< PREVIOUS ] [ 2003 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2003 INDEX ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2003 INDEX ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Last week I made my TV debut, more or less, as I
appeared Friday night on the KRMA program Colorado State
of Mind.
Among the topics was widespread American
obesity and what government could or should do about
it.
The show's producers were quite prescient; shortly after the show was taped, a group of urban planners released a report which said that modern development patterns were in all likelihood contributing to obesity.
That's because our suburbs and shopping malls pretty much require people to drive, rather than walk, and walking is a cheap and easy way to reduce obesity and its associated maladies.
From my experience, this is true. It's easy to walk
around the old part of Salida, platted in 1880 by the
Central Colorado Improvement Co., the land-development
subsidiary of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad.
It follows the elitist
principles of the New
Urbanism
-- small lots, mixed residential and
commercial use, narrow streets, wide sidewalks, etc.
As for the newer stuff, our daughters were once at a
certain age, that of we will make you miserable until
you cave in and take us to a big shopping mall.
(Fortunately, they have now matured and now avoid these
hells when possible.)
To stop their whining, we took them to the Citadel Mall in Colorado Springs. Our daughter Columbine wanted a graphing calculator for her pre-calculus class, and couldn't find one there, even though there were dozens of stores. But on the way in, we had noticed that just across the street, at the Citadel Crossing Mall, was a big-box office-supply store which would doubtless carry such a machine.
So we decided to walk across the street while the rest of the family continued to shop. Just getting to the street meant walking through an immense parking lot that swarmed with negligent drivers, followed by a narrow sidewalk along a busy access road, where you'd turn into hamburger with the merest slip.
Eventually we got to the crossing of Academy Boulevard. There is not enough room in this newspaper, let alone inside the space of a column, to describe Academy. Suffice it to say that there is no one I hate enough to want him to have to drive there, let alone try to cross it on foot. I suspect the Springs is so religious because pastors there tell their flocks that unless they are devout in this life, they will spend eternity on Academy Boulevard.
The signal for crossing Academy gave us perhaps 30 seconds, so before we got across, the air was filled with the sounds of revving engines. And then there was another narrow sidewalk and parking lot, followed by an equally harrowing return trip.
Simply crossing the street from one mall to another was obviously supposed to be an auto trip; provisions for pedestrians were meager and dangerous.
Now, I have never read of any Ute or Arapaho legends about Academy and its Citadels. No early explorer like Zebulon M. Pike or John C. Frémont mentioned this. Gen. William Jackson Palmer took no notice of this when he founded Colorado Springs. Academy and its Citadels didn't fall out of the sky.
This nightmare was a result of deliberate designs made by humans. Those humans devised an environment that encouraged driving, even the short distance from one mall to another, by making it very unpleasant and dangerous to walk.
That's a form of social engineering,
the very
same process decried by the critics of the New Urbanism.
They say it's an effort to use the power of government to
force people into certain lifestyles.
But government was involved in the constructed geography
of Academy and the Citadels; this wasn't just the result of
the market
giving people what they wanted. Some
public body approved the too-narrow sidewalks and the
inadequate crossing time at the poorly marked crosswalk --
even conservative Colorado Springs has zoning laws and
building codes.
So this, too, represents an effort by government to force people into a certain lifestyle -- in this case, a car-friendly fat-promoting lifestyle.
And say what you like about it, it's good for our economy as we are forced to burn more gasoline that in turn makes us spend more on medical care, military procurement, parking enforcement, litigation and the other blessings of modern American civilization.
If the critics of the New Urbanism
wanted to be
honest about their real agenda -- that is, serving as
shills for the oil industry -- then they'd deserve some
respect. But as it is, they're hypocrites. They decry
social engineering,
but actually they encourage
social engineering -- just as long as it benefits the oil
industry, at whatever cost to the rest of society.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2003 INDEX ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2003 INDEX ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2003 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >