In the legacy of the American dream machine, it's the vehicle welove to hate - yet buy. It's the King of the Road that vanquisheslesser brethren, the beast that blocks our views, the wobbly brutethat torques and turns over. The SUV is the McCar that gluttonizesits parking space and those around it. The hog that shroudsneighborhood sidewalks, blocking the child's-eye view of the street.It is the suburban attack vehicle.
And if you think that's a bit strong, just listen to the man thatmakes them. In his 'corporate citizenship report' last month, WilliamClay Ford, inheritor of the Ford mantle, 'fessed up that the SUV didall those bad things. And more.
Ford didn't exactly concede that the sports utility vehicle isneither 'sporty,' nor a social 'utility,' nor, for that matter, amotor 'vehicle' at all. (By misslotting the SUV into the truckcategory, it gets permission to guzzle all that gas.) But Ford didgrant its place at the pinnacle of fossil fuel consumers that pollutethe air and aggravate global warming. 'The Joe Camel of the autoindustry,' as Dan Becker of the Sierra Club puts it.
After the apologia came the capitalist credo for the vehicle thatbrings in $10,000 to $20,000 a year per car. Sorry, said Bill Ford,we're in business. Even The Wall Street Journal bashed him for thattwo-faced swivel.
And yet, as a Texas recumbent bicycle builder and anti-autoactivist recently pointed out: 'You don't understand. To us, all carsare SUVs.' Her point was that all cars pollute (causing 30 percent ofUS greenhouse emissions); they clog; they crowd; they cause sprawl,habitat erosion, wetland paving, congestion - all that.
But that may be the good news. If Ford's mea culpa wasn't onegiant step for mankind, growing dismay at the clunkers - and risinggas prices - have put the lid on the notion of untrammeled gas-swigging. The timing couldn't be more auspicious. Motorists handingout $20 bills at the pump as summer vacations begin are gettingpeeved. Simultaneously, some members of Congress have been at work toconstrain the champion gas hog and its peers.
Three years after a rider affixed to the transportation act forbadeven research on tougher fuel standards, a new Clean Air Resolutionis on the agenda this month. As the number of SUVs produced reaches 2million of this year's fleet of 17 million new vehicles, somelegislators are joining environmentalists in the battle. Withecological concerns rising and climate change alerting yet anothercadre, we could see a start to trimming the fat from cars' fossilfuel diets.
Locally, too, Boston is moving to improve its transportationsystem. Prodded by the Big Dig cutbacks (speaking of overweight) andthe general chaos of congestion and public transit, thetransportation reform committee for Access Boston 2000-20l0 ischurning over the future of mobility by train, trolley, bus, bike,and foot.
No better time could be at hand.
So, in the spirit of 'Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save theEarth,' which sold 1.6 million copies, we offer Seven Simple ThingsWe Can Do to Transport Greater Boston to a Better Place.
Ax the asphalt-first approach. End new roadbuilding. Forgetwidening for the likes of the Weymouth mega-mall. Bury any notion ofa new Cape Cod Bridge. Cease and desist from the dribs and drabs andmini-swipes of road expansion attacking local neighborhoods. Forgetthe urban rotary with its torturous right-of-way and smallconstituency. Why build a new bus 'boulevard' when the dirty dieselbuses that serve 40 percent of all riders are an urban disgrace -slow, irregular, poorly-maintained, badly labeled - and downrightracist and classist in their poor service to the most needypopulation.
Retrofit the streetcar city. Old is eternal. We have a finetrolley line eroded by starvation of the MBTA's brainpower andbudget. The system - that skeleton - is splendid. Bring back theArborway and Watertown routes. Give Roxbury the rail replacement itdeserves, not just broken promises. And speaking of broken: Fix theescalators, the balky turnstiles, the under-par streetcars. The Tshould give us more bang for our current bucks before begging formore.
Get connected. Mini-and-mega-transportation links are essential toget the city unstuck from traffic. Stop dawdling and start with theNorth/South Rail Link. The Great Connector will unite all the othermeans of mobility in a carrying system that links riders in andoutside the state. Then connect the passengers to the world around.Too many T and train stations sit wrapped in grim asphalt parkinglots, hostile islands of automobiles severing them from the sidewalkand city. No place for bikes. No space for safe walking. Confusing toreach. Only connect.
Bring out the bikes. Boston, everyone says, isn't a biking city.So . . . Cambridge is? Nonsense. Any place is bike-able if peoplepersist. (In snowbound Finland, the bike paths are clear 90 percentof the year.) Bike routes are a priority; they should be on thestreet, as well as greenways. There should be racks for the bikes,and, hey, showers for the riders. Start with the new Central Arterycorridor; its freed-up space has six or seven lanes for cars - nonefor bikes. That's grounds for staging a critical mass ride throughthe atrium of the Transportation Building.
Get creative. How about circulating a trolley through the Seaportalong that Central Artery waterfront corridor? San Francisco does it.Start from South Station, say, chugging around the seaport, loopingaround, back down the Northern Avenue Bridge on the surface to a newNorth Station. Trash Fidelity's private dirty diesels now shuttlingstaff members to the Promised Land and spewing exhaust into the city.Forget the clunky, costly transitway with its unproven, ungainlysilverwash buses. Streetcars could civilize this auto land at afraction of the price.
Stop the parking dog from wagging the beast. If the axiom is themore parking, the less place, Boston is on its way to being place-less, courtesy of the 23,000 new parking spaces counted by the city.Destined to take up vital land and encourage still more cars, thispernicious pattern wastes valuable real estate by putting half theparking places in the urban core. The rest get dumped in the mostvulnerable neighborhoods. Put the lid and limits on this invitationto car-bound congestion and space consumption.
Concentrate the core. Plan forward, don't drive backward. It'stime to reverse the poor planning, or no planning, that destroysurban density, promotes sprawl, and makes the car a necessary evil.Remediate and reclaim the old urban brownfields (toxic waste sites,parking lots). Ban such pedestrian-hostile, Big Box badlands as theproposed Assembly Square project in Somerville and other auto-oriented malls. Put a moratorium on fringe development. All projectsshould be compact and transit-oriented. Subsidizing sprawl is thedeath knell of urban walk ability - and life. Like the SUV, it shouldtake a back seat.
