Autosclerosis, Berkeley Style
Seabury, Paul
Paul Seabury Autosclerosis, Berkeley Style • • "Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed...
...If so, people by then will have become accustomed to a city decomposed into clusters of hemmed-in hamlets...
...Thus the postindustrial Zeitgeist begins its assault on the most American of industries and contrivances...
...Democracy requires hear- ings, and hearings invite popular pressure...
...the most effective of them consist of three spaced concrete conic vessels (bollards), each filled with sand, in shape resembling NASA re-entry vehicles...
...suggested a stop sign at Derby/Ward to slow down traffic, and a light at Russell/ Grove which is in agreement with the proposal...
...Now comes autosclerosis, otherwise to be known as hardening of the arterials...
...Must responsive government mean more government, less authority, and more discontent...
...the planners are frustrated and attacked as charlatans...
...Some also have argued that Berkeley should be "redesigned for people who need to survive...
...Vast numbers of STOP signs have recently been erected, with the effect that cars often may proceed only a block at a time without coming to a halt...
...Traffic engineers long...
...It is the Car War, and has been commenced by a strange alliance of radicals and householders...
...Now, in the real -and visible world, the painful side effects of the experiment are all too apparent...
...Here we must return to the strange manage de convenance of visionaries and quiet householders which comprises the constituency of the Plan: Residents, although they may not dislike Cars in General, do not like cars which drive by their own homes...
...The game has become increasingly intricate as the number of participants has enlarged...
...But this is not all...
...Economists use the expression "beggar thy neighbor" to explain why nations, by means of import quotas, currency devaluation, and the like, often try to export their economic woes to others...
...the American counterculture...
...The trip you might make after dinner will be combined with the trip home because you won't want to get into the car again...
...Policies such as these, initiated in order to grant the citizenry more repose, have simply spread discontent more widely—not only among Motorists but others as well...
...In the 1960s, much attention was paid by radicals to the task of unofficially erecting barricades...
...Thus freedom and necessity both exist...
...On one side of each there is peace...
...This strategy, in the view of some of its proponents, is said to be unpleasant...
...the problem is not solved by a diverter at Milvia / Parker, but should be moved one block north to Blake which is more industrial in character, or divert traffic downtown...
...Generally speaking, both before and after the invention of the automobile, one principle of American public policy has been that freedom should prevail over constraint with respect to the voluntary movement of persons...
...Suggested a semi-diverter at Dwight/ Milvia blocking it from downtown traffic but not blocking it from the traffic from the other way...
...the benefit to one privileged group is the disadvantage to another...
...i.e., diagonal instead of parallel...
...Paul Seabury Autosclerosis, Berkeley Style • • "Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it...
...recommended closure of Otis/Newberry at Ashby with full blockades...
...It might be hoped that peace would come when the last harassed driver threw up his hands and resorted to other, if less easy, means of getting to and fro...
...where people could go slow when they wanted, take it easy...
...on the other, the traffic beats its way by...
...At the beginning some perhaps believed that the matter of "discouraging" the automobile could be expeditiously planned and carried out by professional traffic specialists...
...invidious status symbol...
...To be more particular, the chief object of transportation policy has been to ease the orderly and efficient movement of many persons from many starting points to many destinations, and among all the means contrived to accomplish this the automobile has proved to be king...
...Sir Isaac Newton Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) Newton was not quite right, at least in the case of choosing creatures, like man...
...In his view, electric golf carts are the obvious answer to the city's needs, as are elephant trains, bicycles, and so forth...
...Here, diverted, clogged, frustrated but undaunted, the aggrieved Traffic inches and honks along, past less fortunate residences, emitting its noise and toxic fumes, scattering dogs and cats, and annoying other Residents...
...Whose safety, whose pleasure, and whose ease are served by eliminating the automobile 'or by aggravating drivers, is at best a very difficult matter to calculatewith exactitude...
...Is it not possible to be all three—Motorist, Pedestrian, and Resident—rolled into one...
...These are laced together gracefully by attractive redwood planks...
...In this way, driving is supposed to become more arduous and annoying, a chore less likely to be undertaken...
...Pedestrians, direct competitors to the car, may be hit, in unequal meeting of steel and flesh, or exist in a state of nervous wariness and alarm...
...How that apparently neutral category relates to the first two has become a very interesting question...
...Here _indeed is further cause for discontent, and for another neighborhood association to rise up in search of similar privilege, including its own set of barricades...
...Needless to say, the clamor for shared privilege mounts...
...once again the question is not only which people but which part of people's needs is being assuaged...
...Home to office, office to home, home to market, work to recreation, pleasure to pleasure—none of these transfers can be accomplished as well by any known form of public transportation...
...This vitality, akin to the springtime wakening of nature, led Christopher Morley once to write jovially, "April prepares her green traffic light, and the world thinks Go...
...As the Daily Californian (University of California student newspaper) recently summarized it in an editorial entitled "Divert, Subvert, Destroy": "We would rather live in a clean, gentle city `John Kenneth Galbraith, a longtime enemy of Babbittry, was an early anti-car man, as can be seen in his early (1958) mockery of it as a philistine's delight: "The family which takes its mauve and cerise air-conditioned, power-steered, and power-braked automobile out for a tour, passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that long since should have been put underground...
...and so, we all make new friends and adversaries...
...They should allow parking on Derby but no parking on Ward...
...Most of this has come from neighborhood groups demanding access to the benefits...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 19...
...Some neighborhood associations have hung fetching little boxes of geraniums on them...
...In a general sense, from a "flow-pattern" perspective, such individual decisions al-leviate the general congestion, and "everyone" benefits...
...now it is a commodity of considerable disputed merits: the chief source of pollution...
...It is the quintessence of free choice...
...for example, Berkeley officials have recently reduced the number of permits issued for new parking lot construction, and have sought to impose prohibitively expensive street parking charges...
...They are Dead Ends...
...But he also can voluntarily decide about the matter...
...But such was not to be the case...
...But cries against the automobile have been mounting...
...If, as Herodotus said, war is the father of all 'things, Berkeley recently has been the mother of many: school busing...
...One can imagine an urban paradise, in which Disneyland elephant trains would gracefully glide through the streets of Munchkintown, in a quiet flow of golfcarts, bicycles, wheelchairs, and pedestrians...
...It was to be anticipated, at a time when most American institutions are under attack by their clients, that a time would come for a serious challenge to the automobile...
...Whether this sketch in itself sheds light on the current civic plight of America may be questioned, but it does open the question of whether the Berkeley plan deserves nationwide imitation...
...Not unnaturally, humanity takes to it like fish to water...
...and, finally, insatiable consumer of scarce energy resources...
...And what a privilege it is...
...Does not want to allow cars to enter Milvia or Russell at Adeline...
...There is, for instance, another side of human nature which prefers repose to movement, and yet another, sober, side—to be seen in the activities of public authorities who specialize in regulating such movement...
...In one sense, Residents and Pedestrians are natural enemies of the Motorist—the former because Motorists driving on their street disturb their tranquility, endanger their children and domesticated animals, and pollute the air...
...motorists, doctors, firefighters, policemen, are aggrieved...
...free speech movements and student rebellions...
...Trains, subways, and buses necessarily serve the aggregate wishes of multitudes...
...Better than its many predecessors—the horse, chariot, carriage, landau, and even sedan chair—the car has had the merit of being able to transfer a person swiftly from one particular place to another particular place...
...A third commentator predicts, "Within a year or two, [the barriers] will simply be accepted as a fact of life...
...The University, whose faculty and employees include the majority of the city's daily inbound commuter traffic, is under pressure to diminish its own parking facilities...
...then [sic] live in a modified parking lot surrounded by automobilia—no matter how convenient escape was...
...Who would not pay a little more for the privilege of such protected real estate...
...He recognized parking problems in the area surrounding the University Receiving Station, Early Learning Center, and Adult School resulting in no parking places on Carleton/Derby and Ward/Stuart...
...businesses suffer...
...Some barricade apologists now argue that emergency vehicles could be equipped with special cutting devices—electric saws or clippers, for instance—which could sever the boards or chains which link the cones...
...they stretch across the intersections...
...The architecture editor of the Los Angeles Times, casting a shadow of Things to Come on his city's automobile-prone population, has praised their beauty...
...Other proposals abound...
...similarly, police cars, ambulances, and doctors on emergency trips...
...So, with traffic essentially undiminished, Berkeley has become an automotive Chinese-puzzle maze...
...he at least must walk to his car in order to drive it...
...the taxpayers, who pay for this in real money, are vexed...
...Here, the autos stubbornly flow on, in, and out, in undiminished quantity...
...In a city such as this, which prizes participation highly, the prospect of personal residential gain seems now to outweigh other considerations...
...The barricades do not have an ominous aspect...
...and obstinacy reigns in government...
...Conflict, as Simn'iel pointed out, is sociative...
...I. Euphemisms cosmeticize unpleasantries, so it is not surprising that the Berke-Icy (California) City Council, in recently decreeing a widespread blockage of streets to vehicular traffic, described its goal as being to "create a less inviting atmosphere for car usage...
...and so on...
...But no one has yet found the Yellow Brick Road to get there, nor what the cost of such a trip would be...
...The campaign is waged in less conspicuous ways as well...
...There is an interesting democratic dynamic in these processes, by which questionable privilege, when not abolished, tends to be universalized...
...noisy disturber of repose...
...utopians are disillusioned...
...Ying Lee Kelley, a feminist-activist Council member, said recently: "Until we as a city and as a nation find an alternative to the automobile, we're going to have to make some nasty decisions...
...It marks a change from radical struggles of the past decade in this community...
...Who would not want to belong to such a club...
...Of course (following Newton), nothing in the laws of nature says that such auto-mobility must persist indefinitely...
...At a Planning Commission meeting (one of hundreds recently held) the following (and typical) cahier was advanced by a concerned citizen: "Joel Rubenzahl, 2023 Carleton, and a member of Savo Island Project Area Committee felt downtown traffic uses Milvia to• avoid Shattuck stops...
...Yet there is an odd aspect to human existence, in which the simultaneous coincidence of opposites occurs...
...and people will have changed some of their traffic habits...
...And so the idiosyncratic wishes of amateur traffic planners multiply and churn on...
...enemy of the halt and blind...
...I have been going up there every day for some time...
...And, as the Berkeley city traffic engineer adds, "People may think more and drive less...
...But if the redistribution of pleasure and pain is a game which government plays, it wouldseem to be an endless one, and as this vignette shows, quite costly...
...Yet the city has no feasible plan to replace the car with compensatory public transportation facilities, nor could it afford to do this in any event: Choked with high costs of social services, the city already has the highest tax rate of any municipality in the state...
...Everyone...
...the traffic no longer flows through them...
...It is not accidental (as Soviet pamphleteers are fond of saying) that the first such preferred enclave was created more than a decade ago, to benefit one of Berkeley's wealthiest residential sections and to establish its tranquility...
...What home-dweller would not cherish the thought that some day the busy traffic's rush by his own house would cease and his street become a quiet backwater, an elongated skateboard track, a capacious parking lot, a macadamized playground, a spacious park where, perhaps on Sunday afternoons, neighborhood block parties could occur...
...There are also other means by which Berkeley creates a "less inviting atmosphere for car usage...
...the old harsh lines between radicals and conservatives have been strongly affected as the conflict has been redefined...
...Noticing this restless American mobility a century and a half ago, Tocqueville was moved to write: "No event can be compared with this continuous removal of the human race, except those irruptions which preceded the fall of the Roman Empire...
...residents in unfavored areas are outraged...
...To effect these plans, barricades have been erected at strategic exit or entry points of nonarterials, so that, while neighborhood residents may enter at one end, as one would enter one's own driveway, through-motorists are effectively The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 17 barred...
...In a barricaded city, it is not only the garden variety Motorist who experiences difficulties...
...should block Russell so cars cannot enter...
...one Berkeley transportation expert is now advancing a proposal either to ban single-occupancy automobiles from the streets entirely or to impose heavy taxes upon them...
...A Motorist could not be such were he unable also to be a Pedestrian...
...Perhaps the only visible benefit of it all can be seen in the strange ways in which the issue has realigned a divided community...
...Not all Pedestrians are Motorists, but all Motorists must be Pedestrians...
...As my colleague Aaron Wildaysky puts it, "aggravation is non-quantifiable...
...The Affluent Society, ch...
...But then, a victim writes, "The situation around Alta Bates is well known to me...
...each proceeds from one public starting point, through prescribed routes, to one public destination...
...There are more traffic signals, YIELD signs, turn prohibitions, DO NOT ENTER signs, chokers, traffic circles and triangles, diverters and semi-diverters, and so on...
...As one beneficiary of barricades writes, "We encourage the commission to see that Alta Bates Hospital chains its parking lot to prevent people from taking short cuts down Prince and Colby to get to the hospital...
...But let us now turn to the particulars of the affair...
...So the case of interest conflict is complicated indeed...
...The strategy of the Berkeley plan is to force auto traffic from nonarterial streets, compressing it into a few designated arterials...
...now, to erecting them officially...
...the Resident embraces the anti-automobile ideology, and shifts the distress of traffic to other, less fortunate, streets...
...Moreover, most Residents from time to time are transubstantiated into Motorists and Pedestrians...
...They are not unattractive (those, that is, which have so far escaped vandals, graffiti artists, and automobile crashes which break them up...
...The phrase is appropriate for the game being played on the streets of Berkeley, for the closure of one "neighborhood" street diverts traffic to another...
...Each day I hope I can make it in and out of there safely...
...Nader's original skirmish had not been against the principle, but rather the workmanship, of it, although some of his contumely doubtless had underlying tones of generalized hostility...
...There also is a third class—the Residents, those in repose at home...
...slayer of persons, cats, dogs, and endangered species...
...How does one measure inconvenience...
...These include cumbersome fire 18 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 engines which, unable to penetrate or circumvent such obstacles, cannot easily or quickly reach their flaming destinations...
...Clever motorists know how to maximize their advantage at rush hours...
...Many miles of pavement are no longer streets...
...Man may be compelled to change from rest to motion, motion to rest, or to change course and direction...
...These phenomena first surfaced here in the 1960s before spreading elsewhere...
...It is a landmark case, which city managers across the country may take to be a new vein of rich ore for urban planning...
...it is also the essential- civic services...
...have known that, within any flow system, if the same volume is maintained and the conduits are reduced in number and capacity, congestion will inevitably increase...
...felt cars should be ticketed with intensified parking on Carleton on the south side...
...In happy protected neighborhood driveways, on warm days, dogs now safely snooze where once their natural enemy, the Motorist, held sovereign sway...
...In the age of the automobile there have been two discernible classes of persons at odds with each other—Pedestrians and Motorists...
...Again to quote the Master, move-ment may be slowed, diverted, or halted by "forces impressed upon it...
...My wife is being cared for at the Convalescent Hospital across from Alta Bates...
...What these would be, and who would pay for them, is now regarded by some as a problem...
...But the automobile, substituting swift wheels for the laggard feet of individuals, enables them to choose both an ultimate private destination and a route to it...
...many of them choose less-congested thoroughfares or by-ways, to save both time and gas...
...It has also been argued that—with respect to their apprehension —criminals will have as much difficulty escaping the police as the police will have in catching them...
...Move but a block away...
...There are hundreds of these, scattered along the city's main arterials and elsewhere in surprising patterns of impediments...
...that "people have priority over cars...
Vol. 9 • March 1976 • No. 6
