Amusing when you read these book reviews of “Dark Age Ahead” by Jane Jacobs side by side.
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Patrick Watson, Globe And Mail First among her detested experts are North American traffic engineers. It was Jane Jacobs who led the fight against New York Planner Robert Moses’s proposal to wreck Washington Square by pushing a freeway right through it; and in Toronto, her adopted city since 1969, against the developers who wanted to drive multiple freeways into the heart of the city, clogging and polluting it even more than it is with the resulting rush of one-person cars, developers who in the process wanted to destroy gracious old landmarks, including the St. Lawrence Centre, Union Station and the Old City Hall. Jacobs recounts a couple of key incidents in which traffic engineers have declared rules of road safety and economics for which they are able to adduce absolutely no evidence, and concludes that in the traffic trade, judgments are often closer to doctrine and superstition than to engineering and science. “Among other elements that make a congregation of people work as a human community, with the richness of random encounter, gossip and intercourse that nourish collaboration and social invention, Jacobs admires boulevards. Traffic engineers, she writes, declare that boulevards, with their vision- obstructing trees and confusing access roads, are a major cause of accidents, injury and death. But they offer no evidence. And a major international study of boulevards — which in France, Portugal, Buenos Aires and elsewhere contribute graciously to the kind of community in which, in Jacobs’s view, democracy and civility thrive — found zero evidence to support the traffic engineers’ doctrine. Or superstition.” |
Bruce Ramsey, Seattle Times; Jacobs, who turns 88 this year, has some of the same themes in this book, particularly her criticism of cars. Now a Canadian living in Toronto, she does not drive and does not defer to the interests of those who do. Her book should have been presented as an attack on individual transport, because that is what she wants to discuss. Her first chapter on the decline in civilization, “Families Rigged to Fail,” might have been about divorce, unwed mothers, absent dads or even the Internet, but instead is about cars. Cars keep people apart. People use cars, she says, because General Motors bought up the streetcar companies in the 1930s “for the sake of selling oil, rubber tires and internal combustion vehicles.” GM was “determined to force unlimited numbers of gasoline-powered, internal-combustion vehicles on America.” I have one of GM’s vehicles, though I did not know how dastardly the company had been in forcing me to buy it. The next chapter is about the spread of credentialism in higher education, which might be a fruitful topic. Credentialism, she says, is about qualifying people for jobs, which America has made “the grand cultural purpose of life,” partly with large government programs to create jobs, such as the interstate highway system. Which is about cars. The next chapter — this is a book about a new Dark Age, remember — is called “Science Abandoned” and is about how Americans are giving up the scientific way of thinking. This might also be a fruitful topic, about creationism perhaps, or astrology. Instead she steers the reader to traffic management. Cars again! She has discovered that when a road is closed, only some of the traffic is diverted. Some of it disappears. (She is right.) She says the traffic engineers won’t admit that, and are blind to the scientific way of thinking. |
