Suburban quagmire

Atrios had an important post on suburban life, which i tried to post on yesterday. He's an admitted suburb hater, and I guess that fits me as well.

I grew up outside Cleveland, yet was able to get to almost anything I needed without a car. I regularly walked to school for 13 years. The public library was only 3 blocks away. A comic book shop was just a little further, and a few blocks beyond that, a grocery store. When, a few years ago now, I got a job in downtown cleveland, I could make use of the RTA's Rapid light rail train to get there. All this convenience was the result of the suburb having been built over 80 years ago, a time when street cars brought workers to downtown banks, stores, steel mills and other factories. Neighborhoods were walkable because there weren't really a whole lot of options besides that for most people.

Now I visit people in the outer suburbs and wonder what they'd do without a car. I'm not absolutely against the automobile, mind you. I just think that most daily tasks shouldn't require one. In DC, I wouldn't dream of owning a car - outlandish parking prices and traffic make it seem rather foolish, and Metrorail and Metrobus make up a great system. In inner-ring suburbia, around both Cleveland and Washington, it seems like car ownership makes sense, but there's the option of walking to most necessities - seems like a good mix. The new suburbs, though, strike me as desolate, lonely places, which especially isolate young people.

I wonder sometimes what hazards we as a society subject our children to by keeping them stuck in subdivisions, separated from everything.