Department of Transportation downsizes Clover St project

In the realm of a solution space, a small local optimum hardly solves the big problems. Here not even the union of all small local optimums can reach global optimum. That requires redefining the problem space. Only then can we see the larger solution space.

Driving itself induces demand for yet more driving. With sufficient density, in the urban core, people can find the services and products they need within a five or ten minute walk. A margin of the population cannot find what they need and thus demands a car, which enables not just access to a few marginal choices but to a new lifestyle, opportunities to live, work, shop, and play not otherwise available to the carless. Lack of marginal demand for some businesses in the urban core causes some businesses to falter. Yet more consumers cannot find what they need within a five or ten minute walk. As space for roads and parking displace some businesses, an additional margin cannot find what they need and thus demands a car.

Economic support of these opportunities grow yet new business, drawing more consumers, drawing yet more business, in cycles drawing yet more consumers to demand cars and driving. Growth and buzz along new centers of development lead to new opportunities there and to decline in the city. Green space and easements once kept to maintain an architectural pattern suitable for walking shifts in zoning and new patterns meant for parking and driving. Over the decades, through multiple feedbacks, the excitement of growth and opportunity, and the loss of grocery and shopping make cars, roads, parking, and traffic a necessity. This cycle of development and decline first in the city, then in some first ring suburbs, leads to a second cycle of outer ring suburbs, and then a third.

Yet some metropolises, such as Manhattan, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Portland and Curitiba, avoid this pattern of growth, but remain or have become centers for vitality and development. Cities like these either have natural barriers to growth, such as water or mountains, or legal and architectural ones, such as urban growth boundaries and limits to water and utility networks, and sufficient transportation infrastructure that even a majority with cars choose not to drive. This pattern of sustainability and life could exist anywhere. It starts with imagination and think outside the box to redefine the problem.