Wide Streets

 

Why, Oh Why

Why don't you answer my questions?
Why, oh why, oh why?
'Cause I don't know the answers.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Is it ignorant to say you don’t know the answer?

During the famines of the 1780s in France, Marie Antoinette supposedly said “Let them eat cake” in response to hearing that the peasants did not have bread to eat.  The phrase was supposed to indicate ignorance, not cruelty.  The ignorance was not realizing bread and cake were both made with flour, and it was flour that was in short supply.  If there was no bread to be eaten, then there would also be no cake to be eaten. 

A recent article “On the High Cost of Wide Streets”  observed that streets that only need to accommodate a single car  can be much narrower.  But those streets were not designed to accommodate cars in the first place.  They were designed to accommodate fire and emergency trucks.  Are they used by cars in normal circumstances? You bet.  Can cars block transit riders? You bet.  When I was attending graduate school in Philadelphia in 1974, streetcars on tracks still shared the road with cars.  The blocking of streetcar tracks ( and the passengers on those street cars) by inconsiderate parked motorists might be illegal, but it happened way too often to be ignored.  The wide streets of Salt Lake City were laid out to accommodate U-turns by horse drawn wagons.  The wide boulevards of Paris were designed to allow cannons to clear barricades from a distance. Those street designs were not because of cars, but it was taken advantage by cars.  

Wide streets might be used by autos, but that does not mean that autos are responsible for wide streets.  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  Wide streets are designed for an extreme event, not an average event.  Wide streets may be less efficient, but nature and good design favors resiliency over efficiency.  Ask the efficient operators of supply chains how well the recent Suez Canal blockage worked out for them. Ignorance can be corrected by study.  Study why streets are wide, not the costs of wide street.