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After living in the Netherlands for more than five years now, we’ve come to appreciate the many amenities of city life. Of course there are the obvious benefits, like festivals, theaters, live music, pubs, and restaurants. Our own little burg of Haarlem has two major concert venues, an opera house, dozens of pubs and cafes, and more than forty restaurants-- all within an easy stroll of the central market square. (We even have our own red light district, but some of you may not consider that an amenity. ;-)
There are also the more subtle undercurrents of social energy that we now recognize as an integral part of the urban experience. It’s the buzz of activity, the ever changing sights and sounds, the interaction with other human beings. Of course sometimes the volume of people and activity can be exasperating. Sometimes you just want a little privacy…a little quiet. We’re lucky that The Netherlands has set aside so much open space within the Randstad to get away from it all-- locally. For me, it works nicely and I couldn’t imagine a better environment to live in….except for the $%&^* traffic.
I think only Beth knows the special attitude that I’ve developed against the automobile over the years. It started way back in Boise, Idaho when we bought our first house on 9th street. We didn’t know it at the time, but the city was aggressively developing the hills above our neighborhood and they were opening 9th street to thru-traffic. We fought it for months, but eventually lost. We watched helplessly as more and more traffic began racing down our street, completely disregarding the people who lived there. The people behind the wheel only wanted to get from point A (home) to point B (town) and nothing in between those two points was of consequence to them. I began to notice, even in myself, how the car becomes an insular environment for the driver. When driving a car, interaction is based upon a defined set of rules, not with other humans, but with other cars and all obstacles hindering your progress from point A and point B. It removes your requirement to be considerate, sucking a little humanity out of you. There are some interesting experiments taking place in Europe where cities are going ‘traffic-sign free’ in an atempt to correct this imbalance – read the wiki entry on Shared Space here.
However, the depths of my bad attitude toward cars didn’t fully develop until a few years after Boise when we relocated to Washington, DC. Our preference was to live in the city, but the rampant, violent, and totally random crime kept us looking further out. We settled in suburban Northern Virginia. I’m not much of a religious guy, but if there is a hell, then for me it can’t be as bad as living in a post-war, American style, suburban development. I never felt so isolated in my life, even when we lived in a house built in the middle of 400 acres in the country two years later. Literally anything that you wanted to do outside of the four walls of your house, you had to get in the car to do. And every day, there were thousands of other people living in the same sprawling development (who you had never met and had virtually a 0% chance of meeting) driving around on the same suburban roads thinking how convenient everything was. A day of shopping was getting in your car and driving from plaza X to mall Y to strip development Z as you went from destination store to destination store. No meandering. No interaction. No sense of community. And then when you were tired from all that driving, you looked for a nice café to sit and relax with a cup of coffee. How convienient! Just pull on up to the next shopping plaza and grab a window seat overlooking the sea of concrete and parked cars to watch the suburban world drive by. Wat gezellig!
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But I have seriously digressed into a rabid, and somewhat unreasonably fanatical, diatribe against the suburban automobile lifestyle. Sorry about that. Let me wipe the foam from my mouth and get back on track with the original intent of this post…hmmm, I had a point? Ah yes, now I remember.
Even in the massive conurbation that we now call home – The Randstad, which has a great network of trains and subways and trams and parks and bike paths, people get sucked into this auto-centric mentality. We’ve never driven into Amsterdam and we rarely use the car except to get Sage out to some of the more remote parks. It’s a safe, exciting urban lifestyle and a great place to call home…as long as you live where you can take advantage of that wonderful public transportation network. One only need look at this Randstad traffic report to understand why.
Red means traffic jams. The entire 60 square mile Randstad is locked up like this twice a day, every day. Location, location, location – save a few bucks on that place further out, and spend your days in your car. Not for me. I’ve learned my lesson. I'll always choose vibrant urban core or fresh country air over an auto-centric, tweener lifestyle.
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