The arrogance of space
How changing physical town infrastructure determines the roads ahead
This stroymap was part of an independent study in Spring 2022. It was done in conjunction and as background to the Community Based Climate Solutions class. For the detailed group project follow this link.
When I moved from the Netherlands to the country of freedom, the U.S. ended up not as liberating as I thought. The freedom of motorists here limits the freedom of pedestrians and bicycles. I was not able to get around safely and comfortably anymore without having a car. It is not only me who does not own a car, many technically can’t afford to and spend over 40% of their income on car ownership, maintenance and fuel.
I remember clearly walking to the local supermarket for the first time. Drowning in seas of asphalt, and deafened by speeding cars I made it to the mostly empty parking lot by foot. Why did this town feel so different than my own? Why was most of the space taken up by one type of road user?
What is the Arrogance of Space?
Most people in the U.S. do not realize that there are alternatives to automobiles. It is normalized that cars are allowed to take up most of the public space. Even in Denmark, a relatively bike- and pedestrian-friendly country, car-centric thinking makes it hard for people to see the space. The Arrogance of Space is a concept and movement that makes people see this ‘Unequal distribution of public space when it comes to pedestrians, cyclists and people driving cars’. The movement started by Mikael Colville-Andersen, promotes citizens to discover how unequal the road is divided by coloring the space allocation of intersections and streets by the user type. By comparing the percentage of allocated space to the percentage of people using that space, you can then determine if a street is arrogant. In the example of paris below you can see that most of the space is taken up by cars eventhough there are only 18 cars and over 50 pedestrians.
I made a similar space allocation for some intersections in Bar Harbor. The dots represent the users I saw during one minute of observation.
Why is it arrogant?
Arguments for diverse infrastructure
How do we decide how much public space an individual can use? State and town residents pay for local roads in the area through taxes, whether they are able to afford owning a car or not. Andersen thinks that an equal distribution of space is a street where users get an equal amount of space, not dependent on their vehicle size. As space need increases drastically with the size of the vehicle (or pedestrian), cars take up more than their fair share of space.
But space use also increases with the speed of the vehicle. Sidewalks that are 4 feet wide can fit two pedestrians side by side at any walking speed. For two highway lanes (60mph) you need close to 40 ft width of asphalt and almost 100 ft width of clear cutting or clear space. Even in dense places with high property values, space is allocated to the user type that takes up most of the space. How the road is designed is highly dependent on the zoning of an area, since this effects the density.
Towns are responsible to supply infrastructure such as roads, streets, sewage, water and electricity to the inhabitants of the town. As population density in towns increases the expenses of the infrastructure costs per person of the town decreases. Especially in already dense areas, the roads should be designed to prioritize the high density users such as pedestrians. In these areas the transportation needs of inhabitants cannot be supported by a 6 lane road.
There is a minimum density required for a housing development to be profitable to a town. Since the federal government provides loans for the initial development of roads, the cost-analysis of the long term profitability is often not done. If you take repairs of roads and other infrastructure services into account, only row houses and denser housing are profitable over a time scale of 50 years and more. Even in calculation where houses have their own septic tanks instead of sewage, the cost for road repairs can not be justified with the the low property taxes. This is why many roads in the US are in constant disrepair.
In the map above you can see the property parcels in Bar Harbor. The higher the columns, the more property tax they pay per acreage. There are also other forms of density (people, rooms), but these maps shows economic benefit more clearly. From this map I found that commercial and mixed-use buildings are the most profitable (120,000$/year/acrea-57,000$). The next most profitable for the town are 5-unit apartments (54,000$), 3-family apartments (39,000$), 2-family apartments (38,000), and lastly single family houses (14,000$).
In the maps above and below I have drawn the property tax per meter of service road. I decided the property taxes by the road frontage for each parcel. The taller boxes are have higher property tax meter of road frontage.
History
How do we not notice the space that cars take up? How did this ''normal'' get so integrated in our thinking? With the upcoming masses of motor vehicles in the 1920s and 1930s, the priority shifted away from justice and order towards speed and freedom for motorists. The desire for motorist freedom was combined with argument to leave the street up to the free-market. “Engineers who discriminate between modes of transportation on the basis of their spatial efficiency [speed] were violating market principles.” This washed away the earlier concerns about the high number of killed children and depoliticized the design of the street. In the United States traffic engineers design local roads, and highway projects are the only federal road responsibility, while in the Netherlands social designers are in charge of collecting input from citizens and designing roads for each user.
In the 1960s a first change in the dominant motordom thinking started. Cities were getting extremely congested, Jane Jacobs arguments were stronger than ever and the need for public transportation was revitalized. Some highway engineers relabeled themselves as transportation engineers. Still there is debate on if the automotive city was a choice from the masses that wanted to escape the loud and dirty city or if the elites pushed the suburbs with subsities. There might have been some demand, but any full city rebuilding needs a strongly organized group. Accommodating the safe and green landscaped suburb to the very standardized white American family, made the streets unsafe to people who were excluded from the suburbs.
There was a small bike boom from 1970-1974, but this was mostly due to the baby boomers that were not able to drive yet. The real cycling shift has been over the last decade. See the graph of bicycle commuters in NYC below.
Economics
Cities built for the automobile can not be changed easily; to maintain the access to suburbs and low density areas new roads are being built and repaired. The US Department of Transportation spends 60% ($47 Billion) of their budget on car and motor related safety and infrastructure projects, while only 16% ($12 Billion) goes to transit and rail. There is no mention of expenses towards pedestrian or bicycle infrastructure. Most of this money goes towards building new roads, and giving out loans for towns to build their new roads. There are no funds available for the repair of these roads however, and this led to many towns declaring bankruptcy.
It can not be argued that car owners pay for this through fuel taxes since the federal revenue from this was only $36 billion in 2018. State and town residents pay for local roads in the area through taxes, whether they are able to afford owning a car or not. Other visitors contribute through fuel taxes ($230 million per year in Maine).
In Bar Harbor specifically most of the revenue to sustain infrastructure come from parking fees. In the tourist season of 2019, 2.2 million dollars were collected from parking fees. This is more than Bar Harbor spends on current road infrastructure projects (1.4 million) and thus there is room to execute new ideas that support different types of infrastructure.
Equity
On the smallest economic scale, the personal finances, it is also beneficial to not drive. It costs about $797 to drive 1000 miles a month in a personal vehicle. This is almost 40% of earnings of a low income families. Since there is a correlation between low income groups and other marginalized groups, it is directly targeting to only invest in automobile infrastructure.
Specifically in Bar Harbor there is also a history of economic exclusion. The town of Bar Harbor is built on Passamaquoddy and Penobscot land so inherently there are issues with everything we build, whether it is on public or private land. Between 1800 and 1880 the town of Eden (old Bar Harbor) grew area-wise with summer cottages until hotels and bigger cottages were built and the park was established in 1916. The elite visiting the island were now assured that the nature on the island was protected for recreation, or at least protected from more buildings but not against the forces of Nature. In 1947 a massive month-long fire destroyed the east side of the island (see map below). The combination of the creation of income taxes and the great depression led to the end of the elite era and their large cottages.
Some tourists stayed to lobster longer and now, the residents of Bar Harbor are slightly more economically poor(2%) but are less affected by unemployment (3.4%) than other places in the United States. This could be explained by the summer and fall employment opportunities that do not pay enough to get out of poverty for the whole year. Or it could be explained by the large inequality between the lobsterman and the summer cottage owners.
These statistics do not tell the full story since most of the people coming to Bar Harbor are second homeowners, tourists, and seasonal workers. Many seasonal workers can not afford to live on the island year-round and are not counted in the statistics even though they might be the most vulnerable group. The lack of local and regional workers even requires Bar Harbor to rely on international seasonal workers (H-2B) visas for hospitality jobs (hotels). These workers are often from developing countries and are only here to cover seasonal jobs that nobody else wants to do.
In addition to the burden of car ownership, licenses also show the inequalities between different groups. Men are still 1.5% more likely than woman to have a drivers license in Maine. There are limited statistics on people with disabilities but the number is at least 8% fewer licenses in comparison to people without disabilities.
Climate
On October 19th 2019 Bar Harbor declared a Climate Emergency, and the town council has been taking steps to start reducing the direct CO2e emissions from town operation related activities in November of 2021. The next step is to start addressing general emissions in the town.
In 2019 transportation was responsible for 29% of the total direct emissions nationwide. In Maine, a state with less agriculture and industry than the rest of the U.S., the transportation sector is responsible for 54 percent of emissions and this number keeps growing. The increase of gas prices in 2022 and the increasing availability of e-bikes and other small electric possibilities have encouraged more people to stop driving for small trips. In 2009, 50% of trip in the US were under 3 miles. These distances can be covered in 15 minutes by bicycle if the right infrastructure is present.
Future
To increase the space allocated to pedestrians and cycling slightly, I drew plans for future possibilities and adjustment of the streets. See this story map for the details and my local climate solutions group project.
Limitations
Truly equitable streets might not be designed only on the number of users. We need to give people options to have a choice in the mode of transportation they pick. The Arrogance of Space is only a visualization tool to show how much space cars take up in our landscapes. If there is no sidewalk in the first place, there will be very little people walking, this does not mean that there is no demand for sidewalks however. In Amsterdam, 18% of trips are made by pedestrians while they get 40% of the urban road space. This seems unequal towards the other road users. But the roads in Amsterdam have as main function to protect the most vulnerable and not to move people around as quickly and equally as possible. Not everything can be explained by numbers and maps, ensuring that all road users feel safe in a mobility system that serves them is the most important.