Trying to Tame the Automobile

By Wolf Von Eckardt

U.S. cities look to Europe for livable streets

Boston can be a nightmare for motorists: a spaghetti tangle of twisting alleys, tree-sentineled boulevards and cramped, one-way lanes. But it can be equally harrowing for the poor pedestrian. Consider Appleton Street in the South End. Some years ago drivers discovered they could short-cut their way to the Southeast Expressway by using Appleton. Many weekday afternoons since then, the once-tranquil street has looked like some thing out of the Le Mans 24-Hour Race, and during the rest of the day, when the wide, one-way street is lightly traveled, like a drag strip. Next spring, things should begin to change for the citizens along Appleton Street. For one city block on the four-block-long street, Appleton will be the site of a ground-level experiment that could presage a new era in unscrambling the agonizing mesh of big-city residential traffic in the U.S.

Trees, planters and decorative street-lighting will be used to channel automobile movement. The entrance to Appleton will be narrowed so tightly that only one car will be able to enter at a time. Cars will be parked in clusters in a hopscotch pattern to impede the flow of autos--indeed, to slow them down to 5 to 10 m.p.h. When the overhaul is completed, cars, cyclists and pedestrians all will share wall-to-wall rights to the street, with pedestrians first among equals.

The concept is known as a Woonerf, a Dutch word that might loosely be translated as "protected precinct." Right now, the Woonerf is spreading through Western Europe, and the concept, in whole or in part, is in use in Boulder, Colo., and Seattle, Wash., and under consideration in Washington, B.C., Portland, Ore., and New York City. "My own feeling is that we should slow down traffic, not keep it out of residential streets," says Donald Appleyard, professor of urban design at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Livable Streets. "And the Woonerfhas proved a great success in European neighborhoods."

The automobile has contributed much, willy-nilly, to the decline of the old central cities. In the process of surrendering to unlimited automobility, these cities buried entire neighborhoods under concrete freeways, widened roads at the expense of shoppers and trees, bulldozed handsome buildings for parking lots and threatened the purpose and identity of downtown districts.

Some downtown business district planners are beginning to fight back with measures designed to restrict or divert automobile traffic from shopping streets, or to ban autos altogether from certain areas, or at certain times. Pedestrian malls that are well-served by public transportation and parking often prove to be profitable delights. The best of them, such as the pedestrian shopping districts in Portland, Ore., or the old city of Munich, Germany, are continuous festivals.

But closing one street to automobiles only increases traffic in others. When main arteries are clogged, impatient commuters short-cut through residential streets--as the people on Boston's Appleton Street discovered, to their dismay. Incessant traffic noise, pollution and lack of parking rank high among the reasons why people move out of the cities.

Traffic controls, such as speed limits or one-way streets, have only a limited effect. They do not change the fact that, seen through the windshield, the typical residential street looks like an inviting, concrete race track. Rows of parked cars on both sides become walls that seem to protect the driver from any interference. Yet oncoming cars on cross streets are difficult, if not impossible, to see, and the clear track ahead dulls a driver's awareness that a child chasing a ball may dart out at any moment from the barriers of pain ted steel.*

At the same time, those walls of parked cars hem in pedestrians, depriving them of living space and blurring the distinction between a street and a road. Explains Architecture Historian James Marston Fitch, who taught at Columbia for 30 years: "The road is a means of moving people and goods from where they are to where they want to get to; but a street is for people who are already where they want to be."

The new effort to sort out the two, tame automobiles in residential areas and restore city streets as a place where children can play, old folks can sit, joggers can jog and friends and lovers can meet, began in 1976 in Delft, Holland. "We were trying to stop child murder," says Dutch City Planner Thijs de Jong.

Dutch urban designers, like De Jong, have been trying to turn traffic control devices into positive forces for enhancing the streetscape, adding a new dimension to the fashionable term livability. They have made the street a social space, a kind of outdoor living room which invites spontaneous interaction between neighbors, particularly children and the old.

In deploring crowded cities and their lack of open space, planners have overlooked for decades this notion of returning the streets to a variety of human uses. The now no-longer modern movement in architecture and city planning attempted to resolve the conflict between cars and people by abolishing the street altogether. The modern ideal was Le Corbusier's dream of The Radiant City, which consisted of skyscrapers spaced far apart in a huge park, pierced by superhighways. The trouble was, of course, that the park too easily turned into a parking lot. The concept, which guided much urban renewal in the United States during the 1960s, had a deadening effect on city life.

The Delft system is changing that approach. To achieve peaceful coexistence between cars and people, the Dutch are rearranging conventional streets into sidewalkless Woonerven. The entrances to streets are necked-down to one lane to slow down autos; that lane is then broken up with trees, planters, play equipment, benches and flower beds. Cars are parked diagonally in small groups on alternate sides of the street, so that moving vehicles have to slalom around them. Intersections are marked by islands of greenery or with gradually raised crosswalks.

Special care is taken to placate motorists. Woonerf designers oppose the American torture of bumps and humps to slow down autos, relying instead on an environment in which the driver feels like a privileged guest who must mind his manners. "We don't want to irritate people in cars," says Planner De Jong.

All of the Woonerven are marked by special traffic signs (showing a house within a protective boundary) and most are constructed from decorative pavements. Their designed charm has helped overcome resistance from residents who feel insecure without proper sidewalks. Their moderate construction costs also have proved attractive: the price of a Woonerfis only 10% to 15% higher than routine repaving. In fact, so great has been their success that there now are some 800 Woonerven in The Netherlands, not only in pioneering Delft but also in places like The Hague and Utrecht.

The idea has spread to West Germany, where the new, livable streets are called Wohnbereiche (protected residential areas). Enthusiasm in Germany is so great that in 1979 and 1980, the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. in joint sponsorship with the Council for International Urban Liaison invited U.S. officials and citizen leaders to Delft and such German cities as West Berlin, Bonn and Essen to study the new techniques.

One of the Americans along on that jaunt was Emily Lloyd, then transportation adviser to Boston's mayor. Boston had installed a complex system of traffic mazes to discourage through traffic, with only partial success. "Some residents said it was almost impossible to find their way home," says Lloyd of the circuitous routes. She now sees the Woonerf as a way out. "It is time that people perceive when they are in a residential area, and when they are on a highway."

From Berkeley's Appleyard, however, comes a warning. "Those who wish to carry through such improvements must be aware of the difficulties," he says. "Traffic is a complex ecological system that shifts around rather than disappears. Naively held ideas and simplistic plans will only result in backlash."

Appleyard warns that any reshuffling of street patterns must be worked out with residents. He may well have in mind an experiment in his own backyard. In Berkeley, after increasing complaints of congestion in residential streets, the city in 1975 erected 41 diverters, 18 traffic circles and 300 stop signs. During the first weeks, barriers were attacked and heaved aside, drivers sneaked their cars along sidewalks and 30 stop signs were stolen. The controversy grew so fierce that two city referendums were held, with the new system finally squeaking out wins in both.

So the barriers remain in place today. Motorists still grumble and the police department remains cautious about the barriers' effectiveness, but the number of traffic fatalities dropped from twelve in 1974 to five last year. The drivers may not like all the diverters and stop signs, but Berkeley's residents have grown to love them. --By Wolf Von Eckardt.

Reported by Bob Buderi/Berkeley and John E. Yang/Boston

*In 1980 in the U.S. 46,000 child pedestrians (up to age 14) were injured by motor vehicles; 1,940 were killed.

With reporting by Bob Buderi/Berkeley, John E. Yang

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.