Loud Cities | Cars Ruin Everything
A couple of UK stories prove that if you want livable cities, cars are your #1 problem.
tl/dr
Cars are a bigger problem in Garden Cities than in London or the countryside.
Roundabouts (traffic circles) unintentionally make cars incessant.
There is no relief for pedestrians, especially in cities. Urban roundabouts are irritating, but the suburban ones are downright hostile.
In the modern suburban world, it’s hard to build a village not dominated by cars. We have to, anyway.
In the penultimate essay in my Garden Cities series, we’re talking cars.
We Americans are abnormally accepting of cars. We are conditioned by their ubiquity, and pacified by the lack of alternatives. Given this, you’d think that a few dozen cars running through a quaint exurban British town wouldn’t have bothered me. But you’d have thought wrong.
I have never been more irritated by cars than I was in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities. Below, I’ll explain why.
If you are just now tuning in, this June, I traveled to the United Kingdom to study Garden Cities with the National Townbuilder’s Association. We walked about a dozen of these prototype towns, studied their original land plans and quality of execution, and met with leaders around the region in hopes of better understanding how they were built.
There are two reasons the cars drove me batshit in most of them. First, there were no stoplights, so the cars never stop, a constant assault on walkability. Second, the noise from the constancy of vehicular travel was a high-pitched hum that proved taxing to auditory sanity. It left me hardened to an already existing thesis - we have to do better at not letting the car dominate our public spaces.
UNPLEASANT PERSISTENCE
I was in Letchworth, the original Garden City (and bizarrely the least interesting one), when I noticed the constant hum. It’s a hum that had never bothered me before. All of the streets were two lanes. A few had informal parking on the side. Generally speaking, that should be a pleasant urban street. The households were modest, for the most part. You got the feeling that most households here were car owners, but few would have more than one car (I suspect having two cars would be considered weird). Wages were middling, and the cost of everything in the UK was outrageous. There wasn't a ton of loose change floating around these cities. Ostensibly, the Garden Cities had everything to prevent the need to travel, but with the attractions of the modern world, job opportunities, and the economic pull of London, people still drive quite a bit.
The UK countryside here is built upon a system of roundabouts. Virtually all of the intersections are roundabouts (or, as the British call them, “traffic circles”). On the arterials, these designs are offensively large and very hostile to pedestrians. How offensive? Check out the Magic Roundabout in Hemel Hempstead, which is a roundabout made up of six roundabouts.
Hemel Hempstead: The Final Boss of Roundabouts. Try walking across that, Grandma.
Even the regular suburban circles have the feel of those new American traffic engineering fads, the diverging diamond interchange (DDI), which speeds cars, increases confusion and makes it really clear to pedestrians that they can F right off. Just figuring out the rules for these “simplified” systems must be incredibly taxing to our first-time drivers and seniors. People absolutely fly around these arterial roundabouts. Even before factoring the-wrong-side-of-the-street driving, which is inherently disoriented to foreign pedestrians, these roundabouts are anxiety-inducing for any American to navigate.
The “Look Left/Look Right” guidance at crosswalks is all over London. Has any country ever spent more on infrastructure just to ensure absent-minded tourists from a single ally stop getting hit by their buses?
But in the Garden Cities, the roundabouts are smaller and neighborhood scaled. In that sense, they work. No one is speeding in the Garden Cities (I found out later that most of Europe is flooded with speed cameras - the lead-footed get sent speeding tickets via the mail without ever seeing police). Still, with relatively wide main streets in Garden Cities, it’s not uncommon for cars to be going 35mph, which is above the threshold for irritation - both for the ears and walking. Worse, they never stop. The roundabouts do two things - 1) eliminate the deceleration and acceleration cycles we come to know in America, and 2) evenly space the cars so they never stop.
A Garden City-scaled circle eliminates the need for traffic lights and stop signs, but it also means that cars never stop.
THE HUM
The hum of the cars at 35 mph takes away all of the “town-country” benefits Ebenezer Howard articulated and sought. You can’t hear birds sing. You can’t hear the trees sway. It’s just cars. They never stop. It’s cars all the way down. Interestingly, the same problem did not exist in the urban center of London, whose neighborhoods are probably 3-5x denser than the Garden Cities (which are 2x as dense as most of America) and generally have more things going on.
Why? I found London surprisingly uncongested, which was weird (we were mostly outside the congestion zone). There were few cars, by American standards, coupled with world-class transit and a recently beefed up cycle-superhighway network that delivered remarkably safe retrofitted bicycle corridors throughout the 2000-year-old town.
Because the streets were narrower, cars traveled closer to 20mph, which is substantially nicer to walk, bike, or drink next to. The presence of traffic lights, not roundabouts, on most collectors meant a respite from the constant hum, offering brief windows of natural sounds. I didn’t realize how necessary that was until I toured the Garden Cities.
Density Deadens Sound
Lastly, the density deadens sound. I know, I know--that’s counterintuitive. But this is how it works: most of London’s buildings feature 0’ setbacks and contiguous 3-5 story masonry buildings, which serve as excellent sound barriers. Whatever craziness is going on in the next block, you are buffered from. In the Garden Cities, like a sprawling American suburb, there is no refuge. If your American neighbor a block over is having a rowdy rager with Ratt on repeat, you’re going to be “attending” the party whether you were invited or not.
If these guys are a block away in an American suburb, you are going to know about it. That is not true in London.
Density, especially urban density, is substantially better for noise contamination than dense suburban development, with its free-standing buildings and no sound walls.
Sounds matters. That was the main takeaway from the Garden Cities tour. You don’t really know it until you experience the extremes, at which point it becomes obvious.
