posted January 10, 2005
As a downtown merchant, I have some serious concerns about the Chattanooga 2025 plan after reading through it. In some ways it is an exciting and impressive extension of the revitalizing work already done downtown in recent years, but I’m afraid the disdain for the automobile evident throughout the plan could lead us to make some grave mistakes in the coming years if we’re not very careful. To be fair, the plan does not call for everyone to simply abandon their cars and trucks outright, but there is definitely a discernable bias towards using urban design to punish and discourage their use. This is not only wrong-headed but economically dangerous.
First, someone should apologize for the much-maligned automobile. It is fashionable these days to bash motor vehicles, presumably because of the pollution they cause and the congestion they create, and it’s tough to honestly justify the American love affair with them. It is an unavoidable fact, however: very few Americans are going to abandon their cars and trucks for the sake of urban design (or anything else, for that matter). Just ask any business that has been obstructed by road construction for any length of time.
I can tell you from experience that very few consumers park at the detour, lace up their hiking boots, and make a pleasant afternoon of the rest of the trip. Why won’t Americans give them up? This is so obvious that most people take it for granted, but the answer is that they are simply the most efficient form of personal transportation ever devised for covering long distances (this is a big country) in relative comfort and safety.
How else, after all, in the course of human history, has an individual ever been able to cover miles in minutes at his or her sole discretion with sheltered passengers and cargo, and all at a reasonable cost? Cars and trucks are popular because they do an excellent job of getting people around in an efficient and timely manner. Clearly, the notion that urban designers can somehow plan away our use of automobiles is childishly naïve.
As essential as they are to our everyday life, the Chattanooga 2025 plan seems to seethe with resentment against motor vehicles. It refers to the need to restore a balance between pedestrians and automobiles by making lanes narrower and turning radii tighter, something which has already begun to happen with the redesign of Fourth Street Boulevard. The tire marks and ruts left by motorists trying to make the nearly impossibly tight turns around the oversized medians tell the tale better than I can.
To read the language in the plan, you would think that cars and trucks were rogue elephants rampaging through our precious cityscape. What the planners may have forgotten is that each one contains at least one person- a citizen, a voter, a consumer- who came downtown to earn money, or better yet, to spend it, and who (when dismounted) also becomes a pedestrian.
Howard Bell, an urban design professor of mine at Columbia University, perhaps said it best (though I must paraphrase): any attempt at urban development that does not include convenient ingress/egress for automobiles and enough parking for the vast majority of expected inhabitants will fail, period. He advocated underground structures, as he was largely concerned with Manhattan where there was no other alternative, but the point is that he felt that strongly about planning developments in Manhattan, which has one of the lowest concentrations of vehicle ownership in the United States! Like it or not, our current transportation infrastructure in this country is based on personal motor vehicles, and with the advent of renewable resources such as hydrogen as propulsion (not an if, but a when), it is unlikely to change anytime soon. No amount of peevish hostility from urban planners is going to change that. What it may do, however, is doom this otherwise promising downtown renaissance, and most retail businesses within it, to failure.
Defenders of the plan will remind us that Chattanooga 2025 is just that, a plan, and that I am overreacting to the language in it. You will have to read it yourself to find out. I think it’s important to note, though, that as much notoriety as our urban designers have received for the work they’ve done- most of it well-deserved- anybody with concerns about the plan had better speak up now before the momentum from earlier successes leads our planners into prideful folly. Needless to say, urban planners are not business operators and may lack the fundamental understanding of consumer behavior to make the best decisions in this regard. With all due respect, most live in an academic setting where the concept of retail business- the exchanging of dollars for goods and services rendered- is nothing more than a crass, unpleasant theory.
I worry frankly that many of our city leaders, including a few of our mayoral candidates, may too have become intoxicated by the recent (and again, in many respects, well-deserved) press on our downtown plans, and may not fully realize that it is possible to carry it too far. If you kill off downtown commerce, even unintentionally, you have killed the goose that lays the golden egg of tax revenue necessary to fund continued development. Even the current aggressive posture of our meter police seems to suggest that the city is more concerned with the revenue generated from tickets than with the message sent to people trying to earn or spend money downtown (some would argue that the meter police need to be aggressive to keep spaces turning over, but that just tells me is that there is not enough parking- paid or, God forbid, free- downtown).
I am certainly not suggesting that we should go back to designing the city around the automobile; I agree that there should be a balance. The question is how the balance is struck. No one among us loves the huge, sprawling parking lots of Hamilton Place or the nightmarish traffic of Atlanta, but the planners must bear in mind that both of these phenomena are not the direct result of cars and trucks but of economic growth: dollars changing hands (a lot more dollars, I might add than downtown Chattanooga has ever seen), which as problems go is not a bad one to have! Automobiles are not the cause of this problem, however, so shutting them out won’t solve the problem. The problem, rather, is caused by perceptive business people (or business-minded politicians, in Atlanta’s case) simply accommodating the mode of transportation that the vast majority of consumers choose in this country, which happens to be the automobile, to a greater degree than anticipated. If these folks are guilty of anything, it is outstripping their urban planners’ creative ability to effectively deal with motor vehicles in an urban setting. The answer is not to try to use urban design to punish or abolish the use of motor vehicles; that will amount to economic suicide. What is called for here- and what our urban planners have the unprecedented opportunity to achieve- is developing a vision of how to accommodate people and their vehicles in the context of an appealing, livable city.
Finally, I should say that as an automobile dealer, you would expect me to be annoyed by the attitude of the plan towards motor vehicles, but I am honestly far more concerned as a downtown merchant and property owner. There is a big, wide world outside of downtown Chattanooga that gets along just fine without it, and the people in it are going to keep right on buying and driving their cars or trucks well past the year 2025, whether they run on gasoline, electricity, or hydrogen. If downtown doesn’t make itself appealing to them, however, they will simply go somewhere else. Our urban planners have achieved remarkable success that has earned them well-deserved worldwide notoriety for their work here in Chattanooga, which is precisely why we should expect better, perhaps unconventional, solutions to the problem of accommodating motor vehicles in an urban setting. It will not be an easy task, but here’s hoping they are up to it.
Tim Kelly
tkelly@kellycars.com
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