For decades, the people of the Bay Area have looked south in horror at Southern California’s endless maze of clogged freeways and smog and swore we would take a different path.
Our actions do not match our words. Despite near unanimity that we want a greener and smarter approach to growth, our actual day-to-day decisions are leading us closer and closer to becoming another L.A.
Every week seems to bring a new study showing how suburban sprawl increases carbon emissions, adds congestion, increases home prices, reduces the quality of life, reduces wildlife diversity, decreases community satisfaction and even makes us fatter. Still we close our eyes to reality. The population of California was 19 million in 1970, now it is 38 million. We think if we reduce growth in our neighborhood we are preserving our way of life when the exact opposite is true: We are creating a carbon-spewing, car-centric smoggy sprawl.
Environmentally, we are already seeing the impact: An ever-increasing number of smog alert days, palpably hotter summers, our main water source — the Sierra snowpack — eroding before our eyes, and wildfires engulfing forests and homes alike.
From a global perspective, the statistics are even grimmer. Species loss today exceeds that of the great dinosaur extinction. Human-induced greenhouse warming is leading to a vicious cycle where warming is feeding on itself, creating an ever hotter world.
Conservatives criticized Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” over the claim that global warming may lead to significantly higher sea levels because the science in support of that was flimsy. Fair enough. But since then, many new studies support the rising sea level proposition. The Bay Area, with much of its commercial activity near sea level, has much to lose.
In light of all this, why are we not making better land use decisions? Mostly it’s from NIMBY neighborhood opposition to development projects. Elected officials, sensing the tide of popular opinion, follow up that opposition with new rules restricting density. Twenty neighbors around each project have defined land use throughout our communities to the detriment of us all.
The results are untenable. Transportation by walking, biking and mass transit becomes exponentially more difficult in suburban sprawl. For those who wish to bike or walk, the infrastructure has becomes so focused on cars that the roads are often unsafe.
Land use and transportation are two sides of a coin: The Bay Area emits three times the world average of carbon dioxide per capita despite our mild climate, and more than 50 percent of it comes from transportation. The automobile made the suburbs possible, and the suburbs have made the automobile essential.
But things are not all doom and gloom. In fact, with a little discipline we can have a more vibrant, healthy and satisfying community while greatly reducing our carbon footprint. The changes that must be made involve redesigning our land use patterns to make more vibrant and interactive communities that are less automobile-centric. This process, known as “Smart Growth” or “New Urbanism,” means building more density near jobs and transportation and integrating stores, jobs and houses more tightly.
Proper urban planning opens the door to walking or biking to the store and our jobs. It allows us to find cultural activities near our homes. It revives a sense of community and neighborhood that is alien to sprawl. People living in such integrated neighborhoods have been found to be more satisfied with their community.
Forrest Linebarger is CEO and chief designer at VOX Design Group Inc. in Mountain View. He can be reached at Forrest@VoxDesignGroup.com or at (650) 694-6200, ext. 511.
