Here’s a pretty good argument for keeping traffic on residential streets to a minimum: That traffic is why you have so few friends. Nope, it’s not because you’re on a once-a-week bathing regimen, or your conversational habit of relating all current events to something funny your cat did yesterday. It’s because the too-intense traffic is disrupting the social nature of your community. Seriously.
The video above, via Street Films, explains the research done by the scholar Donald Appleyard, who documented the livability of streets. His seminal work, aptly titled Livable Streets, studied the differences the amount of traffic on otherwise similar streets made in people’s lives. In the study, he took three very similar neighborhood streets in San Fransisco — as similar as possible, actually, except for one thing. Each had incredibly varying degrees of traffic. And that lone factor, it turned out, changed everything.
It changed how people gathered, changed how they communicated, and even changed their social patterns — and was largely responsible for determining how many friends they had on the street.
People who lived on the lightly-trafficked streets had an average of 3 friends per person — they were able to walk around casually, cross the street to visit, and so forth. But those who lived on the heavily trafficked streets, on average, had only 0.9 friends per person. That’s a pretty astonishing drop — but it makes perfect sense.
The larger principle at work here — that cars flat-out disrupt, even ruin, the social fabric of our communities, should be duly noted. Imagine how many friends you’d have if there were no cars on your street — you’d probably be the most popular kid in high school. But the bigger point is that we have ample reason to be envisioning carless societies; they’re a major ecological burden, a leading cause of premature death, and now, it goes to show that people may just be happier across the board without them meddling in their lives.
Streetfilms has a great series focusing on exactly this topic. Check out the website for more vids like this one.
