There is no excuse for bad city design

By: Lucas R. Watson, Layout Editor

Cities across North America are often said to be poorly designed, but oftentimes, they have been poorly redesigned. In my previous article, I discussed the toxic relationship between Buffalo and the automobile, mentioning the extensive public transit the city once had and how, objectively, Buffalo was a very well-designed city. It was a city designed around people, and this is to say clearly, cities should be designed around people, not cars. When a city starts to deprioritize the movement and lives of people and instead allocates resources to improving conditions and conveniences for cars, it becomes an objectively bad city. Car-centric cities are not cities meant for people.

Many people from North America who go abroad and see cities in Asia, Europe and South America wonder why they like it so much. It’s because you usually travel to a dense urban environment where there are amenities nearby, and you travel to a walkable neighborhood. People don’t travel to Cheektowaga, for example, because they want to visit a suburban area with limited walkability or transit access. People go to dense cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. because these cities offer robust transportation networks through buses, heavy rail, trams or light rail. They typically feature dense, walkable or bikeable neighborhoods with destinations that people actually want to be in. 

The few cities in North America that feature these things are widely popular cities with high levels of people walking and biking, and that’s to say that it’s a widespread thing in Europe, for example. Take the Netherlands, it has the highest levels of cycling in the world, yet you can still drive if you wish to. The reason most people cycle is that it is the most efficient and convenient route for them and that there is the infrastructure to do so.

Now, to come back to Buffalo. Buffalo is a poorly designed city because we have prioritized the car over nearly everything else. It is only recently that we have begun to see bike lanes in Buffalo, and these primarily consist of a painted white line on the side of a road where the shoulder typically is. There are grade-separated bike paths, such as those on Niagara Street, for a section between Forest Avenue and Hampshire Street. These are very, very safe for bikers commuting, as the most dangerous thing for a cyclist is a car. Just a few days ago, I was hit by a car despite being in a bike lane. The person did not use their mirrors or check to see if anything was near them before they turned and hit me, pushing me a few feet forward. I had been following clearly posted signage and staying within the bike lane; however, I was still hit. There is a reason why sidewalks for pedestrians are typically higher than the street: it’s for drainage, sure, but it’s also so cars cannot drive directly on the sidewalk, killing pedestrians. Safe infrastructure can encourage people to bike and walk to work, to the shop or to the cafe. Without it, people will choose to use a car. 

One excuse many people use is that the United States and Canada are ‘too large’ to support public transportation infrastructure and well-connected cities through railroads, that we cannot possibly have intercity rail and that our only option is to either fly on a plane or drive there. If you believe this, I ask you to view a comparison of the amount of intercity rail in the United States from the 1940s or so and compare it to the amount of intercity rail today, and you’ll see that we had great rail infrastructure. We still do – we have the most amount of railway tracks in the world, with the United States possessing 155,000+ miles worth of it. A lot of it used to be for passenger rail, and with a lack of support from local, state and federal governments, most of it has been relegated to the freight railroads. Buffalo was once the second largest train hub in the country and had a total of four train stations downtown – the Leigh Valley Railroad, New York Central, Erie Railroad, and the Delaware Lackawanna and Western Railroad. Now, all we have left is a small station on Exchange Street. So, the United States and Canada are not ‘too large’ for inter-city rail and public transportation.

Another is simply ‘the weather,’ and it is possibly the poorest excuse of them all; the weather is what everyone on earth experiences every single day. It rains nearly everywhere. I had mentioned how the Netherlands had the highest amount of cycling in the world, and they truly do, but it rains quite a lot there, and they get extreme – and I do mean extreme – windstorms that are sometimes affectionately called ‘Dutch Hills,’ yet they still cycle. Then comes the inevitable for Buffalo. People mention the existence of snow and how you cannot cycle in the snow, and to be fair, without any bike infrastructure at all, it is difficult to cycle in the snow. But, just for example’s sake, let’s take one of our northern neighbors: Montreal. Montreal receives an average of 85.3 inches of snow per year (216.6 cm), and Buffalo gets a bit more than that at 94.5 inches of snow per year (240.0 cm). Montreal has a very strong biking culture compared to its contemporary cities, despite having relatively harsh winters compared to many cities across North America. What Montreal has done over the years is build up its bike infrastructure and resources for people biking, so much so that they are primarily considered the most bike-friendly city in North America. Montreal wasn’t always like this either. They were largely car-dependent back in the 1950s, but through efforts to build up their transit infrastructure, their first rapid transit lines opened in the mid to late 1960s. The weather is a feeble excuse when you consider that Montreal can be extremely bike-friendly even in the depths of winter, with high rates of commuting via walking or cycling.

If you were to propose a transit system that would kill around 40,000 people per year, say that it will become the primary mode of transportation in most cities in the United States, dedicate the majority of funding for public infrastructure to this transit system and, in turn, redesign our cities around it, you’d be called a madman. While there are tangible benefits to using cars as a primary or secondary means of transportation, they seem to do more harm than good in most cities. There are cities across the world that are trying to rectify the mistakes of the past by turning away from car-centric infrastructure and focusing on the needs of people, and truth be told, it is a challenging thing to do. But it is possible. We’ve seen it happen elsewhere, so there’s nothing that says we can’t do it here. We can break away from poorly designed cities and create places where people actually wish to be.