Books on Streets

A friend emailed me to ask whether my thoughts on bike riding and street use — short version: human beings have a higher purpose than the burning of petroleum — came mainly from books, and if so what books on the subject I’d recommend. I know a lot of you who read this blog like to read non-fiction books, too, so perhaps you might find this interesting. Or not. Anyway, here’s my response:

I’d say about 2/3 of my ponderings come from reading, and the rest from talking to smart people and from engaging in my own observations/analysis.

The best introduction to a lot of different good ideas on the subject that I know of is Traffic: How We Drive by Tom Vanderbilt.

There’s a big urban planning component to the whole thing: Jane Jacobs’ Death and LIfe of Great American Cities is the seminal work but I find it dry and hard to read. I’ve had better luck with the New Urbanists (Andres Duany, Ray Oldenburg, others). Some books that come to mind are Suburban Nation, The New Urbanism, Common Place, and The Great Good Place. Of course, James Kunstler is the enfant terrible of the whole group and often the most insightful (and perhaps the most prone to hyperbole, which I love about his work). Check out The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere, and The City In Mind.

Transportation is inextricably linked with procurement/growing of food — they are our two main uses of energy. In the last 80 years or so, both transportation and agriculture have been completely torn down after millenia of sounder practices, and been replaced with systems that are built entirely on petroleum.

An easy way to look at it is that petroleum, or more specifically the prehistoric animals and plants that are now oil, have finally exerted their control over us and have re-engineered humanity to serve their need to be consumed. The book that first showed me the question of who is serving whom — which makes sense, since we’re all just collections of genes that which have evolved to be good at sustaining and replicating themselves — was The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan, which looks at the co-evolution of plants and humans in four instances — apples, tulips, marjiuana, and potatoes.

Other food books pertain directly to the question of “what are streets for” because they pertain to the question of “what are people for”. Omnivore’s Dilemma, naturally. And I’ve heard The End of Food and The End of Oil make a nice pair. And other oil books include a nice quick read: $20 A Gallon.

Big picture stuff — you know, the history of life on earth and the specifics of evolution of people and thought — is pretty helpful. Robert Wright’s Nonzero is the best I know of there. All his stuff is good.

And macroeconomic structure is at the root of things too: I found The Company We Keep to be inspiring, but other people have recommended Economics as If People Mattered. Deep Economy by Bill McKibben is very good too.

Wendell Berry, who wrote What Are People For?. I have a collection of his essays (Art of the Commonplace) which moves me.

Blogs, of course: Copenhagenize, How We Drive, Streetsblog, and Infrastructurist seem to catch my attention the most. Particularly Streetsblog.

I hope this is interesting and not too roundabout. It all ties together, is the thing — and specifically keeps coming back to two questions: “what are streets for?” and “what are people for?”. I think the answers that our current economic/community model provides are pretty disappointing. But there are other possibilities out there.

• Share