Back To The Future: A City Planner's Perspective. (Part Three.)

This is the third in a series of posts on Back To The Future as seen by a city planning nerd. Frame grabs are copyright Universal Pictures and are used here on the basis of fair use, for commentary purposes. Getting Around Hill Valley - 1985 In 1955, Hill Valley is still compact enough (including a well-defined and thriving downtown) that cars aren't strictly necessary. Mass car ownership has only been underway for about ten years--not long enough to force the wholesale rearrangement of the built environment we live with today.

By 1985, though, the town has sprawled enough to present a by-now familiar plot problem for any movie involving teenagers: namely, how do we give someone enough access to his setting to make a story possible?

In most movies, we wave this problem away by assuming that the teenager has his own car, or at least access to one, at all critical story points. When we want to show that a teenaged character is a loser or otherwise some kind of underdog, we show him driving a, you know, really old beat-up car which is supposed to suck terribly. (In Savage Steve Holland's "Better Off Dead," released the same year as BTTF, being stuck driving the family station wagon to the local ski hill is apparently enough of an existential humiliation to justify multiple suicide attempts.) In fact, I can't think of a single movie where teenagers have to take the bus everywhere.

I think this explains a lot more about the world than we care to admit. When you're a kid, forming your first impression of how the world works, you're watching movies and TV shows full of people you're supposed to identify with. But they invariably have far more mobility and autonomy than you do. What's missing is the boredom. They seem to be always able to go where the action is, and get there before it's over. They don't have to spend two hours and three transfers taking transit to their friends' houses, and they don't have to duck out of the school dance halfway through Stairway To Heaven because the last bus is at 12:45. So you spend your first four years as a non-child wondering why your life sucks, and no one can quite explain why.

By the time you're sixteen, you've figured it out: North America is designed for the exclusive enjoyment of people with the health and wealth required to own and operate a vehicle. No wonder, when hard times hit, people are more likely to give up their homes and live in their cars than vice versa.

In this respect, Back To The Future faces the teenage mobility quandary more honestly than most films. Access to the family car is make-or-break for Marty's personal life, and when that car gets totalled he's up the proverbial creek.

Faced with the same fecal burrito as every real-life suburban teenager physically stranded in his elders' version of the American Dream, Marty's next-best option is... suicidally dangerous skateboard stunts in rush-hour traffic!

Maybe, like his grandfather suggests, he's just an idiot. (After all, he did need to be told that Riverside Drive in his hometown must be located next to the river!) But I think it's more basic than that. I don't know a single teenager who, faced with marooning in some Bungaloid Acres subdivision, wouldn't gladly sell his left kidney to Satan for an alternative--any alternative.

So it's significant that the top of Marty's big wish list is that shiny new Toyota 4x4. The definitive sign, once he's returned to 1985, that he's changed history is that he now owns one.

I once heard a critic chalk this up to that old 1980's materialism (dreadfully passé and dated, to hear him say it--yeah, like we're all a bunch of burlap-wearing monks now.)

But I think it really resonates with teenagers. It's like, "Well, I changed the past... my dad is no longer a coward and a failure, my mom is no longer an alcoholic and the meathead who tormented them both is now a neutered little lapdog. That's nice but the important thing is that I now have full access to the world around me!"

In any case, even before he goes back, Marty has it comparatively easy. According to the road sign in 1955, the site of his future home is a mere 2 miles from Hill Valley proper. He can walk there in about 45 minutes if he has to. Most suburban kids in 2010 (or in 1985 for that matter) should be so lucky.

But technological progress will make things worse by 2015.

"Where we're going, we don't need roads!" 2015 Hill Valley is a kitchy techno-utopian future right out of Popular Mechanics. The most noticeable change is the profusion of flying cars. Finally--oh, God, finally!--traffic jams are a thing of the past. Goldie Wilson III flat-out tells us so on his animated jumbotron ad.

And yet five minutes later, we learn that the skyway out to the future McFly home in Hilldale is jammed with rush-hour traffic!

It's actually so bad that it's dark by the time they get there.

So there it is, the lesson that some of the smartest people on the planet have spent a hundred years and billions of dollars failing to learn: No matter how advanced your technology and infrastructure, it still somehow takes 45 minutes to get across town. The only thing that changes is how big "town" becomes, how much it costs to build and maintain that system, and (presumably) how crummy and inaccessible the world becomes when you don't have a flying car.

To be continued...

Back To The Future: A City Planner's Perspective. (Part One.)

A former student of mine recently emailed me to ask what had driven me to choose city planning as a career.

I told her about car dependency and its effect on the environment; the fact that the spaces we build and live in have a profound effect on our health and happiness and ability to deal with the world; and the fact that after living in three major cities and working in a half-dozen more, I had started to get some very definite ideas about what worked and what didn't.

What I left out is that I am a huge Back To The Future geek.

When the time-travel fantasy came out in the summer of 1985, I was so blown away that I went back to see it three days in a row. Twenty-six years later I've probably watched it a hundred times; I still find stuff in it that I didn't notice before.

And much of its appeal comes from its setting, the fictional town of Hill Valley, California. Over the course of the trilogy, we get to see Hill Valley in no less than five distinct time periods. Starting from its "current" incarnation in 1985, we see the same places in 1955, 1885, a parallel-nightmare-Pottersville version of 1985, and finally the impossibly far-flung future of 2015.

The town is more than a setting; in many ways it's the central character of the series. I wonder if there's anyone my age or younger in the planning profession who hasn't been influenced in it; who had the place-making bug stuck in their ear first by watching Hill Valley change through past, present and future.

At least I hope they were. 'Cause if they're getting their ideas from Star Wars we're all in big fat trouble...

This series of posts looks at the Back To The Future trilogy from a city planning geek's perspective. It is liberally sprinkled with frame-grabs from the films; these frames are copyright Universal Pictures and are used here on the basis of fair use, for purposes of commentary.

Part 1: Doc Brown's Lab

The first film opens in 1985 in the laboratory of Dr. Emmett Brown, a mad scientist with a clock obsession. We're not sure where this lab is, exactly. A framed newspaper clipping informs us that Doc's house burned down at some point, the land sold to developers. It's not clear when, exactly, but the clipping is yellow enough that it was probably awhile ago.

It looks like Doc has been living here in his lab for quite some time. But where is it? Where does a scientist go to lease laboratory space in a small town anyway? (A question that presumably dogs small-town mad scientists all over America. You may know how to build an eighth-dimensional balonium fraculator but try getting that past the zoning board...)

When Marty emerges from the building, we see that it is a run-down, single-storey structure at the back of a Burger King parking lot on a suburban commercial strip.

Anyone who's ever dealt with a suburban commercial chain-store developer knows their mulish refusal to work around anything that's already there, especially some crummy old shed. So what's the deal?

Finding himself stranded in the fifties, Marty looks up Doc Brown, who in 1955 lives somewhere called Riverside Drive. He's never heard of Riverside Drive; asking for directions, he learns that it's the street he knows in 1985 as John F. Kennedy Drive.

So he goes there to find a beautiful, graceful Arts and Crafts mansion on a manicured lot with a detached garage or carriage house. The garage looks familiar....

It's Doc Brown's lab from 1985! Suddenly the whole site is thrown into context. When Doc Brown's house burned down, he moved into his garage and sold the surrounding land to developers, who went on to scrape the site bare and plop down parking lots, burger huts and gas stations all around the garage parcel. Riverside Drive has evolved bit by bit into a suburban commercial wasteland renamed John F. Kennedy Drive. It's taken a mere thirty years for this.. to turn into this: It's Robert Crumb's A Short History of America come to life, and our first hint that Hill Valley in 1985 actually sucks pretty hard. It says a lot about how well the film is set up that we are able to believe that Marty really wants to get back to 1985. That Jennifer Parker must really be something! The garage is one of those leftover buildings that line first-wave suburban strips all over North America. These former roads out of town gradually attracted one commercial development after another, which are now mixed in with rundown old houses from the street's past life as a rural road. These roads are typically no good to anyone. Because of the old lot fabric and access rights, there are driveways every forty or fifty feet, making the strip next to useless for moving traffic. And yet the built environment is completely devoted to cars at the expense of any pedestrian amenity. Old buildings remain but it's not worth keeping them up so they are allowed to decrepitate while the owners wait for Dunkin' Donuts to show up and buy them out. The strip is just commercially viable enough to suck the life out of downtown, but not enough to succeed as an environment in its own right.

Since this strip used to be called Riverside Drive, it's a safe bet that it's located along the river. In a chronically water-starved state such as California, what should be the town's major amenity is instead occupied by the the loading docks and dumpsters of convenience stores and lube shops built with their backs to the river. All that asphalt is probably wreaking havoc with drainage, dumping torrents of greasy stormwater and Whopper wrappers into the Hill River every time it rains.

We don't get to see this part of town in 2015. That's probably a good thing. In the real-life 2015, the urban boundary will have grown beyond even the old rural fringe. City Council after City Council will have spent a couple of stealth bombers' worth of tax money tackling the endless traffic snarl, upgrading John F. Kennedy Drive to as many lanes as it can hold. But you can't stop progress, and JFK won't be able to compete with new greenfield sites with more convenient traffic geometry out off the Interstate. A lot of this strip will be practically abandoned to pawn shops, payday loan agents and other sunset uses, while the retail and fast-food action migrates to Shonash Corners power center. When that day comes, Doc Brown's lab will probably still be there, used by his 21st-century counterpart to brew crystal meth.

Oh, and one more point about Doc's lab. The address in 1955 is 1640 Riverside Drive...

but in 1985 the street number is 1646.

I always figured Doc probably torched his own house to get the money to fund his time machine. But I only just realized, on viewing number eleventy, that before he did that, he subdivided the property, establishing the garage with its own address, allowing him to keep his lab while selling off the rest of the land unencumbered.

To be continued...

Duluth, Minnesota, February 2008

Bibendum Lost

About five years ago, at a flea market in Paris I saw (but did not buy, stupid stupid stupid!) an old Michelin poster.

It’s from, I’m guessing, probably the late teens, and it’s an ad for some kind of rubber resistance-strap workout device. Apparently Michelin was at one time involved in the manufacture of various rubber products beyond tires.

It shows Bibendum, very jaunty and unconcerned—I think he’s even wearing a monocle—with his walking-stick hooked over his arm. And he’s simultaneously, effortlessly, punching and kicking a pair of very Gallic-looking muggers—kind of one fist going out sideways this way to hit one of them in the nose, the opposite leg striking out the other way to nail the other. Paf! Paf! A Belle Epoque Charles Atlas ad.

I have since scoured the Internet and better poster shops everywhere, looking for a copy of this. No one else is aware of its existence. I’m starting to think I imagined the whole thing.

If anyone can direct me towards a print of this poster or (failing that) proof of its existence, I will be very grateful and reassured of my own sanity.

Mad Max

You need to be careful about attributing too much meaning to movies, especially big noisy action movies. Reading the cinematic tea leaves for deep relevance to the world of today is a mug's game, or at least a game for those poor souls who have opted to do graduate studies in film.

At the same time, part of what makes a movie work is how it taps on our familiar experience and resonates in the audience's mind. Any movie, if it's any good, is a little bit true--even if it's an over-the-top fantasy.

Idle Primate and I went out to see Mad Max recently. That's the first of George Miller's postapocalyptic trilogy set in the Australian outback and arguably the least iconic of the three. When people talk about a "Mad Max dystopia," they're usually referring to The Road Warrior, the second film in the trilogy, set after a nuclear war. That's a very simple world--rampaging motorized gangs of punk rock mutants in a completely lawless post-nuclear wasteland, where civilization is clearly and indisputably dead and gone.

Mad Max is more interesting in that it takes place while things are falling apart. It's not post-apocalyptic so much as... well, I guess pre-post-apocalyptic is the best word. (Which technically should just be "apocalyptic" but it's not really that either, because apocalypse suggests a clear and sudden transition and that's not really what's going on here.)

Max and the other good guys are highway-patrol cops, chasing down the first generation of the emerging road gangs that will have completely taken over by the time we get to The Road Warrior. It's clear that the police force is on its last legs as a civic institution; the cops themselves are starting to look and behave like just another (albeit relavitely benign) gang operating out of the trashed-out remains of the Halls of Justice.

But what's striking is that no one seems to think the world has ended. Notwithstanding the obvious failure of major institutions that is underway, a good chunk of the movie involves Max and his Sears-catalog family piling into the station wagon and going on a pleasant road trip, even though we know those roads are full of biker gangs. The bikers themselves are kind of goofy and clean-cut--a missing link, the last of the 1960's-style bikers, sort of a coelocanth-like specimen of pre-Altamonte Hell's Angel, from just before it split once and for all from the hippie genus and became something vicious and malignant. The kind of bikers you would imagine doing security for the Monkees.

At the same time, ambulances still come when you call them; lawyers still show up to get their clients out of jail; whiskey and hookers are still bought with money, not cans of Spam.

So the film and its characters exist in this odd space of apocalypse denial. In this respect Mad Max is a much more realistic film than The Road Warrior.

The big problem I have with survivalists and hard-core doomers is not that they anticipate some serious shit going down; it's that they seem to expect and even hope for a very clear-cut situation to emerge afterwards, where life is a matter of having lots of guns and being willing to use them. Where all complications of society, rules, expectations and having to deal with other people are swept away, and where life--if nasty, brutish and short--is at least freed from bullshit.

But as we've seen in Russia and Afghanistan and even the late Roman/early Frankish period, civilizations don't collapse that neatly. There is never any clear-cut signal that says, "NOW it is necessary and okay to quit mailing out resumes, pick up a machine gun and start marauding." You can lose and lose and lose some more--retirement plans, public schools, the rule of law--and yet that blessed state of nature never seems to come. The survivalists and Tea Partiers are bound to be disappointed. Just what does someone have to do to get a Hobbesian war of all against all going around here, anyway!

Of course, in Mad Max, the title character gets just that signal. Something Changes Forever and the hero is freed from all obligation to the old world, freed to become the Road Warrior.

It's only a movie, guys.

What's really interesting is how plausible even the implausibilities are. In this crumbling world, where even the police station looks like a trashed-out squat, the roads are still being maintained with beautiful smooth asphalt, well enough to drive on at eighty miles an hour. Absurd on the surface of it; roads are fragile and take an insane amount of effort and coordination to keep functional at all, and in a general center-not-holding-things-falling-apart those roads should turn into cowpaths right quick. Except that in real life, while civic institutions such as schools and city halls and libraries have to close due to collapsed tax bases, the half-assed thrashing of governments trying to jumpstart the economy is largely directed towards road building. Suddenly Mad Max seems eerily prescient.

Getting ready to make a mess!

So this weekend I've started looking into what's involved in this learn-to-make-stuff thing.

Something I've been wanting to do for some time now is to build some bicimaquinas. The word is Spanish and was coined by a group called Mayapedal in Guatemala. They take donated bicycles and carve them up, modify them and put them back together to make stationary pedal-powered machines. So far they've designed and built a blender, a corn grinder, a water pump and a number of other useful devices that make life a hell of a lot easier when you live somewhere without a reliable, affordable electricity supply.

Depending on who you ask, that might include a lot of us in the next few decades.

Even if you're not of an apocalyptic bent, there's a lot to love about these things. We're surrounded by clever technology that lets us imagine we're really in charge of the universe, but an awful lot of it doesn't work at all unless we keep feeding it some form of concentrated fossil sunlight.

Bicycles are sort of different; they take the power output of a human being (up to 300-400 watts in short bursts, more like 75 watts over long periods of time) and strip away as much friction as possible, allowing us to get the most work done with the least effort. It's a truly clever invention, an elegant solution to a persistent problem that dogs every animal on the planet, i.e. moving around without blowing your calorie budget. It's an honest invention that doesn't rely on a geological trust fund to work its apparent magic. In this respect it's a much bigger achievement than a car or an airplane or a moon shot.

(Let's leave aside for the moment that making replacement parts for bicycles itself depends on an industrial system that may or may not be able to function, even at a drastically reduced level, on the available renewable energy sources. Someday even bicimaquinas might not be viable. But in the meantime...)

What I also like about the bicimaquina concept is that, even for us pudgy and comfortable first-worlders, it deals with some of our current problems as well as our future ones. Leave aside the whole issue of reducing energy consumption for environmental reasons. Right now we've got labour-saving machines doing a lot of our physical work for us, while we go to gyms to work out on different machines whose purpose is to help us burn off extra calories while doing no useful work.

The Dutch cheapskate in me finds this objectionable.

So I'm gonna start with bicimaquinas because, of all the greasy, dirty, hands-onny get-stuff-doney crafts, bike repair is the one at which I am least inept. I've actually got a decent grasp of how bicycles work, though I haven't actually worked on one in years. So there's something to start with.

I think eventually I'd like to build a pedal-powered washing machine. Something like that would give you a good workout over the course of half an hour or so and get something done that, frankly, I tend to avoid. (Of course I tend to avoid exercise too...)

But for now I think the first project will be a stationary stand to mount a bike frame on--the power plant for whatever other devices I then decide to hook up to it.

Gonna have to learn how to weld...

Energy Intensity of Urban and Intercity Passenger Modes

Here are some more charts showing the energy intensity of various travel modes. The data comes from

Gagnon, Luc. Comparaison des options énergétiques: Options de transport. Hydro-Quebec. 2008.

I built these charts using the data in Gagnon's paper. (Actually, he had some charts in there as well; they were really good and look a lot like these. But they were in French, plus they were in PDF format, which often gives weird results when you swipe an image for, say, a PowerPoint presentation for a class you're teaching.)

If you want to make a point on energy and transport options to an English-speaking audience, feel free to use mine.