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I recently came across this article from Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review. It is based on the proceedings of a symposium held in December 2000, entitled Jane Jacobs & the New Urban Ecology. A unique part of the proceedings is a section entitled Random Comments, Jane Jacobs—a collection of some of the comments Ms. Jacobs made both after the panel presentations and in response to audience questions.
Despite being over a decade old, her comments remain relevant today. Here is what she had to say about public transportation:
The Importance of Public Transportation
Now that it is becoming acknowledged that sprawl, with its wastes of land, energy, and time, can’t continue indefinitely, we begin to hear of hope in large, encompassing public transportation plans. We surely do need more and better public transportation service, for many reasons. But I shudder at the thought of these big schemes in the hands of planners who don’t—perhaps even can’t—know where routes should go or what kinds of routes putative traffic will justify. Already enough small, and yet also expensive, mistakes have recently been made in such places as Buffalo, Toronto, Atlanta, and Chicago, to be worrying.
Back in the 1950s when plans started to appear for one-story, spread-out high schools instead of three or four storied traditional buildings, architects for one of these first new schools—in Connecticut if I remember correctly—weren’t sure where to locate walks for students and staff criss-crossing outdoor grounds between classrooms and other facilities like gyms, auditoriums, and cafeterias. Should they rely on guesswork? Or depend on neat geometric schemes? Should perhaps everything be paved? The architects let the problem stand unsolved until the school had been in use throughout its first winter, during which they mapped the paths which users had made in the snow. The architects let users inform them where paths should go.
The closest approach I’ve ever seen to use of this strategy for public transportation has been on several little Caribbean islands where my husband and I used to vacation. For tourists, there were taxis and rental cars. For local people, however, there were little jitney buses, actually station-wagons, owned by their drivers who were free to take passengers along whatever routes drivers pleased, on whatever schedules the demand justified, for whatever fares they set in free competition. Although we were tourists, the jitneys interested us as they took people to markets, jobs, entertainment spots, and back home, so that’s what we used. We became not only admiring but envious of the flexibility and true economy of this self-organized system, dictated to providers by needs of users.
In America, the terrain for effective new public transportation is now almost as blank as that Connecticut schoolyard’s new-fallen snow because in so many places public transportation has not yet developed at all, while in others it has all but dwindled away or grown inconvenient. Rather wistfully, I wish we could experiment as freely as Caribbean islanders, but for historical and other ingrained causes that seems improbable. But at least we should be able to hope that schemes will develop incrementally and as flexibly as possible, not become rigid prematurely, and certainly not become the responsibility of highway and automobile traffic engineers, whose educations and assumptions are inappropriate for this other task.
No efficient schemes, incremental or not, are apt to prosper without two other simultaneous changes: (a) densification, probably largely by infilling our existing sprawls; and (b) an end to adding and widening highways. What is now called smart growth requires all three kinds of change.
For a full transcript of her remarks, following this link.
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