Roll out of bed tomorrow at 5 a.m. and drive around your city. Notice anything odd? How about the fact that the Starbucks and YMCAs are open--and full of people--and that traffic is already knotting on the freeway. Turn on the TV at home and you'll notice that the local news starts at 5. Go out a little later and you'll find newspapers on the driveways at 5:30, hair salons open at 5:45, and day care centers accepting children at 6:30. Fast-forward to the evening and you'll find in New York that Broadway shows open at 7 on Tuesday evenings rather than 8, and restaurants that once were open on weeknights until 1:30 a.m. now close at 11:30. What's going on? As a nation, we're getting up earlier and going to bed by 10. About 40 percent of men and 30 percent of women now wake before 6 a.m., double the percentage of 30 years ago. "The last time so much of the population awoke so early, some experts speculate, was the farming era of the 1800s, and then mainly in the summer months," the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote recently. Why are we getting up so early? We work harder and longer than previous generations, and families are pushing activities such as doing housework, running errands and exercising at the health club into the early morning hours. But sprawl plays a role, too. People get up early to beat the traffic. It isn't working, though. In 1982, the Philadelphia area's morning and evening rush hours lasted four hours. Now they're seven hours. "We start to see volume on roadways pick up at 5 a.m.," said one official with a traffic reporting service. Footnote: In 1981, a TV station introduced Philadelphia's first early morning news show, at 6:30 a.m. "Everybody said nobody would watch," a station official remembers. Today, four TV stations have newscasts starting at 5 a.m. and another has a show starting at 5:30 a.m.
One simple solution to the problem of sprawl is to require that every new home be built on, say, five or 10 acres of land. Surely that should be enough to force even the most determined homebuilder back to the city, right? Wrong, says the Washington Post, which has studied the effects of land-use restrictions in suburban Washington, D.C. Since 1980, the paper reports, one county after another in Maryland and Virginia has designated large areas as "rural reserves," with requirements that houses be situated on five to 25 acres of land. Result: Sprawl has jumped over these places, causing long commutes to become marathon treks. Today, people drive to D.C. from as far away as West Virginia. Worse, the "protected" land is being developed anyway. Rather than townhouses or cul-de-sacs, the rural reserves have $700,000 "mini-estates." Says one high-tech worker who commutes from West Virginia, "We laugh because we have to drive by the snobs just to get to work. These houses are on 10-acre or 20-acre lots. Who can afford that?" If this simple-minded approach to curbing sprawl doesn't work, surely the counties are eager to drop the restrictions, right? Wrong again. True, the rural-reserve approach is a disaster for the region, but it can be quite successful for individual counties. That's because by welcoming the mini-estates and sending the townhouses even farther out, a county can get just the development it wants-- fashionable, expensive and without too many kids for the local schools to educate.