All Sprawl DownBy Jane Holtz Kay Look down the road and you see sprawl in the fast lane. Consult the signs and you see the results: "Teardowns for Sale," McMansions or Starter Castles consuming the landscape. Observe the driveways and you glimpse the SUVs-on-steroids lodged in three-car garages. Witness the outcome: congestion and more congestion. Welcome to the new architecture of the exit ramp. This is the Great Diaspora to the fringes that has aroused Americans to a new political and environmental awareness. Politicians cluck. Environmentalists struggle to stem the menace. And menace it is. Sprawl's spreading land patterns are altering every segment of life in the Bay State as in the nation. Sprawl is social. It is a shift in community structure as our old, walkable neighborhood interactions succumb to car-bound lifestyles. Sprawl is political. It is a shift in the national voting pattern as voters disperse from city to suburb. Sprawl is environmental and planetary, rendering habitat into hardtop and landscape into hardscape across the state. The coyote who dropped in on South Enders not too long ago, like the white-tailed deer chomping on suburban rosebuds, bespeaks the uprooting. Beyond the winsome newspaper accounts of these four-footers, the shift indicates the deeper loss of habitat and species caused by sprawling developments, chewing up 44 acres here every day, Audubon reports.
And, yet, for all the forward motion, highway-first policies are stalling progress. For all the talk, the city is studded with billion-dollar Big Dig cranes to tunnel us out faster to the next "there" on the periphery. And, less visibly, state road hogs are stomping the state with Little Digs - dig after dig, after dig. Misinvestment, disinvestment, wrong investment. The ongoing road building subsidizes urban flight and undermines the land banks and trusts. Locally, almost $200 million in road projects is underway in Boston, while the state allots 400 million a year beyond the Big Dig to roads and bridges with fresh-start rather than fixup high on the agenda. The latest outrage came last week when Secretary of Environmental Affairs Robert Durand confirmed the MBTA's decision to deny Roxbury and the South End rail replacement for the Orange Line. In its stead, comes a lumbering, second-rate bus, the so-called Silver Line, a misnomer designed to associate silver with high tech slick. Given no guaranteed right-of-way to speed the trip, this is highway robbery and environmental injustice - a throwback to highway uber alles policies made visible in the intrusive '50s style bus stops designed to line its cumbersome route. Such projects are symptomatic of a state in overdrive. Add-a-lane here. Widen an intersection there and there. Mislabel it "repair" or "safety," and asphalt spreads, and with it sprawl. The only thing green about the state's transportation policy is the money. The only thing certain is its destiny to promote the sprawl that eats the soil that Jack bought and strips the historic centers that time wrought. Whether "privatized" for a whopping $250 million like the 2l miles of lanes on route 3 north to New Hampshire or public like the proposal for route 3 South, or ongoing for the endless route 128, roads bring more driving, less walking and undercut planning for livable communities. Roads are the subsidized engine of urban flight that feeds the lawnmowers of exurbia. Streetcars and trains are the core of compact communities that reverse that exodus. Nonetheless, for all the success of commuter rail and Amtrak's new highspeed train to New York, streetcar and other rail improvements lag. Nationally, more roads are in the works from the $203 billion federally-funded highway program, upped last year by 40 percent; locally, road turf - widening expands. To make the center hold, programs for good rail transit and transit-oriented rail development are essential to stop sprawl. Yet, our state transportation policy is neither comprehensive nor consistent in their behalf. Our failure to get back on track with the trains and trolleys that once pioneered Boston's streetcar city and suburbs is a dispiriting conclusion to the waning century. It is time to turn today's land-grabbing fast lane to sprawl into a fast track for rail. Originally published in the Boston Globe, fall 1999, editorial column.
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