HUFFINGTON
11.11.12
NO WAY OUT
paycheck, his eyes show the weight
of sadness and wounded pride.
“Sometimes, it hits me and I get
so depressed,” he says. “I’m like,
‘Man, what is happening?’ You
feel like you’re losing your mind.
I’ve got to do something. If I had
transport, I’d be back at work by
now. I know this.”
WHERE THE SKY IS BLUE
When Chattanooga Mayor Ron
Littlefield was growing up in the
1950s, his father worked in textile plants in mill towns in Georgia and Tennessee. Nearly all the
workers occupied modest homes
clustered near the factories.
“My father never drove” Littlefield says. “He would always walk
to work. We don’t build cities like
that anymore. Perhaps we should.”
As Littlefield, 66, forged his own
career as an urban planner, he
watched U.S. metropolitan areas
push out their boundaries. “Everybody wanted to live out in the
suburbs and have an acre or two,”
he says. “They wanted to be out
where the sky is blue and the grass
is green, with cul de sacs, and curvilinear streets and no sidewalks.”
Government enabled this development by constructing an arte-
rial system of roads and highways
that put the private automobile
at the center of life, yielding the
suburban sprawl that defines major metro areas from Phoenix to
Houston to Atlanta.
As people have come to live further apart from one another while
commuting greater distances to
their jobs, running public transit
systems has proven increasingly
challenging and expensive, requiring broader areas of coverage. At
the same time, economic inequality has separated many communities into two camps — those who
ONE IN 10 LOW-INCOME
RESIDENTS RELIES ON
SOME FORM OF PUBLIC
TRANSPORTATION TO
GET TO WORK.
can afford cars, and those who
depend upon buses and trains.
This is especially so in mediumsized cities such as Chattanooga,
whose metro area is home to
about 530,000 people, putting it
in the company of Modesto, Calif.,
and Jackson, Miss. In big, dense
cities such as New York and Chi-