Streetfight: Rewriting the Operating Code for City StreetsDRAFT
April 1, 2015By Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow
Introduction: Hidden in Plain Sight
The opportunities hidden in plain sight in every city; How NYC
changed; door opened with background Bloomberg and PlaNYCwithout
this impetus, nothing would have happened.
Chapter 1: Urban Legends
The mythology and legacies of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses;
Their competing philosophies in the continuum of other schools of
thought for streets and a personal view from the street; How New
York Citys streets came to be what they are today and how this
reveals how most cities tend to operate by inertia, tradition, and,
occasionally, out-of-date planning; Streets didnt just happen, they
happened by design.
Chapter 2: Density is Density
Cities are on the rise and where a majority of the earths
population live; The problems facing cities must be addressed
systematically. Leveraging density both for efficiency and
sustainability is more important than ever and cities need new
strategies; PlaNYC was the first attempt to unify the citys
departments under a comprehensive operating principle, drawing on
some of the best ideas from around the world (Will include examples
of global C40 cities implementing best practices); Outdated design
standards and emerging strategies to improve them.
Chapter 3: How to Read the Street
The anatomy of the street and the operating principles that led
to streets being built like highways; Learning to reading between
the lanes planners can find entire cities hidden on their streets.;
How commonly held theories about how streets work cause millions of
people to misunderstand and oppose efforts to improve them; The
promise and difficulties of pricing roads around the world; Lessons
learned from the battles over congestion pricing in NYC and around
the world.
Chapter 4: Follow the Footsteps
You can design a street to make it livable by watching how its
used; New York City examples illustrate how that use of a street
can be changed simply by applying paint and readily available
materials; Rewriting the code underlying streets and showing city
residents the power of the possible; Applying this approach and
using these tools in the transformation of Times Square; The
importance of data collection, the economic impact of these kinds
of projects and scalability for other cities. (Will include
discussion of sidewalks/wayfinding/view sheds)
Chapter 5: Bike Lanes and Their Discontents
What you see depends on how you get around; The story of the
Prospect Park West bike lane in New York City and its bikelash;
Howand whybike riding has sparked political and cultural
controversies around the world.
Chapter 6: Bike share: Leveraging the Power of the Street
Bike share systems are the binding receptor in transportation
networks, setting a new standard for convenience; By integrating
the transportation ecosystem, bike share explodes the demand for
transit and walking and provides the low-cost missing link for city
development; The experience of launching Citi Bike, the nations
largest bike share program, and bike share programs in other cities
(Portland, Los Angeles, NACTO cities).
Chapter 7: Transformative TransitThe future of transit is
already embedded in the streets of every city; How cities like
Medellin, Bogota ,Mexico City and New York, molded by geometric,
community and political realities.
Chapter 8: Blood on the Streets
Traffic deaths are the greatest unacknowledged public health
crisis in the world; Discussion of approach to traffic and what has
worked in other cities; Prescriptions for the future not just for
NYC but for other congested cities;Vision Zero and global safety
actions and ad campaigns.
Chapter 9: Measuring the Street
Measuring the impact of projects requires a forensic approach
beyond traffic volumes and travel times; Data solves the problem
not just of determining a projects impact but also how to
communicate that impact and winning support for similar programs
elsewhere. Discussion of similar results in other cities, including
Transport For London study on pedestrianization. REPURPOSE FOLLOW
THE LEADER;
Chapter 10: Signs and Dotted Lines
Parking signs, street signs, pedestrian signals and countdown
clocks. Streets are filled with a bewildering forest of components
that we barely notice and are at best misunderstood and ignored at
worst. This chapter looks at the irrational and contradictory
policies governing parking, the futility and confusion of signs and
signals, and how cities might be better off without any of
them.
Chapter 11: What We Talk About When We Talk About
Streets/Communicating Change
How planners and leaders frame changes to the street and win
public support can be is as important as the project itself, yet
planning schools arent good at teaching how to communicate change.
A look at the cardinal myths and fears that accompany any project
that improves streets and strategies for how to surmount them. A
closer discussion at how to negotiate the long game of public
opinion with the short game of media headlines. Chapter 12:
Conclude.
Final thoughts; Streets as small communities; A look at whats
next and examples from around the world; New innovations that will
lead to the next wave of change.
Introduction: A New Street Code
Every city has an underlying operating system, and no matter how
exotic the city, streets from Melbourne to Mumbai to Manhattan are
all similar and failing in the same way. Streets have been designed
to keep traffic moving but not to support the life alongside it.
Streets force city dwellers to make bad choices about how to get
around and discourage them from walking, stifling the kind of
varied and spontaneous street life that energizes the worlds
greatest cities and dragging down the local economies that would
otherwise thrive. Too many streets are inefficient and dangerous,
reflected in chronic congestion, chaotic streets and in 1.24 annual
million traffic deaths along 40 million miles of road worldwide.
Until relatively recently, there hasnt even been a commonly shared
vocabulary to name or describe these failures, leaving streets in a
kind of suspended animation for more than a half century despite
innovations that have revolutionized almost every other field.
Streets in cities around the world look virtually the same in their
utilitarian blandness and the underlying operation, danger and
economy of city streets remain as opaque and featureless as the
asphalt roadbed. People have forgotten what streets are for and
have little idea how they can be used or how powerful a force in
urban life they can be.
This book reveals the underlying source code for streets that
helped unlock New York Citys roads, sidewalks and the collective
space between buildings that is the filament of all cities. It also
demonstrates how to rewrite that code and alter your own citys
streetsan approach that is now spreading rapidly to city streets
around the world. After six years of the most radical restructuring
of a citys streets this side of master New York City planner Robert
Moses and his nemesis, Jane Jacobs, the patron saint for streets,
nearly a half-million pedestrians in New York City daily walk
across Times Square plazas atop former vehicle traffic lanes that
were changed overnight. Bicyclists ride safely in green lanes
painted along the curb where cars once parked on streets where
people feared to tread. Pedestrian-filled plazas bloom where scraps
of asphalt had lain dormant for decades. And, most importantly,
hundreds fewer New Yorkers die annually in traffic crashes.
But unlike the means used by Robert Moses, this revival of the
citys transportation network was accomplished without bulldozing a
single neighborhood or razing a single building. It was
cheapabsurdly cheapcompared with the billions of dollars spent
annually building new streetcar and light rail lines and
rehabilitating or replacing aging roads and bridges in American
cities. And it was fast, installed in days and weeks using
do-it-yourself and guerilla tactics: paint, planters, lights,
signs, signals and surplus stone. Overnight, centuries-old roads
turned into pedestrian oases atop space that had been there all
along.
The strategies, tactics and the fight were so extensive and so
effective in New York City they have implications for cities
globally. For the first time in history, as of 2010, the majority
of the worlds population lives in urban areas. By 2050, that number
is expected to grow to seven in 10. Citizens of the world have
become citizens of cities. But cities themselves are not prepared
for this urban reality. When it comes to streetcraftthe design,
diversification and balance of city streets, sidewalks and public
spacegovernments, developers, engineers, architects and the people
who live in cities have not caught up with the new road order.
Despite this historic demographic realignment, todays city
streets were built in different ages and barely serve the
long-outdated purposes they were originally designed for. Car-based
urban planning has built atop, around, over and through these
streets, adjusting for increases in population only by increasing
the scale of the already obsolete infrastructure. These
effortsbuilding new highways, widening streets and endlessly
sprawling the citys limitshave only multiplied the damage wrought
on city cores and smothered the very things that make them places
where people want to live: accessibility, convenience, diversity,
culture and immediacy. In turning streets into places to move cars
instead of people, theyve become places people dont want to go
unless they are in one.
From Ancient Rome to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the
New World, cities have always been the global cradles of culture,
technology and commerce, where historys most luminous minds and
civilizations converged and altered the course of history. But
little of this richness and creativity is reflected in the streets
of the worlds growing megalopolises, which are expanding faster
than its people are capable of consciously influencing. Elected
leaders, city planners and citizens have few expectations for how
city streets should perform, and without a clear understanding of
the scope of the problem, few cities have explicit goals to reduce
and eliminate serious traffic crashes, reduce congestion and
implement policies that make cities more walkable, more diverse and
discourage sprawl.
Streets are also cities social, political and commercial
arteries, and they can ascribe social status with famous
addressesPark Avenue, Champs-lyses, Lombard Street or Rodeo Driveor
mark political and identity boundaries like Falls Road in Belfast
and the segregated roads of the West Bank. Regardless of the wealth
or status of their inhabitants, city streets are inherently
democratizing public places. They continue to play critical roles
in democracies and the public life and transformative moments in
the history of people. Whether its Tiananmen Square, Mexico Citys
Zcalo the Bastille, Trafalgar Square, or Tahrir, Wenceslas or
Taksim squares, these spaces are where the life and history
happen.
No city so embodies the strengths and contradictions of urban
streets as New York City. A 19th-century street grid cut imposed
over pre-Colonial footpaths, Manhattans streets were maximized for
car space under a 20th-century city planning dogma. This change
grafted the motor vehicle and an idea of independent, suburban,
internal-combustion progress onto a city where millions of people
walk and ride subways and buses. Postwar New York was built for a
future that forgot its dense and efficient urban origins, and its
new, car-focused infrastructure became an obstacle for the future
that eventually arrived. Yet the most visible outcropping of this
problemtraffic, its danger, inefficiency and its uninviting,
overrun driving surfacehas become an invisible part of the
streetscape.
Invisible in this new road order are the people of New York and
every city. Every city resident is a pedestrian at some point in
the day. Any city whose streets invite people to walk, bike and sit
along them also inspires people to innovate, invest, spend money
and to move, love and remain in these cities. And regardless of
where you live or how you get around or how much you may detest
bike lanes, streets matter. They are the mortar that now holds most
of the worlds population together and they must be designed to
encourage walking and the street life, economy and culture that
they support. Global city dwellers are beginning to recognize the
potential of their city streets and, after seeing whats possible,
urgently want to reclaim them. They are slowly recognizing an unmet
hunger for livable, inviting public space. Parks, plazas, benches,
any place to sit down. Room to bike, walk and get around without
having to get somewhere. Many cities have embarked on significant
and headline-grabbing efforts to reclaim roads, bridges, tunnels
and rail rights-of-way and turning legacy hardware into the stuff
of urban dreamsparks and greenways, city idylls that provide room
to walk, bike and play in the middle of a city where a highway once
stood. Some cities have embarked on plans to build bikes into the
transportation network with bike lanes and bike share programs.
Tactical urbanists reclaim parking spaces for a day and calm
traffic through asphalt murals. They call them livable streets,
complete streets, sustainable streets, and they may be able to
rescue cities from the urban disaster that awaits if they do not
change course. Yet few of these strategies have been incorporated
into the way that cities operate from the street up. Traffic
planners and engineers still resort to outdated planning and
engineering manuals that prescribe wide lanes but narrow
imagination for creating quality streets and walkable urban places.
Even where the imagination exists and the political will is
aligned, the effort to make these overdue transformations can
quickly become a streetfight against the status quo. Its a daily
battle for the city planners of today to keep the next generation
from reverting back to claiming more road space for cars merely by
force of habit.
During an intense, six-year period under Mayor Michael
Bloomberg, New York City proved to itself, the nation and the world
that almost everything assumed how urban streets operate was wrong.
New approaches to public projects and to the data that documented
them turned global debates over public planning on their heads.
Real-world experience showed that reducing the number of lanes on a
street or closing them entirely didnt merely provide pedestrian
space and breathe new life into neighborhoods, it actually improved
traffic. And simply painting part of a street to make it into a
plaza or bus lane not only made the street safer, it also improved
traffic and increased both pedestrian foot traffic and the bottom
lines of local businesses.
Its no coincidence that the American city with the tallest
buildings, the most people, the most iconic landmarks and
larger-than-life public figures would embrace such an intense and a
high-profile reshuffling of its streets. But while this
counterintuitive approach enjoyed widespread support and improbably
high poll numbers, it also enraged a small but vocal army of
opponents. They were a mix of people who detested Mayor Bloomberg
and those skeptical of anything environmental, healthy or vaguely
French. They denounced the changes and politicized the very data
that should have transcended the passions surrounding these
changes.
Street life got better by virtually every measure, but it was
the pushback to this approach that got the biggest headlines. When
you push the status quo, pushes back, hard. Everyone likes to watch
a good fight. And this was a streetfight: a politically bloody and
ripped-from-the-tabloids streetfight. I was deeply embedded in that
streetfightright in the middle of it, in fact. Call me biased, call
me crazymany people havebut I am convinced that the fight to wrest
back New York Citys streets holds lessons for every urban areas,
and that the future of cities depends on it.
###
My six-year, seven-month, 18-day tenure as New York City
transportation commissioner started with a meeting at New York
Citys at City Hall, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, in early
spring 2007.
Why do you want to be traffic commissioner? the 108th Mayor of
New York City asked me.
It was his first question and my first time even in a room with
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire entrepreneur-turned-mayor,
sitting with six of his deputies arrayed Knights-of-Camelot-style
across the expanse of an immense, round table. Six years into his
administration and two years into his second and term, I realized
that it wasnt clear to me that daynor to many outside that roomwho
or what he was looking for in a top transportation official during
his remaining 31 months in office.
Despite Bloombergs phrasing, the question he asked wasnt a test.
Its a common misconception that the commissioners job is limited to
managing traffic congestion.
I dont want to be the traffic commissioner, I said. I want to be
transportation commissioner.
Bloomberg said nothing. No one jumped in to break the tension.
Well, at least I got to meet the mayor, I consoled myself,
confident that I had just blown the interview.
The administration of Michael Bloomberg had a global reputation
for innovation and a by-the-numbers-please approach to governance.
This was the Mayor who had created the 311 system allowing
residents to dial one number to obtain virtually any city service.
He had banned smoking in bars and trans fats from
restaurantstrifles compared to his overseeing dramatic reductions
in crime and wresting of control over city schools from a
notoriously ineffective Board of Education. But at the time there
was no transportation leg to his legacys table, no initiative, goal
or accomplishment on a scale even approaching his other
achievements.Fresh from my traffic gaffe, I pushed ahead with my
priorities, unsure how theyd be received as I heaved them upon the
table like a gauntlet: I wanted to make New York Citys punch-line
buses work better. To make bike riding a real, safe transportation
option on New Yorks mean streets. To charge a toll for all people
who drive into Manhattan during rush hour.
These were far from mainstream transportation ideas but I
assumed that Team Camelot must have wanted to hear my pitch or they
wouldnt have asked me to the table in the first place. So I made it
plain: I wanted to change the transportation status quo in New York
City. Fifteen years earlier I was transportation advisor to Mayor
David Dinkins and since had worked under President Bill Clinton at
the Federal Transit Administration before leading the transit
practice of a major international transportation engineering firm.
My audience with Bloomberg told me that they werent just looking
for someone to ride out the rest of the term with little change or
controversy. They wanted someone who understood the basic
architecture of government and had transportation credentials, but
with a private-sector metabolism that thrived on ideas and
innovative approaches to problems.
Having already worked within the New York City Transportation
Department, I understood that it was in charge of so much more than
traffic. New York City has 6,300 miles of streets, 12,000 miles of
sidewalks, 1.3 million street signs, 12,000 intersections with
traffic signals, 300,000 streetlights, 788 bridges and the Staten
Island Ferry, moving 22 million people annually, and facilities to
make the signs and do the ironwork to hold together these streets,
sidewalks and bridges. The chief mission was managing the hardware
and responding to the daily emergencies that wreak havoc on them.
New York Citys DOT, with a headcount hovering around 4,500
employees, was larger than many transportation departments for
entire American states. Instead of rural roads and highways, New
Yorks portfolio contains some of the most valuable, dense and
contested real estate in the nation. Viewed through another lens,
DOT had control over more than just concrete, asphalt, steel and
striping lanes. These were the fundamental levers that govern a
public realm which, if applied slightly differently, could have
radically different impacts.
But judging by what the DOT had accomplished in the first six
years of Bloombergs administration, it wasnt clear what was
expected from that agency in the final two years. I didnt share
that sentiment with the committee. Looking at the dour faces around
the table, I was certain that I had already bombed and even more
certain that the appointment would never happen. People dont
usually succeed by implying that prospective employers should have
done things differently or should go out in a blaze of glory.I
misjudged.
I would later discover that the reason there wasnt more palpable
enthusiasm that day was because my agenda was already settled law
with the committee. The crux of this city-altering approach was
being codified as we spoke into PlaNYCthe visionary, long-range
sustainability plan guided by Dan Doctoroff, then-deputy mayor for
economic development. PlaNYC was a detailed, 127-initiative
blueprint for urban sustainability unlike anything New York or any
big city had ever seen. It stated a goal of reducing carbon
emissions by 30% while improving the efficiency and quality of life
in New York City neighborhoods and business districts. It also took
the unusual step of laying the groundwork needed to accommodate the
one million more New Yorkers expected to live there by 2030, which
would have a profound impact on the operation and allocation of
resources of every city agencyand in particular how we designed and
used city streets. Strategies like buses, bike lanes, open space in
every neighborhood and using less energy and more sustainable
materials to achieve it. This new vision changed everything about
how New York would function. Other cities had started drafting
plans centered on a handful of long-range goals. But no other citys
vision embedded that approach into a code for all city agencies to
follow and support each other mutually, from transportation and
parks to housing and energy consumption and waste management. It
was also unprecedented in expecting all city agencies to work
together and not as independent fiefdoms run by strong-willed
personalities. All agencies were expected to pull in the same
direction that the mayor set, or there would be consequences.
PlaNYC was a new manual that we could use to rewrite the streets
and overcome the status quo myth that New York was
ungovernable.
This plan coincided closely with the priorities I had laid out
gleaned from 20 years in transportation at city, federal and
private levels. For Bloomberg, this made me the right person for
the right job at the right time. I would soon discover that
reanimating dormant streets and implementing the goals of PlaNYC
required an entirely new and relatively radical approach. Its not
enough to have a vision and specific goals for a city. The way to
achieve them is where the heart of change resides, and that change
is excruciatingly difficult.
City leaders, urban planners and engineers and the people that
they serve have been as hobbled as their streets by two opposite,
increasingly unproductive tendencies: Megaproject monomania, which
is still embraced by mayors and leaders who want to leave a mark
and do something during their tenures, versus a strategy of
neighborhood-based preservation and resistance not just to
neighborhood-destroying projects but to even necessary and modest
changes that would improve their streets. The future of our cities
has fallen between these cracks, remaining stagnant as governments
plan bigsometimes too bigand communities routinely oppose changes
in the status quo by thinking smallmaybe too small. What both
parties lack is the vocabulary to think beyond their dysfunctional
streets and identify the shared interest that would let them work
around their mutual distrust. I discovered that it was more
effective to work with local communities to put rapid-fire projects
in the ground in real time using materials on hand and then using
those projects as instruments to win support to expand this
approach than the traditional, municipal alternative: An exhaustive
attempt to achieve consensus on a strategy even when theres
consensus that the status quo isnt working. This approach can risk
years of indecision, inaction and paralysis by analysis to placate
the opposition of minorities that accompany any change to
streets.
This book pulls back the curtain on the battles fought to make
this approach succeed in one of the worlds greatest and toughest
cities. It shows where I succeeded and failed and how other cities
and communities and their leaders can learn from what we were able
to accomplish against almost total oddsand how. Overcoming even
obsolete thinking requires an entirely new vocabulary for streets
and it also requires new, counterintuitive strategies to win over a
skeptical city residents. For leaders, it demands the resolve,
courage and grit to withstand the slings and arrows required to do
things differently for the first time. Every community believes it
has every reason why changing the way that they use their streets
is impossible, impractical or just insane. I witnessed that
firsthand and determined that there is no end to the excuses for
inaction. But inaction is itself inexcusable and as our cities
grow, and leaders and the people they serve cannot accept streets
in their dysfunction without even attempting to change it.
More than policy or ideas, it is the practical experience and
execution of projects that provide the most valuable lessons for
any city. As Jerold Kayden at Harvards Graduate School of Design
observed, To plan is human, to implement, divine. Based on this
real-world practice and not ivory-tower or third-party idealism,
this book deconstructs, reassembles and reinvents the street,
inviting readers to view something that they experience every day
in ways they never imagined. We lay out a new road map to inspire
and empower city officials, planners and everyday city residents to
create these changes in cities around the world.
This new operating code for streets is already being translated
into projects in global cities, from pocket parks and plazas in
Mexico City and San Francisco to pedestrian-friendly road diets in
Los Angeles and Auckland to pocket parks in Buenos Aires and street
closures around the Coliseum in Rome. If it can happen in New York
City, according to the Sinatra model of transportation theory, it
can happen anywhere.
Ch. 1: Urban LegendsIn July, 2014, seven months after I stepped
down as transportation commissioner, a work team from the New York
Citys Department of Transportation added a footnote to Manhattans
urban history: Working with thermoplastic paint and concrete, the
crew striped and heat-stenciled a parking-protected bike path
directly in front of 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, the
former home of Jane Jacobs, the late urbanist and the patron saint
of city streets.
The design of the new bike path, running alongside the curb and
protected by the line of parked cars on the other side, wasnt new
to Manhattans streets. The new lane connected Hudson Street with an
existing bike path built six years earlier just north of Janes
three-story, red-brick home. When it first appeared in 2007, a
protected bike path was a foreign concept on American streets, one
that seemed to upset the balance of the street and viewed as an
enemy to traffic. By 2014, it was just another part of the
streetscape.
Janes Lane, in front of her former home at 555 Hudson Street,
Manhattan, arrived 53 years after the publication of The Death and
Life of Great American Cities. (Credit: Seth Solomonow)
Meanwhile, across town at 378 Broome Street in the SoHo
neighborhood, a tree planted by Jane Jacobs in 1962 in front of the
Church of the Most Holy Crucifix provides a reminder today of the
neighborhoods saved from master builder Robert Mosess wrecking ball
and the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Moses hoped the planned
expressway would whisk traffic from the Manhattan and Williamsburg
bridges to the Holland Tunnel along an elevated highway instead of
churning along local streets. Jane and her allies fought and
successfully defeated that plan, which would have dramatically
altered the Lower Manhattan streetscape and destroyed hundreds of
homes and businesses in the process. The tree endures today as a
monument to the power of neighborhood preservation and of local
resistance to bureaucratic overreach.
These stories and the battles between Jane Jacobs and Robert
Moses are part of a creation myth about modern New York and all
cities. In this almost Shakespearean epic, Moses is remembered as a
public works dictator answered to no authority but his own as he
force-engineered a Utopian, car-based future onto New York. Jane
offered an alternative vision of a future built to a human scale
instead of designed to move as many cars as possible. Neither
version of these caricatures captures the full extent of their
impact on cities and how they should be designed and whom they
should serve. And as the myth has evolved it hasnt always taught
the right lessons of how to make our streets safer and our cities
better.
A native of Scranton, Penn., Jane moved to Depression-era New
York City and emerged as the unlikely voice of mid-century
urbanism. Her path there was not the result of traditional
education but was sparked by her radicalization amid local
development politics in her adopted West Village neighborhood on
Hudson Street, where she and her husband moved during the 1940s.
Her signal work, 1961s The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Streets, was an urban revelation. Jane declared in accessible
language how a citys design can nourish or destroy the quality of
human life in cities. She blasted the planners of the first half of
the 20th century for being too quick to destroy old buildingsand
the neighborhoods with themin the name of progress and high-rise
buildings set back on superblocks in an attempt to evoke the
suburbs. Jane said that this approach grossly misunderstands how
city neighborhoods function and ignores the small things that
animate lifemost of which emanate from the street and buildings,
not from the grand designs of developers or urban planners.
Death and Life helped make armchair urbanists out of millions of
city dwellers, inspiring them to look at cities not as bleak, scary
and chaotic places, but as fascinating, complex networks of
neighborhoods sparked into life formed by their density and
diversity. As she wrote the manuscript for the book, Jane took her
primary inspiration not from engineering manuals and textbooks, but
by following the people she saw on the street beyond her
second-story window: The Ballet of Hudson Street. Along the
neighborhoods sidewalks and in the children, shopkeepers,
bohemians, meatpackers and longshoremen and filing through the
streets stores, pizza parlors and local watering holes, Jane saw
the story of the street. Cities are, by definition, full of
strangers, she said, and within a single block, one can encounter a
lifetime of characters and customs, giving citizens something they
otherwise would be able to get only by traveling.
Jane delighted in this spontaneity of her neighborhoods streets
and the details that comprised the life force of the neighborhood.
A well-functioning neighborhood city street, street has a little of
everything; shops, cafes, schools, libraries, recreation and
destinations that encourage walking day and night. Buildings hold
apartments but also neighborhoods shops, doctors offices and office
space. Having well-balanced street-level design activate the
sidewalks, inviting residents outside with their all-important eyes
on the street. When people occupy their streets and sidewalks, they
see each other and are seen. Even strangers look out for each
other, keeping the street safe and neighborhoods engaged and
connected.
Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they appear, Jane said,
sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a citys wealth of
public life may grow. (p. 71) I can think of no better summation of
street life, literally or metaphorically. While active street life
generates neighborliness, which is a critical form of social
wealth, its also good for business. Where communities are walkable
and where people are on the street, there is also public ordera
prerequisite for a safe and vibrant citiesand there is also foot
traffic that drives local merchants and that is sought after by new
residentsand is sought and supported by developers. Its as much
about urban economics as it is about quality of life.
Janes ideal human-scale neighborhood would have shorter city
blocks with varied building architecture and entrances close to the
sidewalk. The size of buildings is kept small to prioritize the
street-level experience, lest the dwellers in tower apartments set
hundreds of feet back from sidewalks lose their connection with the
energetic sidewalks and the ground-floor retail. From architecture
styles and building stock to sidewalk, block and building size and
the zoning allowing mixed uses, Jane showed how density was a citys
competitive advantage over suburbs, and that its design shouldnt be
left just to modern planners who were less interested in creating
street life than about designing something that looks impressive
when viewed from above.
There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city, Jane
wrote, people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we
must fit our plans. Instead of designing streets from afar and
focusing on cars, planners need only look to the street and follow
its use to find the solutions for its problems. To me, this way of
looking at streets provides the most relevant examples for modern
cities. What makes cities great is how their streets organize and
concentrate people to catalyze the magic in the city street.
Streets are the essential spaces where city dwellers combine, and
when people are closer together, it sparks and amplifies humanitys
greatest qualities. People interact and inspire each other,
generating the kinds of stories that dont happen in quite the same
way in suburban strip malls.
By closely observing how people are already using the
streetwhere they are crossing, where they gather and what places
they ignore and why, how fast the cars are walking, why or locals
gather in front of a corner storeone can interpret how the street
wants to be used. And just as any ecosystem thrives on
biodiversity, where one seemingly small element can have dramatic,
interconnected effect on everything else, so too do streets depend
on hidden-in-plain-sight components which, when out of balance, can
cause the entire system to fail. Street design is no idle or
aesthetic pursuit. Entire communities can be impacted by something
as simple as how many trees there are on the street and if theres a
place to grab some dinner.
Unfortunately, while Janes human-scale vision has rightly
analyzed urban ills and inspired generations of city lovers, many
of Janes own Village streets today are little changed and remain
stunted examples of what a human-scale street could be. As
inevitable as the new bike lane outside Janes former home may have
seemed to New Yorks increasing number of bike riders in 2013, new
and safe infrastructure for bikes and pedestrians was already
decades overdue in Greenwich Village by the time it arrived.
Neither Jane nor subsequent generations of like-minded allies and
progressive city planners succeeded in reversing or significantly
altering the existing footprint and impact of a century of
car-based planning, or found a way to embed this changed-based
urbanism into official city standards for street design so that it
doesnt continue. Jane herself observed that the protests and
community involvement that she was famous for, including banning
cars from Washington Square Park and defeating a Moses plan to
bisect the park with a road to connect Fifth Avenue and new homes
near LaGuardia Place, do not represent any reversal of the erosion
process of space already ceded to cars (p. 359). At most, she said,
they represent a stalemate.
New Yorks Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side and SoHo
neighborhoods are known for their packed and vibrant (narrow)
sidewalks and they are also some of New Yorks most desirable and
expensive neighborhoods. But the streets that run between the
sidewalksCanal Street, Sixth and Seventh avenues, Houston Street,
Broome and Varick streetshave remained sewers of traffic, as broken
and blighting in 2006 as they were when Jane left New York for a
new life in Toronto in 1968. Every day, endless streams of cars,
SUVs, service vans and box trucks lumber along these streets, often
as slow as a pedestrian and rarely ever as fast as a cyclist.
Meanwhile, the sidewalks along Prince and Spring streets are so
crowded that people jostle each other into the street. Jane
imagined a future of reclaiming streets and widening sidewalks that
had been sawed off to give more room to cars. Yet local community
gadflies in her own neighborhood, invoking preservationist
language, led fierce attacks on proposals in the 2000s for weekend
car-free street events weekends or to install bike lanes and bike
share.
Instead of launching an urban renaissance, Death and Life was
immediately followed by decades of the urban blight and
depopulation. Millions of mostly white city dwellers sought relief
from the costs, danger, poverty, stresses and the racial tensions
from cities to increasing distant suburbs. Combined with the loss
of industry and manufacturing within cities, this rapid
de-urbanization brought disinvestment as the municipal tax base
fled, starving transportation infrastructure and stranding
development. New Yorks West Side Highway, literally and
figuratively collapsing under its own obsolescence, was demolished
during the 1980s after a decade of plans to replace it foundered.
As of this writing, no new subway lines have opened in New York
City since World War II, a streak that the MTA is threatening to
end in 20TK with the opening of the first five stations of the
Second Avenue Subway. Big cities across the nation similarly found
themselves saddled with the legacy of massive road and bridge
networks that divided neighborhoods and streets more car-dependent,
drive-by corridors, unable to support the mix of uses that made the
streets rich and inviting places to begin with.
More than a half-century since Janes Death and Life, we still
recall the general lesson that cities are for people, but many city
residents have long since lost the plot. Jane led one of the
earliest in a series of nationwide highway revolts that erupted
during the 1960s and 1970s in dozens of cities in North America and
around the world. Local residents, empowered by social movements
they saw in their own cities, rejected plans for new urban highways
and their devastating impact on neighborhoods, the environment and
traffic, dozens of projects were scrapped, delayed or abandoned.
Despite Janes framing of the greater problems afflicting cities,
her greatest impact stopped at the highway off-ramp. Generations of
communities have remained focused exclusively on NIMBY fights over
what they dont want city streets to behighways, construction sites,
residential or retail complexeswhile forgetting what our streets
could be: dense, vibrant, inviting and changeable public
spaces.
The failure to change the way cities think about and design
their streets wasnt because Jane or any of the millions she
inspired were wrong about the economics of cities, real estate, or
werent thinking big enough about their streets. For decades, our
strategies to achieve them werent small enough. Urban dwellers may
have the vision but they still lack the specific conceptual
vocabulary and strategies to think small about their streets. More
and better space for pedestrians to walk or to stop. Sidewalks that
include benches and landscaped bioswales that capture rain runoff
to nourish sidewalk trees. Intersections that make it easier for
old and young people on foot to cross the street safely instead of
maximizing traffic volumes. An approach to street and sidewalk
design that treats the public realm as important spaces and sees as
an investment in them as investments in its economic wellbeing, not
merely in its quality-of-life. Instead, if a project isnt a
highway, a retail complex or a megaproject, planners and ordinary
citizens have no starting points to understand the world of the
possible for streets, reducing these would-be developments to
to-build-or-not-to-build proposals. Whats desperately needed today
is an expansive articulation of a small-scale, change-based vision
for cities combined with specific, street-level details that
planners can use to retrofit, redesign and rebalance streets and
sidewalks to support those who make the city vibrant: its people.
###
Like many New Yorkers Im passionate about New York City streets
but I didnt grow up wanting to be a transportation commissioner.
Still, my urban education started early, exploring the streets of
the city with my mom. She has always been a passionate New Yorker
with strong opinions about development, preservation and the
nuanced interplay between people on neighborhood streets. Wed be
caught up in a conversation about politics or current events and
shed constantly tell me to Look up, look up! at the buildings and
people who were the backdrop for our ramblings. Theres an old
saying that New Yorkers never look up, but they also never really
look down, at their streets. How many lanes are there? Why are
odd-numbered streets westbound and even numbered streets eastbound?
It was a great education and left a profound impact on how I viewed
the citys operating system of streets and bridges and their
importance for people. My Moms and my backyard was Washington
Square Park, just a few blocks from her house, and our
conversations often turned to Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, two
names forever entwined by the park:.
But I wanted be a lawyer and work on social justice issuesmore
Clarence Darrow than Jane Jacobs. I had been encouraged to go to
law school by Marion Wright Edelman, the visionary leader of the
Childrens Defense Fund, my first job out of college. After
finishing law school I worked at a law firm but it didnt take long
to realize that wasnt where my passion lay. As soon as I was
financially able, I left and was naturally drawn back to the
political work that I was involved in before law school.
I worked for the mayoral campaign of Dinkins campaign in 1989,
at a time when no one thought he could win. Ed Koch was seeking a
fourth term as mayor, and after 12 years most New Yorkers had
forgotten what life was like without him. The Dinkins campaign
headquarters was located in Times Square at Broadway and 43rd
Street, above a peep-show theater. Wed see women dressed in
feathers and boas, sequins and crowns riding up in the elevators we
shared with them. They definitely got off on a different floor.
Around campaign headquarters I saw political luminaries like Harold
Ickes, Ken Sunshine, Bill Lynch and Don Hazen. Future mayor Bill de
Blasio helped coordinate the volunteer division. It was a strong
team of people working on a shoestring budget.
Times Square circa 1989 was still in its raunchy era, with
derelicts and hustlers hanging along sidewalks lined with tchotchke
stores and adult theaters. Parents forced to walk through the
square with their families on the way to a Broadway show would put
a protective hand over their childs eyes. It wasnt a place youd
choose to go if you could avoid it, and it was certainly not the
cleaned-up Giuliani version that would come later, much less the
pedestrianized Times Square we have today. For lunch wed grab deli
sandwiches and bring them back to the office. There was nowhere and
no reason to sit outside. You would be careful walking on the side
streets after dark.
After Dinkins won but before he was sworn in as mayor, I
remember calling my Mom to talk about what city agency would be
good to work for under the new administration. I told her that I
wanted to do something that would have an impact and make a
difference in peoples lives every day. She waited a beat and said,
If you want to touch peoples lives every day, you have two choices:
sanitation or transportation. Maybe it was her background as a City
Hall reporter for the New York Post covering Mayor Koch that gave
her that insight, but she was right.
My career at DOT started work for Lou Riccio the transportation
commissioner Mayor Dinkins appointed, working as special council
for state and federal affairs. That was just when a new
transportation funding bill known as ISTEAwas being drafted, a bill
that would fundamentally change how transportation projects were
planned and funded. It reflected the late Sen. Daniel Patrick
Moynihans view that transportation decisions are best made at the
local level, rather than through federal dictates about how and
when funding from Washington could be used for road, bridge and
transit projects. It was a powerful new direction at the time. I
read the entire bill and became a kind of expert on how the rules
applied in the city. Shortly after, I was named director of the
mayors office of transportation, overseeing everything from
strategies to improve the already-doomed replacement Pennsylvania
Station, as well as improved access routes to the regions
difficult-to-reach airports.
Underground, the transit system had improved from the fiscal
meltdown of the 1970s and Gerald Ford famously telling New York to
Drop Dead, at least in Daily Newss translation of his refusal to
bail out the city. But even 15 years later, the system was still
starved for funding. Above ground, the citys bridge and road
infrastructure was in no better shape. A previous deputy
commissioner during Mayor Ed Koch administration, Gridlock Sam
Schwartz, sounded the alarm about the dire disrepair of the four
East River bridges, the backbone of New Yorks road system. Sam
helped generate awareness of just how badly the bridges had
deteriorated, to the point where disrepair had forced the city to
shut down the Williamsburg Bridge to replace corroded cables and
weathered steel and road components. The bill had come due after
years of neglect, requiring billions of dollars and years of
recovery projects just to bring them into a state of good
repair.
New Yorks streets were similarly decrepit, but that wasnt enough
to stop me from commuting to work downtown on the back of my
husband Marks bike. He clerked for a federal judge near City Hall.
We rode down Greenwich Street to my Worth Street office. I would
sit on the seat as he pedaled, standing and steering around pothole
minefields and an obstacle course of yellow taxis. The bike was a
one-speed silver cruiser we dubbed The Tank. You didnt see a lot of
bikes on the city streets at that time. There were no bike lanes to
speak of. Even ordinary street markings were hard to come by. It
was always a joyful ride, coasting down the street, holding onto
Marks waist. But it was dangerous. Seven hundred and one people
died in traffic crashes in New York City in 1990. Twenty of them
were cyclists.
Downtown Manhattan street life around this time amounted to
hotdog vendors and lunches eaten standing up. What public space
there was could be found in front of courthouses and official
buildings, grim and uninviting spaces likely to be occupied by
homeless people and the citys less-savory elements. Safety wasnt on
the agenda. The quality of street life wasnt on the agenda. Plazas
definitely werent on the agenda. The agenda was basic maintenance
and repair. The waterfront road along the Hudson River, the site of
the former West Side Highway near where I lived, was a jumble of
dilapidated piers and parking lots, and the way there was littered
with broken glass and crack bottles. There was no attention to the
way the streets looked or felt. New Yorkers were just desperately
hanging on, trying to survive, not thinking about how these
streetsthe greatest asset in one of the worlds most walkable
citiescould be used. Even then I was thinking how wasteful this was
and that New Yorks streets had more to offer.
###
When Robert Moses looked at New York Citys streets, sidewalks
and neighborhoods in the 1930s, he also saw a city struggling to
modernize but weighed down by the past. And more than anyone, Moses
had the means, the power and the motivation to do something about
it. Three decades after his death in 1981, Moses and his legacy
remain as complex as the city of New York itself. As Jane has
evolved into an almost saintly image of the local preservationist,
Moses remains the archetypal destroyer of neighborhoods and
caricature of institutional arrogance, as portrayed in Robert Caros
1972 Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography, The Power Broker: Robert
Moses and the Fall of New York. The devastating appraisal
documented how Moses relentlessly amassed political power and
consolidated regional agencies to become the citys areas master
builder, shaping New York Citys physical environment more than
anyone since the creation of the grid.
Enabled by successions of mayors and governors and fueled by
billions of federal dollars in Works Progress Administration and
Interstate Highway funds, Moses amassed as many as 12 directorships
and leadership positions over vital public works agencies,
including the New York City Parkway Authority to the Triborough
Bridge and Tunnel Authority to the state parks. The federal
government created massive public works programs to build new urban
roads and housing to replace the slum infrastructure of the 19th
century. Moses was first in line to provide these urban renewal
projects. With this seemingly limitless funding and control over
public planning, Moses from the 1930s through the 1960s completed
one of the most urban massive works agenda in urban history. The
almost incomprehensible list of projects that he moved from
planning to implementation included 17 parkways and 14 expressways
that ringed and connected the city in ways that were thought
impossible. It doubled the acreage of city parks, built Lincoln
Center and brought innumerable playgrounds and public pools and
public beaches where millions of New Yorkers who couldnt afford
summer homes or sleep-away camps could play or cool off during hot
summer days. Slum clearance was followed by the construction of
superblocks of vast symmetrical apartment towers surrounded by
tree-lined paths. They housed hundreds of thousands of middle-class
New Yorkers at Penn Station South, Washington Square Village and
Lenox Terrace and on the Lower East Side.
In his relentless push, Mosess projects also divided the city.
Armies of workers bulldozed swaths of entire neighborhoods of
Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, displacing hundreds of thousands
of people in the process. Caro and others would note that these
projects, notably the Cross-Bronx Expressway, disproportionately
impacted African-American and immigrant communities with little
political or cultural capital. Thousands of families were
dispossessed in this way, often with the promise that they would be
housed when reconstruction of new apartments was complete.
Meanwhile, the highways separated previously contiguous communities
and isolated others that were just hanging on.
Contrast these neighborhood-slicing projects with the aesthetic
and engineering marvels like the Verrazano-Narrows and Whitestone
bridges overseen by Moses, or contrast the grass-lined parkways
with the utilitarian, water-hugging multilane highways like the FDR
Drive, Shore Parkway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a section
of which is a four-tiered structure carved into the schist layers
of Brooklyn Heights. But in the end, this power proved to be far
from absolute. Moses proposed a road slicing through Washington
Square Park in the 1950s to grant motor vehicles easy access to new
residential developments south of the park. Jane and her allies
succeeded in halting the plan while also shutting the park to all
traffic.
The Power Broker remains required reading in schools, but
despite its damning critique, it would be simplistic to dismiss
Moses merely as a public works dictator. Like generations of
planners before him and since, Moses was shaped by the assumptions
of his era. He believed that nothing but bold action could help New
York City escape 19th century obsolescence and build atop it a new
and more prosperous city that could withstand the future. From
where Moses sat in the 1930s, that future was being driven by the
motor vehicle. Streets in Mosess era teemed with people, cars and
double-decker buses darting in every direction as streetcars rolled
along the avenues and elevated subways clanged overhead. Moses saw
New York City as a traffic management challenge that could be
solvedengineered, built and erected into order. And just as Baron
Haussman built a new Paris atop the ashes of the old, so Moses
believed that he wanted to achieve was more than just building
roads. Through a comprehensive urban renewal program supported by
local politicians and backed by billions in federal funds, Moses
was building a new city, an Empire of Progress for the common man
reaching from Staten Island across Long Island and through the
Bronx.
While Mosess successes as a builder are widely debated today, he
also prompted fierce opposition at the time to many road projects
from Long Island to Lower Manhattan. In this, he wasnt the first
city planner to prompt such an intense, polarizing response. New
Yorks earliest Transportation commissioners in 1808 started to
survey Manhattans patchwork of roads, farmland and waterways,
drafting right-angled streets to replace irregular foot- and
cow-paths. In this pre-grid status quo, property owners feared that
roads might be built through their land, and they strafed the
surveying commissioners with vegetables and menaced them with dogs
and threats of lawsuits.
Despite its opposition, the 19th-century grid plan instantly
rationalized the growing city. New crosstown streets measured 60
feet from building to building with 34 feet of roadbed bisecting
them while most north-south avenues were allotted 100 feet. New
York City grew rapidly through the 19th century, with the streets
growing choked with hawkers and vendors. Transportation planners
tried to build their way out of street chaos by building up. The
first elevated railway in New York City opened on Ninth Avenue in
1868, to be followed by many elevated structures that would join
the citys tall buildings to shroud streets in midday shadows and
noise. As buildings grew ever higher and streets teemed with more
people, carriages and streetcars in the late 19th century, planners
then tried to build their way out of congestion by building
downbelow ground. The first subway stations opened in 1904 as rail
companies started dismantling the remaining elevated rail
structures as noisy and blighting anachronisms.
The 20th century transportation innovations of subways and cars
helped accelerate population growth, and the citys population
doubled from 3.4 million in 1900 to 6.9 million in 1930. In 1910,
the subway moved 810 million passengers. By 1930, that number was 2
billion passengers. The streets of New York, already built for
omnibuses, horse-drawn carriages and streetcars, were more than
wide enough to accommodate the first motor cars, so long as people
got out of the way. Children playing in the street wen the way of
the horse carriage
The relatively high speeds and loud engines of automobiles and
the lack of a comprehensive traffic signs and signals only
amplified the streets bedlam. There were few rules and even less
experience in the new right-of-way and little margin of error. At
first, cars were seen as the invader on city streets and
pedestrians the innocents who started being run down in increasing
rapidity. In 1910, the first year that records were kept in New
York City, 332 people were killed in vehicle crashes. By 1929, that
number more than quadrupled to 1,360. But instead of four times the
outrage, city planners and engineers took a different tack,
building the city from the point of view of the motorist. Streets
were built wider, obstacles were removed and traffic signals became
the arbiter of when cars could stop or go. Pedestrians and playing
children, who barely a generation earlier mingled with horse carts
and vendors in the street, were confined once and for all to the
sidewalk and assigned the responsibility for their safety and to
stay clear of cars.
The Swiss-French modernist architect Le Corbusier in the early
20th century envisioned cities of wide streets arrayed in geometric
patterns and with populations concentrated in soaring towers and
pedestrians and cars segregated into tiers. This symmetrical and
distinctly futuristic design inspired planners looking to engineer
a rational course further away from the mixed-use chaos of the 19th
century street, believing that man and machine were species best
kept separated. But gone with these new street designs werent just
traffic conflicts but all of the complexities of the streetthe
messiness that Jane Jacobs saw as vital to the streets viability.
No street-level stores, no strolling-friendly sidewalks where
people could see others and be seen.
This futurist world was translated to New York City streets by
architect Harvey Wiley Corbett, who helped design Rockefeller
Center and many other Manhattan skyscrapers. Corbett yearned for a
Manhattan taller, more futuristic and crowded than others had dared
at the timea gothic, three-dimensional city that continues to
inspire film versions of what the future will look like. Corbetts
definition of the modern street was as foreboding and intimidating
as his renderings. Pedestrians are removed, from street level in
the first step to convert a street to modern times, allowing cars
[to] invade their former domain, he wrote. This wasnt seen as just
pro-car. It was assumed that by separating people from traffic, the
relative quiet and dedicated space would improve their lives.
Moses embraced this, thrilling in the engineering challenge and
in planning comprehensively at a citywide scale. He conceived of
interconnected tunnels, elevated highways and cloverleaf projects,
whose radii expanded as years passed. New Yorkers were equally
caught up in the excitement of remaking of the city by 1939, when
then-Parks Commissioner Moses helped bring the Worlds Fair to
Flushing Meadows Park in Queens. Thousands of visitors lined up to
view General Motors-sponsored Futurama exhibit, designed by Norman
Bel Geddes, the centerpiece of which was football-field-sized model
of the city of the future. Moses saw in the interconnected, almost
elegant metropolis as exactly the kind of urban utopia that New
York could be, with cars gliding effortlessly on wide roads around
and past tall buildings. Impressed by the Futurama display and
seeing how it amazed visitors, Moses would build models to awe his
political patrons, reporters and the public into supporting his own
projects.
Yet conspicuously missing from Moses models or architectural
renderings were any representations of people and the life that the
street was presumably being designed to encourage and support. Like
so much other planning, people were meant to make use of whatever
was left over on the street after space had been created for cars.
The City of the Futuredesigned to be viewed from above, built for
cars, a place where pedestrians were afterthoughtwasnt created by
accident. It was by design.
Forty years after the publication of The Power Broker, and 30
years after Mosess death, New York City historian Kenneth Jackson
and other historians have reevaluated the Mosess long-term impact.
While scorn is still heaped upon Moses, Jackson notes that his was
far from an original urban planning sin. Other cities couldnt build
enough roadsLos Angeles built 900 miles of highways and 21,000
miles of paved streets in the 20th Century, dwarfing New York City.
And despite the limitations of the road network and little new
transit added, public transportation reached the highest transit
ridership in 60 years and New York City thrived as never
before.
Whatever the cause of the New York turnaround, historian Kenneth
Jackson wrote, it would not have been possible without Robert
Moses. Moses left New York City far better equipped to grow and
thrive than the Depression-era husk that he had inherited, and
without his brazen and single-minded ability to complete projects,
Jackson said, Gotham would have lacked the wherewithal to adjust to
the demands of the modern world. (Robert Moses and the Modern City:
The Transformation of New York (Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson,
eds.)
Moses, believing he was helping the city he loved, was
apoplectic at the publication of the Power Broker, responding to
his biographer in a 1972 letter:
The current fiction is that any overnight ersatz bagel and lox
and boardwalk merchant, any down-to-earth commentator or barfly,
any busy housewife who gets her expertise from newspaper,
television radio, and telephone is ipso facto endowed to plan in
detail a huge metropolitan arterial complex good for a century.
Anyone in public works is bound to be a target for charges of
arbitrary administration and power broking leveled by critics who
never had responsibility for building anything I raise my stein to
the builder who can remove ghettos without moving people as I hail
the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs. Quoted in
Flint, Anthony (2009-07-23). Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs
Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City
(Kindle Locations 3420-3424). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle
Edition.
Though Moses did not mention Jane by name (nor was she mentioned
in The Power Broker), she seemed to fit the profile of the kind of
critics that Moses denounced. To Jane, Mosess highways didnt just
mean destruction of housing or some minor, local dislocation. He
proposed to demolish 416 buildings for the Lower Manhattan
Expressway. Those buildings were the homes for 2,200 families and
the 365 retail stores where they shopped and the 480 other
commercial establishments where locals worked or that otherwise
contributed to and defined the area. Flint, Anthony (2009-07-23).
Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master
Builder and Transformed the American City (Kindle Locations
2693-2694). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. This
wasnt breaking eggs, this was the destruction of a neighborhood and
the annulment of the very kind public life that Moses sought. Where
Moses saw slums that could only be replaced, not repaired, Jane saw
neighborhoods that already contained all the seeds and social
networks necessary for their own renewal. Uprooting thousands of
residents and small business tenants from Chinatown, SoHo and West
Village properties and raising a highway to move people more
efficiently from New Jersey to Brooklyn missed the people for the
streets.
Jane and the Village dedicated activists she organized with
ultimately succeeded in turning the politics against Moses and his
plan, bringing it to defeat in the late 1960s, followed by the
erosion of Mosess authority. Ultimately, what she stopped wasnt
just a highway through Lower Manhattan or Moses himself. She
stopped future generations of city residents from being powerless
at the hands of the leaders working on their behalf. Jane showed
that you didnt have to be a public engineer to know when a proposed
development endangers a community. Less clear today is if
communities have the tools to conceive of new ideas or to recognize
when a proposed change is good for a community. Judging by New York
Citys streets, we may not have figured out that one. Transportation
technologies have undergone multiple revolutions in innovation and
design. The modern automobile changed from a 1961 Chrysler Imperial
with its tail fins and curb-feelers to the 2016 Toyota Prius
hybrid, with nearly silent engines, air bags, anti-lock brakes and
GPS. Coins and tokens disappeared from buses and subways, countdown
clocks display how long the wait is for the next train. On Janes
streets, however, little has changed aside from the color of the
street signs. Between the many newly constructed buildings, the
spaces in-between, streets have fallen between the cracks. Until
very recently, theyve shown none of the inventive, bold spirit that
New Yorkers show in everything else they did.
As the Moses/Jacobs story has been told and retold over the last
four decades, Janes strategy of grassroots resistance has been
invoked in resistance to official ideasand celebrating them as a
victory, even if that victory is the status quo. Pedestrian-,
transit- and bike-friendly projects in dozens of cities from
Adelaide and Sydney to London, Toronto and New Orleans in recent
years have been regarded by residents with the same kind of fear
and suspicion usually reserved for proposals for multilane
highways. Speaking at public hearings, local residents and business
owners invoke Jane Jacobs-like language to fight Jane Jacobs-like
projects. They oppose plans for walkable neighborhoods and bike
lanes because of phantom fears that they might make streets more
dangerous, congest traffic, put local shops out of business or
erode a neighborhoods characteror property values. Even as cities
belatedly draft sustainability plans to address urban growth and
proposing more compact and efficient development, its
extraordinarily difficult politically and publically to make the
changes that these plans call for in the face of NIMBY opposition,
even when majorities of the general population support them.
I saw this firsthand in the backlash to a bike lane we installed
alongside a park in Brooklyn in 2009. A small number of residents
claimed that the lane made the street dangerous and eroded the
neighborhoods character. Pulling grassroots strategies from Jane
Jacobs, they collected their own data from video surveillance shot
from one residents penthouse apartment, the findings of which, they
claimed, showed that far fewer bike riders used the lane than
official counts. A lawsuit by the group alleged that the lane
violated rules that protect historical landmark districts and that
the project didnt conform to environmental regulations. Ill go into
more detail on that in Ch. TK.
In San Francisco, a single gadfly halted the citys entire
bike-lane-building program for four years, from 2006 to 2010,
citing bike lanes potential for unhealthy environmental impacts.
Invoking the California Environmental Quality Act, the litigant, a
dishwasher from county outside the Bay Area, waged a lengthy and
tenacious battle, forcing the city to declare in a 1,353-page
environmental review documentconducted over two and a half years at
a cost of $1 millionthat removing parking and driving lanes to
accommodate bikes wouldnt cause congestion and harmful health
effects of more pollution.
For me, the Moses/Jacobs lesson is the transformative impact
that transportation infrastructure has on city life. Retrofitting
our cities for the new urban age today will requires a Moses-like
reverse-engineering, with the next generation of city roads built
to accommodate pedestrians, bikes and buses safely and not just
single-occupancy vehicles and their diminishing returns on our
streets. Jane taught us the need for a more inclusive and humane
approach to development projects, and to build them to to human
scale and driven by a robust community process. Reversing atrophy
requires a change-based urbanism that shows short-term results that
can then be leveraged into creating new expectations and demand for
the kind of projects people are afraid to dream if.
Globally there is a rethinking of the city and its relationship
with its cars and its infrastructure, embraced by new generations
of transportation leaders and visionary mayors. On the largest
scale, highways in Madrid, Seoul and Rio are being torn down and
redesigned for pedestrian and recreational use. Pariss Plages and
the Promenade Plante and New York Citys High Line attract millions
of visitors to former rail rights-of way turned into parks. Cities
are remaking their cities with bus rapid transit networks instead
of massive rail projects. On the micro scale, cities like San
Francisco, Buenos Aires, Mexico City are creating pocket parks atop
former triangles of asphalt or reclaiming and activating forlorn
spaces beneath highways. These concepts have even been extended to
car-choked Atlantas BeltLine rail trail, and tactical urban
interventions in cities big and small to turn parking spaces into
cafes or into a mini park for a day. They are examples of urban
alchemy and a self-evident how-to converting outmoded
infrastructure into modern, public space that makes people want to
move to and stay in cities.
What is needed is to codify this approach so that it can be
adapted in cities around the world not just to repurpose highway
rights-of-way, but to reclaim and give new life to every street.
Its one thing to turn back a proposed developmenta new highway, a
convention center, a too-tall building or out-of-scale,
traffic-generating shopping mall. Its another thing to rewrite the
operating code of a street in favor of the people, places and
public transportation and replace the vestiges of last centurys
planning dogma that ignored the human experience on that
street.
Viewing Moses abundant roadbed through Janes idea of a
diversified street, you find limitless opportunities for an
aggressive, change-based urbanism. There are livable streets hidden
in plain sight on every street. Just because a street today has
five lanes of traffic doesnt mean that tomorrow it cant be
reprogrammed for another use that transforms that street. In fact,
it is because so much of our public space is paved that today we
have so much raw material to work with. In more and more cities
around the world, we must demand and embrace smaller-scale
interventions that can quickly and inexpensively reallocate space,
reinforcing denser neighborhoods with the power latent in our
streets. As cities grow, the next generation of eyes on the street
in front of Janes old home may be those of a bike rider in the new
bike lane.
Ch. 2: Density is Destiny
From fifteen hundred feet above, Mexico Citys traffic problems
seem to disappear. The view rom a helicopter in the hazy sky at
rush hour is of a city in slow motion. Pedestrians, buses, taxis
and cars inch along, barely perceptible along wide, endless
avenues. The only thing that seems to be moving are elevated metro
trains and rapid bus routes built along road medians, flanked on
both sides by columns of stopped cars.
From above, visible traces remain of the citys natural origins
and the 14th-century Aztecs who constructed settlements on an
island within Lake Texcoco. That lake was progressively drained and
paved over the centuries into what today we call Mexico City. In
the city center, Hernan Cortes and the Spaniards conquistadores
built Mexico Citys Cathedral at the Zocalo in the sixteenth century
using the stones from the Aztec temples they destroyed. Ever since,
the citys cathedrals and other ancient structures have slowly
retreated back into the clay earth, sinking and leaning, jostled by
frequent earthquakes. The network of canals and farming communities
at Xochimilco in the citys south provide a glimpse of what the
lush, ancient lake city might have looked like. The canal area is
protected by law from development but immediately beyond it roads
and seas of housing and roads immediately resume. At Tlalpan, one
of the citys major green spacesmore forest than parktwo gaps are
carved into the parks otherwise green oval like missing teeth. Once
forest itself, the gap in the northwest today is a Six Flags
amusement park. In the northeast, a gated residential development,
El Bosque, cuts into the northeast on a single road lined with
upscale condominiums whose entrance is guarded by security.
Along the citys periphery, poor, informal settlements containing
many migrants from other parts of the country have grown rapidly
for decades within environmentally preserved greenbelt areas that
over time prove no more resilient against development than Tlalpan.
One by one, these technically illegal communities have reached a
critical mass that force officials to recognize them as legitimate
municipal communities to be incorporated into the city and provide
the necessary infrastructureroads, power, street lights, water
mains and sewers. It is the antithesis of urban planning yet these
informal communities are one of the fastest growing parts of the
megalopolis that today encompasses more than 21 million people
spread over 573 square miles. Surrounded by mountains and
volcanoes, the Valley of Mexico forms a massive geologic bowl that
holds the city and the haze of the citys millions motor vehicle
emissions breathed in by 42 million lungs. But the greenbelt cant
hold back the sprawl of the city and once these green tracts are
absorbed, there is no bringing them back. After the helicopter
lands, it also becomes painfully obvious that the view of a city
moving in slow motion is no optical illusion. Traffic on the
streets of Mexico City barely moves.
The problem in Mexico City isnt that there are too many people
in too little space, says Dhyana Quintanar Solares, director of the
citys public space department. The problem is too many people in
too much space. We have all the advantages that high population can
offer but few of the advantages that can only come with
density.
Every day from her office near the main road Avenida de la
Reforma, along Avenida de las Insurgentes, Dhyana has a front-row
seat to the futility of Mexico City traffic. My meetings with her
at her third-floor office over the last two years were accompanied
by the soundtrack of transportation failure: the blare of car
horns. At any hour, hundreds of cars, buses, mini buses,
motorcycles, scooters, vendor carts and taxis are crushed together
in Mexico Citys asphalt arteries, waiting at traffic signals or
blocked into a standstill. The result is a multipart car-horn
symphony every time a light turns green. And at the intersection of
Insurgentes and Reforma, the light is always green for
somebody.
In an effort to reduce pollution and congestion, Mexico City
officials in 1989 announced Hoy No Circula (Today you dont
circulate), instituting driving bans on about one-fifth of vehicles
from driving their cars on any given day, depending on their
license plate numbers. These no-drive days have been expanded over
the years but there are still so many vehicles on the road that it
can sometimes be impossible for drivers to see road markings or
even the lights they are stopped for and what lane theyre supposed
to be in. Vendor stands and other hawkers selling mango, trinkets
or washing windows often encroach on the street and block
sidewalks, forcing pedestrians into the road. In those stretches of
road that congestion hasnt paralyzed, cars attempt to make up for
lost time with speed. Many roads no longer allow curbside parking
and have been converted to one-way operation to eliminate as many
barriers to cars getting through as possible. Some 1,100 people in
Mexico City die in traffic crashes annually.
The city government isnt a hapless victim watching cars take
over the streets. The citys own planning rules require that new
buildings provide new spaces to park, a rule taken so seriously
that new high-rise towers require the construction of a 10-story
mascot structure to house all the cars presumed with new office or
residential buildings. A 2014 study by the Institute of
Transportation Development Policy (ITDP) analyzed 251 new real
estate developments built in Mexico City between 2009 and 2013. It
found that of the 172 million square feet of new floor area
developed, 42% of that space was just what was needed to store cars
driven by people using the other 58% of the space. Thats 250,000
spaces, a virtual off-street city built just for carsand this on
top of the street space already built to keep cars moving. This
robs Mexico City of the opportunity to build more residential
properties and greater residential density where its most
needednear the citys metro stations and bus, bike and walking
network. The added parking within the city center assures commuters
a parking space, inducing more people to drive to work instead of
taking public transit. In a sense, city regulations require private
builders to promote more traffic.
Not surprisingly, Mexico Citys roads have gotten wider and its
primary, limited-access highways, such as the Circuito Interior,
busier and bleeding congestion into its service roads, then into
surrounding neighborhoods, a daily tsunami of steel and carbon
monoxide. Any visitor whos tried to cross a Mexico City Street on
foot has probably had that life-altering sense of fear, of aging 15
years in 15 seconds, and of not being entirely certain at the first
step into the street that youll still be alive by the last step.
The simple act of crossing the street can be impossible along roads
where officials have erected fences and other barriers, except via
a quarter-mile odyssey of pedestrian bridges or underpasses.
But something else is starting to grow through the cracks in the
pavement. At the initiative of Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera, elected
in 2013, Dhyana and her public space department is trying to create
invigorate neighborhoods with new community plazas (parques de
bolsillo, or pocket parks), which also serve as bulwarks against
invasion by parked cars.
A pocket park in Coyoacan, Mexico City, one of dozens that
repurpose unused street space to extend sidewalks for seating,
gathering, eating and people-watching (Credit: Seth Solomonow)
Bike share stations and protected bike paths have emerged along
busy Avenida de la Reforma and in the areas around the historic
city center. Six TK bus rapid transit routes today operate along 65
miles of dedicated bus lanes where cars to sit idle, becoming part
of the citys transportation network, moving 855,000 daily
passengers at full speed past lanes of stopped cars. Avenida 20 de
Noviembre used to be high-volume traffic corridor delivering
endless columns of cars north to the Zocalo, the nations cultural
and political epicenter, even though virtually all of them were
bound for destinations far away. Working with Dhyana, we came up
with a plan to calm traffic and limit the number of vehicles able
to enter the area, creating cast stretches of pedestrian space and
extending the Zocalos grandeur further south.
Avenida 20 de Noviembre, Mexico City. Courtesy of Bloomberg
Associates, City of Mexico
Beneath the citys highways in Coyoacan, Dhyanas department
emptied bleak lots of their fences, parking and garbage and turned
these spaces into food courts, bakeries and fitness areas. Little
by little, these changes are creating spaces on the street that
invite people and create opportunities and not just cars. These
strategies are more than just novelties. They may ultimately be
part of Mexico Citys long-term salvation.
###
I often tell people that if they want to save the planet, they
should move to a New York City. But it could be any big city. And
its not just a matter of bright lights, great restaurants and
world-class cultural institutions. Because of their geographic
compactness, population density and orientation toward walking and
public transportation, cities are the most efficient places on
earth to live, and large cities like New York or Mexico City by far
offer the best odds for sustainable growth as global populations
increase rapidly. Having millions of people condensed into
buildings high rise buildings instead of spread out over hundreds
of rural and suburban miles is itself a reason why so many people
are attractedculturally, professionally, politically and
practicallyto cities like New York. But there is also a functional
and economic sustainability-in-numbers case for dense city living.
New Yorkers have a carbon footprint about one third of the average
American, a function of driving less, living vertically and the
environmental economies of scale that come with centrally located
goods and services. For all their smog, graffiti, blacktop and
seeming anarchy, cities are the greenest places on earth.
Two-thirds of the American population now live in the nations
100 largest metro areas, which in turn generate three-quarters of
the nations economy. Urban streets today are the front yards for 80
percent of the American population, and they occupy just three
percent of the nations land area. Urban population is expected to
growby one million people in New York City alone by 2030, and by
100 million more people nationwide by 2050, a 33% jolt.
Concentrating as much of that nationwide growth in cities will be
the single most important strategy that nations can embark on in
this century. In order to attract, retain and accommodate rising
populations, cities must implement rapid strategies to make them
more attractive places to live and tp make what infrastructure they
do have function more efficiently.
The very idea that living in city can be healthy mystifies many
Americans who, channeling their inner Henry David Thoreau, reject
cities as dens of pestilence, crowds, noise and crime. The
countryside, the Walden Pond theory goes, provides open space and
quiet where people can contemplate their higher purposes and live
simpler closer to and off of the land. In fact, as we have learned
over the last 50 years, the environmental cost of living in suburbs
makes New York City look like a coiffed Swiss hamlet. Life in the
suburbs leads to two even greater related problems: A hidden but
far greater environmental price tag that is borne by society
through the driving, emissions, and maintaining and building new
roads, while draining cities of the density that makes them
efficient and thrive. Suburbs and exurbs force not just mega
megacommuting in cars, but require cars to be used for every trip,
no matter how banal. Zoning requirements in many suburbs restrict
commercial development and office parks to segregated areas,
guaranteeing that residential communities will be far out of
walking distance for any activity. Unlike Jane Jacobs compact
neighborhood, a trip to the suburban store for a half-gallon of
milk may be a five-mile drive. Visiting the doctor, going out to
dinner, getting the kids to and from school requires thousands of
car trips annually, all trips that could be done on foot and by
transit en route to and from work in a city.
David Owens, in his influential work on the benefits of compact
urban living, Green Metropolis, observed that 82% of working
Manhattan residents get to work by public transportation, walking
or on a bike, 10 times the national rate. The city has lower per
capita energy use than the entire nation, in large part due to
people living more compactly in smaller, more efficient homes that
are easier to heat, cool and connect to common water and sewer
networks. New Yorkers as a state generate fewer greenhouse gases7.1
metric tons annually, a lower rate than that of residents of any
other American city, and less than 30 percent less than the
national average of 24.5 metric tons. Owen, David (2009-08-29).
Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving
Less Are the Keys to Sustainability (pp. 2-3). Penguin Group US.
Kindle Edition.
Owens and others have also observed that that after years of
rhapsodizing about the virtues of pristine forests, modern
environmentalists have changed their tune on the city. Instead of
fighting to preserve the spotted owl in the forest, they are taking
the fight to cities and taking on the NIMBYs who stand in the way
of new, denser residential developments. Mainstream
environmentalist organizations have reoriented their strategies and
started advocating smart or compact urban growth as part of an
anti-sprawl strategy, reaching beyond the false pro- and
anti-growth dichotomy. More people are realizing that the surest
way to protect the nations wonderful open spaces for future
generations and for the creatures that inhabit them is to build
within cities so that subdivisions wont be built where the deer and
the antelope play. Its better for the planet to build one 50-story
residential tower in the heart of Manhattan than to force
developers to build hundreds of residential units across former
greenbelt farmlands. Denser, better-functioning cities mean fewer
people fleeing to country and bringing their cars and the roads,
parking lots, and strip malls and low-efficiency HVAC and sewer
systems needed to support them.
Despite the natural advantages of cities, political leaders
havent fully capitalized on them. Its not because theyre not smart,
but typically because of the politics and urban planning inertia
that has brought them to this point. Jane Jacobs writings
notwithstanding, cities dont come with owners manuals. Planners,
engineers and the municipal foot soldiers who design, build and run
cities tend to learn their lessons on the job and then take any
collected wisdom with them when they leave at the end of an
administrationoften on the way to more lucrative careers in the
private sector. Within city government, street design practices
were standardized long before the current generation of planners
arrived, usually during a period with no tradition of innovation or
experimentation. In this way, cities have tended to operate in much
the same way that their cities have sprawled: by doing things the
way that theyve always been done, by relying on out-of-date
planning manuals and deviating only when forced to.
Transportation-as-usual in much of the world means building,
expanding, repairing or replacing as many roads as possible and
brushing aside anything not tested or explicitly authorized. The
most dangerous phrase in the English language is Weve always done
it this way, a quip attributed to Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, a
trailblazing US Navy computer scientist. The inertia of outdated
street design isnt merely dangerous, it reflects outmoded
assumptions about how people want to use their streets. Americans
are driving fewer miles on average than a decade earlier, the first
sustained drop since the oil crisis of the 1970s. [Citation Dshort]
Fewer young Americans are even bothering to get drivers licenses:
In 1983, 87% of 19-year-olds had drivers licenses; by 2010, that
number was below 70%. And more are opting for rented or shared cars
and riding bikes over private car ownership as car sales to
Americans under 35 dropped 30% from 2007 to 2012. [Citation: NY
Times] On the transit side of the ledger, ridership in 2013 reached
its highest level since the start of the car boom in 1956. The
federal government has missed these dramatic shifts, forecasting
consistent, high growth in driving over much of the last 15 years
even as miles traveled has flattened out or decreased.
The misreading of what is occurring in America isnt just
confined to driving. Just as parking requirements stifle density
within cities, federal policy incentivizes people to live in
sprawling suburbs. The tax code allows homeowners to deduct the
interest on mortgages in their annual filings, encouraging home
ownership, but in the wrong placeoutside of the city, where it
favors homeowners with better means. The federal gas tax, designed
as a mechanism for drivers to pay for the upkeep of the roads that
they use, hasnt been adjusted in two decades, asphyxiating the
Highway Trust Fund and the transportation infrastructure
reinvestment with it. This is no small sum: Its been stuck at 18.4
cents since 1993. Simply not adjusting the tax for inflation for
two decades is a difference in billions of dollars with two decades
of diminishing returns. Despite the decreasing returns, most of
those revenues go back into roads and only a small fraction is
invested in transit. Even Republican lawmakers, usually opposed to
any increase in taxes, have come out in support of increases in the
taxonly so long as the funds are committed to roads. Having eluded
popular attention for so many years, a comprehensive strategy to
reimagine and innovate Americas urban streets somehow remained too
small for a national policy. Federal government officials want to
cut ribbons on new highways or streetcar projects, not bike lanes
or street-based neighborhood redesigns. If a transportation project
isnt an interstate highway, a high-speed rail or light rail, or a
multi-interchange bridge or road, its hard to get their attenti