In 1981, when I got my first
car — a used Toyota Corolla — the first thing I did was
take a trip out West. For a prisoner of the sprawling suburbs of
St. Louis, Mo., nothing could have been sweeter than to put that
sea of homes in the rearview mirror, and to fill the windshield
with the wide-open Western plains and mountains.
I could
have taken a train or a bus, but my car represented freedom. What
if I wanted to take a back highway through the small farm towns of
western Iowa, or bump down a dirt road high up in a Colorado
national forest? And so, I steered myself around as much of the
West as I could, and became an ardent fan of the open road.
Fast-forward six years. I am sitting in a train, hurtling
through a tube underneath the San Francisco Bay, heading to my
first real job as a cub reporter for a local wire service.
It’s crowded, but not uncomfortable. In fact, as I read the
newspaper and casually eavesdrop on other people’s
conversations, I can’t help feeling smug. Above me, thousands
of cars are inching along the Bay Bridge. I’ll be at work
before most of them get halfway across it.
I realized
then that the automobile is not necessarily synonymous with freedom
and the good life. For the past six decades, however, this country
has believed that it is. And so, instead of growing up, our cities
have grown out, spreading out over the land in monocultures of
single-family homes interspersed with shopping malls. This
car-dependent pattern has inevitably created problems, including
traffic jams and air pollution, not to mention the need for lots of
public dollars to keep expanding and maintaining the network of
roads.
Things have gotten so bad that the leaders of some
Western cities have begun to embrace new ideas. A year ago, voters
in Denver passed a $4.7 billion expansion of the city’s small
but well-used light rail system. Over the next decade, 119 new
miles of rail lines will be added to the system, with lines
radiating north to Boulder, west to the foothills of the Rockies
and east to the white-tented Denver International Airport. The
expanded system will free some citizens from the tyranny of the
automobile and relieve the ever-mounting pressure on Denver’s
highways.
The rail lines also hold the promise of
reshaping an entire metro area. Already, conference rooms and
computers are humming with plans to redevelop the lands around the
57 new stations that will be built. Instead of single family homes
or single-use industrial parks, developers and their backers are
envisioning compact new towns, with a mixture of homes, apartments,
shopping and offices, all within walking distance of the train.
The idea is that when you fly over Denver 20 or 30 years
from now, hopefully you will be able to see these dots of urban
villages, and make out the skeleton of our transit system,” says
Mayor John Hickenlooper.
Denver is not alone in its
enhusiasm for the rail. In the span of just six years, Salt Lake
City’s Trax light rail system has become embedded in the
daily routine of commuters, church-going Mormons on their way to
Temple Square, and Utah Jazz fans headed to a game at the Delta
Center. So far, Trax diverts only 2 percent of the metro
area’s traffic, some 50,000 daily riders, but that is enough
to take the edge off of rush-hour, according to city planners.
Plus, adding more trains is far cheaper than expanding Interstate
15.
The western railvolution has also taken hold in
Albuquerque, which will begin operating a short commuter line in
2006. Gov. Bill Richardson is pushing for an extension to Santa Fe,
60 miles north. And Phoenix, the land of tract homes with swimming
pools, is plunging ahead with a $1.3 billion light rail project.
Making the West’s towns and cities more compact is
critical if we want to prevent the rest of our private lands from
being devoured, and to keep our precious public lands from being
sold off to the highest bidders. According to a report from the
Brookings Institution, to accommodate the tens of millions of
additional people who will live in the West by 2030, we will have
to construct almost seven times as many homes, factories and stores
as existed here in 2000.
If the only option for these
folks is car-based suburbia, then the West we love will disappear
under concrete and asphalt and cookie-cutter houses. That’s
why all of us — even the most ardent automobile lovers
—have a stake in the grand experiment now under way in Denver
and the rest of the West.
Paul Larmer is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado. He is the publisher of
the paper there and can be reached at
plarmer@hcn.org.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
