Cities in Trouble—What Can Be Done

Q  What does the city of Rochester contribute to this?

A  The city pays for the parking garage. But the city had already promised to build a garage anyway, and by getting the underground rights from the owners of the property has saved itself immense costs. This project shows what can be done by private investment with the co-operation of the city.

Q  How do loop or belt highways fit into this picture? How should a city lay out its traffic system?

A  Let's for a moment use an analogy. Let's compare a traffic system with a river system. A river starts with little springs that flow into brooklets; the brooklets flow into creeks, and the creeks into rivers which empty into the ocean.

The traffic river is similar. Small roads combine into big roads that merge into highways that lead into freeways. The trouble is, there's no ocean for the traffic to pour into. When it finally arrives in the city it finds itself jammed into narrow streets. The result is a flood, just as if you dammed a river.

Q  How can you handle this traffic flood?

A  If you want to avoid a traffic flood, you have to provide an ocean, or a retention basin. That ocean can take the form of broad belt highways which distribute the traffic around the most congested areas. Multiple-deck parking garages, accessible directly from the belt highway, are an integral part of this retention basin.

Q  Where does rapid transit come in?

A  There must still be public transportation, semipublic transportation and rapid transit. This includes buses, subways, taxis and so on.

Q  What kind of rapid transit should a city have?

A  The ideal form is the one that will carry us most swiftly to our destination without, at the same time, causing any damage to the environmental qualities of the areas to be traversed. It would be wrong to look at rapid transit only from the engineering point of view. Because then our new public transportation lines might cause exactly the same kind of trouble and damage that our freeways cause today.

Q  Can rapid-transit systems create slums?

A  They can create slums, as we know from our experience with the old Third Avenue elevated line in New York City.

Q  What about the monorail which has been talked about a lot in the last few years?

A  I am very much worried about the tremendous attraction that names such as monorail hold for so many people. Everybody talks about the monorail. It sounds so modern. Yet, actually, what is a monorail? It's just a Third Avenue "El" on one rail. It's just as disturbing to the neighborhoods through which it passes.

That doesn't mean that the monorail doesn't have its place. But I don't think its place is within a highly developed urban area. It might be placed above river beds, or between the banks of freeways—but not inside our city pattern.

Q  Then what is the answer in rapid transit?

A  It's absolutely unbelievable that, in an age in which we have invented jet planes and rockets, we should not have one new ideal about rapid transportation. There is no doubt that we can build a rapid-transit system that is faster, more convenient, and quieter—one that would persuade even the most enthusiastic auto driver to prefer rapid transportation.

Q  Is it true that in cities that have pretty good rapid transit it is not being patronized—that people are still staying with their automobiles?

A  No, it is not. There has been very little done to improve rapid transportation, but where it has been done, it has had immediate effect.