences and a ton of public green space between rows as a result. Pickup games as well as organized football would take place on the same field in a common area in the middle of a neighborhood, in view of dozens of kitchen windows. Reston had its problems, especially with insufficient densities to support village centers as well as segregated low-income projects that were destined to fail. Old Reston's walkable/bikable village centers and townhome development pattern was a lot closer to the American Dream than the high-wall McMansion subdivision on the outskirts that I got lost in trying to find Wayne's "Christmas Party in June.”

I read Alex Marshall's How Cities Work. I worked for the economic development dept in a local municipality and I can attest that Alex's chapter on the role of govt is dead on, except my town was the poster child on what not to do. Our smart growth General Plan has been repeatedly gutted by amendments against the stated Community Goals (will of the people) in favor of suburban developers who had backed the campaigns of three city Councilmembers. 1000 acres of suburban sprawl and "California Highbrid" (imposter) New Urbanism is hardly what these Americans wanted.

I lived in Central Europe as an adult for six years. The German Dream is surprisingly similar to the American Dream: individual freedom, security, health, mobility, family, opportunity, etc. Germans will tell you that nobody loves cars more than Germans. Weren't they the first to mass produce the automobile in 1890-something? The first to build the superhighway (Eisenhower brought that idea home to America after riding the autobahn to Berlin in 1945)? The autobahn is a no speed limit superhighway system that is safer per occupant miles traveled than the US interstate. Germans wash a lot of cars on Sunday too. They drive like there's always a finish line around the bend, but pedestrians are what, ten times safer there than in America? We Americans need to overcome denial, swallow our pride, acknowledge our mistakes and dispel the myths once and for that blame America's problems on differences of culture. Only then can we get on to doing some quality building.

I visited Victoria, BC, Canada. Never seen so many people walking home on wide sidewalks carrying groceries. Looked like the American Dream to me.

I visited Portland recently. No city shows up more often in chapters, textbooks and case studies on democracy/public participation, healthy economies, and growth management. It’s a city that puts their 25,000sf Borders and 40,000sf Whole Foods on ground floor of mixed use buildings right in the inner city. I can’t tell you how many times people where I live including developers will tell you how that’s impossible and that no chain store would ever share a building. I called their bluff and found out Borders and Whole foods have no problem with that. In town halls across the nation Americans are being misled in to serve the needs of over the hill stupid growth developers. Portlanders of all economic levels get around by walking, biking, riding the frequent bus/rail system, or driving. America is about freedom and choice, especially concerning mobility. Autodependency is the opposite of freedom, opposite of the American Dream. Having no option but to spend over $5000 per year (not including taxes that subsidize auto infrastructure) on the most expensive and dangerous and space consuming transportation option is hardly what Americans dream about. At first glance big box offers the bargain Americans are willing to die for. But American tax-payers and the A.D.D. media can't be expected to figure in the enormous subsidies that make the big box/road infrastructure economically viable, that make those "bargains" possible.

I agree with a lot of what Condon has wrote here. The excessive use of the automobile explains so much about the physical appearance of American society, escpecially in comparison to those of other countries. It's why Americans prefer to shop in gigantic supercenters that aren't actually close to ANYONE's home. It's why Americans don't seem to mind when they have to drive an hour and a half to get to work every day (talk about culturally specific)....and it's why the average American living in the suburbs has no idea who his neighbors are anymore; when he walks out his front door, he never makes it further than his SUV before he gets behind the wheel and heads out on the highway

It should be pointed out that if there is a difference, and if it is due to the rejection of highways in Canada, it was not by choice. Canadian cities are poor creatures, without the taxing and bond-issuing power of their US counterparts. The federal government in Canada also has virtually no role in road-building, whereas in the US federal funds heavily subsidized road construction. Toronto, for example, hoped for many highways but had to settle for one-and-a-half after money ran out. It also hoped to remove all of its streetcars but again ran out of money. By then, the problems of road-dependency were apparent and the city mostly survived. Canadian cities were fortunate that their relative poverty saved their built form -- however, this same lack of funding now threatens their viability as US cities race to rebuild.

I don't know of any reputable planners who don't acknowledge that in the U.S., highways-freeways drive sprawl and what passes for "planning," particularly on a regional basis. Countering Professor Condon's piece with comments about Wendell Cox or riots is pretty fatuous.

If one has really studied riots in center cities, which I have done a bit of, I think that it can be argued that riots resulted from the rage that resulted from a sense of abandonment by upper and middle class whites and blacks who left cities for the suburbs throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. Certainly I think this was the case in Washington, DC, and I have interviewed the person who claims to have thrown the first rocks at 14th and U Streets NW (cf the excellent discussion of the "riot ideology" in the book _The Future Once Happened Here_).

While I have not read the book yet, _Root Shock_, which looks at the negative impact on displacement of inner city communities due to urban renewal, which also included highway construction, one can make the inference that the decimation of communities by highway construction also contributed to subsequent unrest and dislocation in our center cities.

In the U.S., busing was to my recollection, a 1970s phenomenon, which postdates riots (1965-1968) and the bulk of freeway construction in the United States, most of which was constructed in the 1950s and 1960s, with a number of projects finishing in the early 1970s.

The biggest thing going for highways vs. trolleys and other forms of transportation was the subsidy accorded users of highways (today only 1/3 of the cost of building and maintaining highways is covered by gasoline excise taxes, presumably even less of the cost was covered during the halcyon years of construction). At the same time, trolley systems and railroads paid franchise and property taxes, and had to pay for 100% of the cost of construction for their systems. Freeway users didn't have to bear such costs.

The National City Lines issue isn't a chimera, despite the assertions of the respondent, but it is true that the decentralization of the population, fostered by a variety of other federal and local policies including the Federal Housing Act worked to spread sprawl as much as the highway lobby. The coalition of GM, Standard Oil, and Firestone was just icing on the cake of an already beaten system (cf. a discussion of this issue in _The City_ by Rybcynski).

In short, a great piece.

This might have been a decent research question until you find out it was a Funders Network for Smart Growth "study" that was probably not peer-reviewed and is not really a study. If you want to promote your agenda, by all means do so, but don't promote it through allegedly independent research. You've missed some of the key points of the forces of sprawl and politics and significance of the points you mentioned. You focused on Portland and Seattle, while not even noting how sparse their urbanized areas are. Did you control for Euclidian zoning, the riots of the 1960s, urban renewal, public housing debacles and race relations? Suppose you have a history of these in Canada? This is naive and worse, intentionally skewed to promote an agenda.

Dear Patrick, Early on in the 20th Century during the teens and twenties, the decision was made to de-emphasize rail options and go to highways for more and more of our transportation needs. We have been paying the price ever since. Only by developing a truly balanced transportation policy can true sanity ever be returned.