[B’ Spokes: This is a great analogy by Tom Vanderbilt which I’ll skip to the end to emphasize his point but the full story is worth a read.]
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The airport courtesy cart is a wonderful way to travel. Who wants to walk Houston’s or Atlanta’s long dendritic corridors (dodging those spillover queues from Auntie Anne’s) when you could be whisked, in comfort if not exactly style, directly from security to your gate? Sure, there’s plenty of mass transit options, like shuttle trains and moving walkways, and there’s always good old walking (which I frankly find a welcome respite after four hours of impersonating David Blaine’s latest act of extreme deprivation in 12F), but who wouldn’t want that private door-to-door ride?
The problem, of course, is that if everyone wanted to travel this way, the airport corridors would quickly bog down in a teeming, thrombosed mass of Lagosian proportions. Airports are able to process huge amounts of people because of mass transit, or because they walk.
And I think there’s something of a metaphor here for the presence of the car in the city of the 21st Century. On 34th Street, as the NYC DOT reports, one in ten people who travel on the street go by car. And yet they are granted an inordinate amount of space, and they exact a toll in time on the vehicles carrying many more people. It’s not difficult to imagine the car, forcing its way through a crosswalk during a right turn (as so many do), as the equivalent of that individual courtesy cart disrupting the larger flow of the stream of airport pedestrians for the sake of its few passengers. Or the driver honking as he passes a cyclist as that shrill cry of “beep, beep, cart coming through” that so vexed Seinfeld. Imagine now if, at the airport, courtesy carts were given wide swaths of real estate in which to navigate, and people on foot were relegated to a smaller, crowded, space, and you have something of an idea of the routine spatial imbalance that exists in New York City.
As with the courtesy cart, the car is a wonderful way to travel — the problem, of course, is that it gets less wonderful with each additional driver. Beep-beep.
https://www.howwedrive.com/2010/04/26/on-airport-congestion-and-city-congestion/oldId.20100427152512361
Biking in Baltimore