Jul 09 2010
Where Are You Growing? Cities And Transportation
On the Ohio River nearly kissing Kentucky is the town of Cincinnati. It is a shinning city built on the rolling hills that are a feature of this part of the country. Like all cities, Cincinnati has sky scrapers, apartments, small houses and larger houses built in the suburbs. Built at the end of the 1700’s it was considered one of the first North American boom towns and one of the first large inland cities. History can, in part, be followed by the development of the automobile. This led to a number of important industries including gas stations, auto repair businesses, houses with garage doors, a need for Cincinnati Garage Door Replacement, a new Cincinnati Garage Door Opener, asphalt companies, street light manufactures and a hoard of other auto related industries. Cincinnati recently voted against support for a trolley car and train system.
As cities develop with the car as a key design feature they bring on a slew of problems. All the cars must be parked, the roads must be large enough to accommodate them, automobile pollution rises, and pedestrian access competes with access for the automobile. Creating the balance between accommodating cars and creating accessible cities has always been a challenge for city planners.
New York City is a mass transit success. The subway system creates accessible ways to travel all over the city. New York does have several features that support an elaborate mass transit system. It is a dense and compact city all the neighborhoods radiating out from a defined center. It was a city that began before the advent of the age of the automobile. No system is without its flaws, but the New York City mass transit model allows people to have relative access to most parts of the city with relative speedy access. It has the biggest and most utilized rail system in the United States. Traveling by subway, a person can disappear underground, and pop up like a prairie dog miles away from their original destination. The rail, bus and boat system allows pedestrians to leave their home and go about their day without requiring a car. In fact, the New York City mass transit system is so good, street parking so difficult and garage storage so expensive, that most denizens of New York City don’t own a car.
Mass transportation also improves pedestrian traffic as people move to the subway stops. Pedestrian traffic helps increase business.
Los Angeles is on the other end of the scale. Los Angeles developed around the automobile with the accompanying decentralized city layout, building out over many miles of vacant land instead of up like in New York City. It became a city of highways with most places require the use of automobiles for easy access. It does have a decent mass transit system and is and is attempting to develop light rail access, but the city is so large that it has many centers of business, including Hollywood, Century City, Santa Monica, Westwood and the down town area. The light rail does not travel the major areas of business on the other side of the hill in the San Fernando Valley. To make a couple stops for meetings or errands in Los Angeles could require a days time and serious route planning, compared to a couple hours in NYC. Every urban area wrestles with transportation, and each city struggles to meet its own unique challenges.
