Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun
DURHAM — Cafeteria conversation at work on January 31st revolved around the predicted ice storm. Bread, milk, and bottled water would be cleared off grocery store shelves by the time we left work that evening we all joked. We also guessed that the next day’s news would be littered with images of cars skidding off the road.
It’s not that Southerners can’t drive in wintery conditions. Neither can the local transplants from New England or the midwest. No one can drive on ice.
And since no one can drive on ice, the answer is not to drive at all.
What we can do to prepare for the next ice storm is break away from our dependence on the automobile. The problem with giving up the car is that our communities are designed so that driving is necessary. Walking to the store is often not an option.
Since the 1950s, residential development in this country has revolved around the personal automobile. Because cars enable us to drive farther, our communities have been spreading. Look at growth patterns for any major city in the US for the past forty years, and you’ll see a consistent pattern. Unless locked by geographic features (like Pittsburgh’s rivers) or municipal decisions (like Portland, Oregon’s growth belt), cities grow at the periphery. They expand. And Durham is no exception.
So, no one lives around the corner from the corner store anymore, and very few of us live around the corner from work.
The outskirts of town is where new neighborhoods go up. But while residential development sprawls, employment hubs like downtowns, universities, government buildings, and dense commercial districts remain the daily destinations for hundreds of thousands of drivers Triangle-wide. Research Triangle Park is the archetypal employment center — zoned for businesses only, every single one of the nearly 40,000 employees has to get into and out of RTP every week day. (Lest anyone thinks I’m pointing the finger at others, I’m one of those 40,000 traveling into RTP every day.)
The Triangle Transit Authority’s buses serve the park, and DOT recently striped bike lanes on the freshly repaved Cornwallis Rd. But in an ice storm, neither buses nor bikes handle the roads any better than cars.
This growth at the periphery mindset is what drives big-box retail. Giant grocery stores and retail chains anchor parking lots larger than football fields, just waiting for us to drive to them. In fact, in some parking lots you get the feeling that you’re out of place if you’re not in a car. Try walking or riding your bike to Southpoint Mall. It’s clear the expectation is that we drive to the store.
Not only do giant retail chains water down the flavor of business by making the suburbs of any town indistinguishable from any other (what Parisians are currently calling “banalization”), national chains drive locally owned hardware stores, fruit stands, and grocery co-ops out of business. And this means that our development patterns determine for us our transportation patterns — car dependent and subject to the weather.
Why can’t Durham lead the effort to offer up another development model?
Ice is not the only reason to think about creating different kinds of cities. Even OPEC, the cartel of the largest oil exporting countries, finally admits that “peak oil” — the term reserved for the economic aftermath of a world in which oil production reaches a peak and then rapidly declines — could happen in the next decade.
Crippling ice storms give us a glimpse at what life after peak oil may look like if we don’t start designing transportation around something other than the automobile. While many communities around the country are already making plans for the peak oil crisis, the Triangle is back to ground-zero designing a regional rail system.
Of course, anyone who’s seen the movie The Ice Storm knows that not even trains can move safely through the frozen glaze, so regional rail is not the answer. But as long as we look for the one thing to deliver us from auto-topia, our future planning will be as stalled as a Camaro on I-40 in an ice storm. Regional rail is part of the answer; so is a more efficient bus network. So is mixed-use, high-density residential development in our existing employment hubs. So is a sidewalk and crosswalk infrastructure that accommodates wheelchairs and strollers.
Each city and county has a development review board, which can be more than just a rubber stamp on developer-submitted plans. Durham County Commissioner Becky Heron knows that, and that’s why she’s one of Durham’s best advocates for smart development.
In addition to being ranked among the “Best Places to Live” and “Best Places to do Business,” Durham’s most recent honor is a spot among Forbes Magazine’s December 2006 list of the top ten “Smartest Cities”. If we’re so smart, then we can figure out how to make Durham a more walkable community.
Walkable communities are safer communities. Whether a community is safe isn’t always a measure of crime — a safe Durham is one where you can cross Roxboro Street without fearing for your life. A safe Durham is one where Duke Street and Gregson Street are no longer freeways running through the middle of neighborhoods.
A safe community is one in which getting to the store, running errands, caring for an elderly friend or parent, or getting to work isn’t made impossible by the weather.
A walkable community is one in which during Triangle-wide ice storms, we can get to the food, firewood, or friendship we need to endure it.