Street Improvement Act Of 1911
Surrendering Our Cities to Cars Would Be a Celebrated Blunder
Communities shouldn't give back the street space that they reclaimed during the pandemic.
Amongst the destruction caused past the pandemic, an urban awakening occurred. It would have been international news on its ain, had the health crisis not overshadowed it. As businesses and offices closed their doors, cities opened their streets for residents and restaurants hungry for space and socially afar outdoor activity—a radical transformation of asphalt into active places at an astonishing scale and step. The revival of street life revealed how much of their ain vitality cities had conceded to cars. Simply this sudden flowering is at present in peril as traffic returns.
In April 2020, rush-hour traffic in the Us dropped past three-quarters. A renaissance of wheel riding began in hundreds of cities around the globe, supported past new temporary lanes and pedestrian-priority street redesigns in places such as Austin, Boston, and Oakland. City officials converted hundreds of streets and private vehicular lanes and thousands of parking spaces in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., for improve uses. Local residents dusted off patio and camping chairs and fix them out in the street to play bingo. People strolled and spoke with neighbors, assumed lotus position at mid-block yoga sessions, played pickleball, danced, or simply watched the world go by on roadbeds previously reserved for cars.
When restaurants reopened, dining al fresco became the safest way for patrons to support them and their employees. New York City lone reclaimed 10,000 parking spaces for outdoor seating—offering a lifeline to thousands of restaurants. San Francisco's Valencia Street in the Mission District became a weekend restaurant street. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot expanded a successful summertime dining-streets program including more than 300 restaurants into the colder seasons and announced a competition to blueprint structures to go on diners condom and warm.
The auto-complimentary-streets trend spread far beyond the usual list of progressive cities. Among those reallocating space for biking, walking, or outdoor drinking and dining were Boise, Idaho; Salt Lake Metropolis; Tampa, Florida; Milwaukee; Nashville; and Louisville, Kentucky. A survey of 130 American mayors found that 92 percent of cities had created some kind of outdoor-dining programme by concluding summertime.
Although New York, Seattle, and other cities are making recent street-level changes permanent, others, including San Diego, are treating last year'southward motorcar-free streets equally but a pandemic fling. Many others, such equally D.C., announced poised to let some or all of last year'southward improvements lapse.
For cities to return to the pre-pandemic status quo would be a historic corrigendum. Concluding twelvemonth'due south innovations provided a road map—no pun intended—for undoing the planning sins of the 20th century. With traffic congestion however well below normal levels, and with the memory of car-free streets still fresh, cities tin can continue reducing their dependence on individual vehicle ownership by making their streets more attractive and accessible to people without cars. Of the 130 mayors interviewed last summer by Boston Academy researchers, nearly half said they had airtight some roads to through traffic, and about a third had shut some roads to all car traffic. Sadly, only a handful intended to brand the changes permanent. A majority, the survey found, "accept non embraced the pandemic as an opportunity to fundamentally reimagine how they allocate infinite in the public realm, particularly roadways."
Americans have paid dearly for a transportation system that didn't work well before the pandemic. Even in many of the country'due south densest cities, roads prioritize personal cars, trucks, and SUVs, making car ownership a virtual requirement to reach most jobs and services. Motor-vehicle emissions are the leading crusade of American air pollution and a major correspondent to climatic change. Despite more than a century of building new and wider roads, traffic congestion had steadily increased in cities before the pandemic, and many people don't have enough choices for getting around. Twoscore-five percent of Americans lack access to public transportation, and 9 percent of households lack access to a car. Even in highly urbanized areas, complete sidewalk networks and acceptable crossings for pedestrians are far from a given. In many areas, roadways are designed and then exclusively for motor vehicles that the idea of riding a bike is viewed equally reckless.
In role considering of these planning choices, every year since World War 2 more xxx,000 people accept died on American roads. In a grim irony, last year's plunge in traffic congestion turned streets into deadly speedways, causing 42,000 people to lose their life in a motor-vehicle crash—the highest level in xiii years and the largest ane-year increase in most a century.
Especially in cities, the most effective way to prevent these dangers is through roadway redesigns that reduce car speeding and promote other ways of getting effectually. Instead, local governments and tech companies alike are counting on smarter cars to miraculously reduce traffic congestion and roadside casualties. For some time, 2020 had been hyped equally the year of driverless cars, expected to usher in a new era of safe, robotically enabled mobility. But that promise remains an elusive fantasy in 2021, and Americans can't pin our hopes on smarter cars to reverse the problems caused by their internal-combustion ancestors. When the pandemic finally eases, many cities volition be left with battered transit systems, a renewed influx of traditional cars, and the same roadways—an outcome that few, if whatever, U.Due south. cities are doing plenty to prevent.
The Biden administration tin can help to some degree, and it is saying the right things. "You should not have to ain a car to prosper in this country," Transportation Secretarial assistant Pete Buttigieg tweeted concluding calendar month, "no thing what kind of customs you're living in." President Joe Biden recently unveiled a $two trillion infrastructure plan that would double federal spending on public transportation systems in cities, to $85 billion, and devote another $twenty billion to improving roadway safety. It besides includes $xx billion to undo the damage highways have inflicted on cities, especially in Black neighborhoods.
Biden and Buttigieg tin can do another major service for cities: fix the federal government'due south cabalistic, outdated, absurdly car-axial yet hugely influential street-blueprint transmission, which state and local transportation planners use to make a host of decisions—how wide roadway lanes should be, how bicycle lanes should exist marked, where to install crosswalks and traffic signals. Currently under revision, the guide (with the aptly cumbersome proper name "Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices") focuses far more than on maintaining motorcar traffic flow than on facilitating transit or assisting pedestrians and cyclists, and it is silent on the kind of mixed-utilize streets that emerged during the pandemic.
Making pandemic-era bike lanes and outdoor-dining areas permanent fixtures should non require a global cataclysm, only cities outside the United States have taken far improve advantage of the opportunity than their American counterparts. Having converted the Rue de Rivoli into a car-free corridor during the height of the pandemic, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo this twelvemonth announced a $300 million program to remake the fabled Champs-Élysées into an "extraordinary garden" of pedestrian-focused infinite, and reclaim half of the city'southward 140,000 parking spaces.
To serve their residents well, U.S. cities tin can't just return to the pre-pandemic norm. They need to come back more resilient, more sustainable, more economically connected, and more equitable. Reclaiming city streets from the domination of cars is never easy, but information technology will never exist easier than it is right now.
Street Improvement Act Of 1911,
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/cars-will-take-streets-back-unless-cities-act-quickly/618615/
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