Snow-Blanketing Day: this year's Boxing Day

 (Corner of 7th Ave and 17th St., 1:45pm 12/28)

I missed last wallopping winter in New York, and so was delighted to learn of Sunday's forecast:

Biiiiiiig Snow.
Since soon-to-be-snowy mornings are excellent for sleeping, my housemate's cat Jacques and I celebrated with my down comforter for a respectable stretch of morning.  But when I finally emerged onto Court Street at around 10, I remembered why these are such sleepy mornings.  I walked to my favorite local coffee spot and was lucky enough to nab a corner spot from which to watch the neighborhood's preparations.  I padded the following haikus into evernote on my iphone:





She began slowly
Blown gentle south down Court Street
Trader Joes is packed

Not everysunday;
Post-holiday and bracing
Groggy street awakes

Sidewalks get salted
Truckful waits at Atlantic
How much for a pound?

Strollers staying home
Cafe Pedlar's windowseat
Is mine for hours

Big plow pacing Court
Anticipates hero's call
Helpless New Yorkers

What began gently
Brings force of 18 inches
(is what they're saying)

Show us, white witness
What altitude really holds
We'll cover our heads

****

Anticipating Snowpocalypse 2010: The Final Saga, the YMCA around the corner closed early that afternoon, so I went for a merciless pelting ('run') south from downtown Brooklyn, instead of hitting the pool.  I looped south to the terminus of Columbia Street at an NYPD evidence vehicle yard in Erie Basin, then west/northwest along all the most deserted streets of Red Hook, back to Pier 6 and along the waterfront north through Brooklyn Bridge Park, up Old Fulton a block and then back up to the Brooklyn Promenade and home via Joralemon (pronounced with puckered lips: 'you're a lemon').  I wore rainpants and a water resistant running jacket, but the most essential pieces of attire were my wool baseball cap and glasses.  Face thoroughly blasted and stinging I made it home while there was still less than 9 inches on the ground and the wind hovered at a respectable but bearable 20-25mph.

Indoors, warm, dry, and fed but with no promise of escape predicted until the next night, by 8pm I was filling in my Facebook status bar:
"...out of shape for this snowbinding weather sentence."
Both housemates were away for the holiday week and though earlier relishing the solitude, I was soon saddened by a weather event weathered alone.
"Jacques," as I later wrote to a friend, "is bad at board games."

The 'mates and I had spent the smallest hours of Tuesday night the previous week up on our windy 4th floor tenement-top watching the lunar eclipse.  And in a memorable display of our sibling sensibility, Ryan and I spent the better part of the hour and a quarter patiently (and in multi-media) explaining to Nathalie just how a lunar eclipse works.  And then she pulled out some obscure brilliance about differently refracted light and the color spectrum when one of us mentioned the moon's earth-shadowed redness.  We froze our asses off and howled at the moon (my idea), and made up stories about the residents of the fancy condo towers that made it clearer than ever why our little building (smallest, oldest, shabbiest on the block) was such a slum.

I sent them both multiple musings from my side of the storm, and eventually went to bed, wind's howl threatening to slice right through the painstakingly-plasticked window holding our livingroom AC.

The NYT ran this hilarious piece that captures how this particularly whimsical snowpocalypse [almost San Franciscan in its block-by-block varied effects] humbled our unstoppable city.  And though everyone is pissed at Bloomberg, blaming him for slow-responding plows, people I saw today and yesterday seemed pretty tickled to be walking up the middle of usually car-jammed Court Street.  And the narrowly-shoveled sidewalks require the patience of a group hike, while I've seen strangers offering each other's arms across particularly boggy intersections.  On 17th Street in Manhattan this afternoon (wish I'd snapped a photo!!!), I watched two boys (or at least one boy and another set of boy-looking legs) building a top-access tunnel in a (no joke!) 5 foot-high snowbank.  The adventure is fun for the able-bodied among us.

Still, reports of people injured and unable to be reached by emergency vehicles are also stacking up, giving off the impression that some neighborhoods are more strategic than others.  Even City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, normally a Bloomberg ally, decried the City's slow response and is calling for a Council hearing to investigate dynamics behind slow excavation.  But even near 121st and Broadway yesterday afternoon, I'd come upon an elderly woman hesitating to step onto a slick-looking mound of sidewalk slush in her path.  I did like we always do, and gratefully lent her some support, talked her over the hurdle.  It's possible that many more like her haven't even made it out the house yet.  If my roommates were here to show me how to turn on the TV [again], I'd hope to see NY1 reminding its able-bodied, still home-bound watchers to check in on their less mobile neighbors. 

A weather event like this can quickly transform from an opportunity to be blessedly vulnerable and playful together in our altered streets.  It becomes a tragedy when response to basic needs in its midst are stymied.  And though we pay taxes for snowplows and snow removal (sort of), it is we, our beloved cities' neighbors, who are the most informed first responders.  Can we really expect city agencies to care better for our blocks and buildings--and most importantly their least visible residents--than we do?

One recommendation I'd make to the City Council at its blizzard hearing is for formation of an emergency first responding block captains corps.  Surely informal versions of this has existed at less 'automated' periods in NYC history?  Emergency Block [or Building, depending on block FAR] Captains (EBCs), could consult an electronic inventory of local volunteers, sorted by nature of disaster, and locate ones equipped with skis, brandy, first aid training, flexible work hours, etc., and assemble the appropriate crew for a given emergency.  These would fan out over a block surveying the state of each household's needs, and in turn contact secondary responders ready to cook, deliver babies, emergency medicine, etc...until City services were again functional.

What good is a Cityful of the world's brightest if we don't pool our brainpower when it matters most?

Fissures, breakdowns, disconnects are inevitable when the scale of provision is a city as striated as this one.  Though the ideal scenario is always universal, indiscriminate access, various structural obstacles prevent this even flow.  Still, New Yorkers can do a lot to fix our place in the small places we care about.

Stay tuned for: brownsnow rivers in streets: crossing guards to the rescue

Where have all the rejected Op/Eds gone?

I have a lot of talented friends committed to making their places better--more socially and environmentally just, equitable, and durable.  Mainly in New York and Los Angeles, but also many other, smaller places in between, many of them are also very verbal types.  They show up to speak at public hearings, they write letters to elected officials, and many of them also seek publication in their local newspapers' Op/Ed sections.  In the coming weeks, I hope to run at least a few of them here, a place where rejected Op/Ed pieces can go.

 (a foremost landscape of my longing--looking south towards Buttermilk Channel from one of the Ikea/Red Hook Park's piers)

After an Op/Ed I really really wanted to see published in the LA Times last year was rejected, I started a file [that I hoped wouldn't expand too much] of good ideas rejected by mainstream organs.  I write about streets--how, when, where, and why they change over time--from an urban vantage that predicts post-automobility.  In the meantime, many US places are still struggling to protect their car-built streets, however costly to economic productivity and perilous by many metrics to our collective and individual health.  Since I'm currently writing about New York's transition to post-automobility, and have pieced together its story by reading lines, cracks, curbs, bollards, planters, and green paint in the pavement, I have taken to "reading" signs of a place's mobility priorities in its pavement, wherever I happen to be.   I can't help but notice, for instance, where an intersection has been reconfigured to shorten pedestrian crossing distances and slow car traffic.  And I always notice when there aren't sidewalks at all, or where (when on my bike) the loop detectors can't 'feel' me standing on them, making me ironically dependent on the weight of cars to trigger a light change and get me through an intersection.  Needless to say, I almost _always_ have things to say about a local government's provision for its constituents' long-term well-being, as 'written' in the asphalt.  And in industrialized cities, the things I say are pretty repetitive, so I catalog them in the good ideas file (sometimes before they're rejected). 

The LA Times-rejected piece I mention above was one such expression.  Its words were formed out of countless alienating experiences on LA's streets--during the year+ when I lived there recently, but also over my 10 years of bike dependence begun there in 2000.  The words were written out of my own yearning for a more humane LA, and meant to invoke the whimsy of the reader, and begin to coax a doubtful public into different ways of thinking about daily, street-level opportunities to deepen their love of a place.

But like I said, the piece didn't run.  Some of its ideas, however, made their way into an Op/Ed which did show up in the Pasadena Star News in March of this year, after the city made public a first draft of its new bike master plan.  So the file of mainstream-rejected good ideas found utility as a copy/paste trove of readymade arguments that could hang on whatever hook was presented by current events, and I felt for the first time like a savvy and shrewd writer.

(One really good idea I had during the summer of 2009: streets [re]placing patrol.  this was a game I played by myself when tooling on bike around the potential-laden but often unpeopled streets of LA and Pasadena.  the game involved me as a 'streets [re]placing ambassador' and whomever I came upon doing something refreshingly human in the street.  Whatever it was they were doing, and whoever they were, it was my ambassadorial duty to get off the bike and join in--celebrating with them the act of re-placing a cartopic space before its design heralded it.  Here, I'd come upon a small, late night street dance party in Altadena.  The partiers welcomed me...)

The file has grown, and I have continued to draw upon it.  This blog in fact, is itself a result of good idea deferment.  Even though the LA Times rejected Op/Ed didn't appear in its original form, the wildly successful, first ever CicLAvia held in Los Angeles this October was an enactment of its spirit.  Similarly, a small group of urban planners and streets advocates last year formed LivingStreetsLA, an organization committed to planning 'streets for people' into the City's existing hardscape.  And yet, maybe it's ego, but I still wish "An Argument for [Re]Placing the Streets of Los Angeles" had run.  I've reproduced it below, and look forward to printing your good idea deferred...

Writing from New York last week, LAT reporter Tina Susman described the most recent bizarre phenomenon to come out of that un-American city:

Streets are for people.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg in March closed a portion of famed Broadway to automobile traffic. And now Times Square is strewn with people making a park out of asphalt.

Surveying this scene from LA’s comparatively lifeless streets, it’s easy to dismiss the Broadway plazas as outlandish. But how did Angelenos decide that moving cars is the most important use of our own streets?  Was it after we decided we love spending an average of 70 hours per year stopped in traffic? Or after we decided we’re proud to lead the country in pedestrian deaths (remarkable, since we have among the fewest pedestrians per capita)?  Mayor Bloomberg can offer Times Square to pedestrian life because New York has a rich tradition of bending its streets to the wills of people-scaled commercial and residential development. 

And so, I want to suggest neighbors, that it is time we begin to pave and stripe our own people-centric streets.

Simply put, the streets of L.A. are no longer serving us; we need to re-place them. 

Designed to convey us everywhere, they are ironically limited.  Most are either traffic-choked or desolate. Instead of opening routes to a more vibrant city, their singular emphasis on fast car movement forms social blockages. This in turn makes us sick in the lungs and encourages obesity, diabetes, and other illnesses of passivity. Our quest to reach faraway places causes stress, since we are so frequently trapped in traffic. The costs of these social failures are rapidly rising in economic, physical, and environmental health. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s traffic engineers are reliable movers of automobiles, but should we trust their people skills?

Street re-placing involves putting the place in streets, remaking them as inviting places for people—whether we travel by bus, streetcar, light rail, car, bikes, or on foot. In Los Angeles, we could fashion at least half of our 10,000-mile vastphalt holdings into pleasantly mixed streets like the ones we enjoy strolling in Paris and New York. But we must first be  willing to ask more of the gray spaces we have relinquished to our cars.  If we expect them to, our streets will offer a fuller, more flattering vision of who we could be as individuals, families, neighbors, and a city.

California recently passed the Complete Streets Act of 2007, which calls for “routine accommodation of all users of the roadway, including motorists, pedestrians, bicyclists, individuals with disabilities, seniors, and users of public transportation…to encourage good planning for all modes of travel and therefore render our roads safer and more convenient places to walk, ride a bike, or take transit.”  The law became effective statewide on January 1. Implementation would dramatically affect patterns of everyday life here in the City of Los Autos—mainly by increasing our options for getting around and connecting to each other.  While Mayor Villaraigosa and city agencies have shown interest in this notion, they face a shortage of institutional, people-minded planning knowledge and political will to dream bigger. They need our help!

We have taken streets for granted, which has framed how we conceive the possibilities for inhabiting the city around us—our possimobilities. The sprawled pattern of  development fed by these streets makes it nearly impossible for strollable, pleasant multi-purpose areas to survive, since those depend on a density and accessibility too costly to maintain when everyone arrives by automobile.

We, the people of the City of Angels, can begin on our own streets to demonstrate the will to re-place them. But the first, vital step is to deepen our knowledge of how our streets’ current forms do and don’t serve us. We must be willing to live more in our skin than in our cars—we need to learn what we haven’t asked of our streets!

If on any day we left our cars at home and moved with our feet, we would find ourselves dwarfed in the frightening and enlightening gap between currently blank and high-speed streets, and our people-sized needs for closeness to work, shopping, school, and our loved ones. We would also notice how alone we are on sidewalks as automobiles whiz past.  If we used our streets instead of offering them to our cars, we’d experience what a low priority the quality of our movement has historically been. And then, if we’d let ourselves yearn for wider sidewalks, safe crosswalks, shade, benches, comfortable, well-lit bus shelters, more frequent bus and subway arrivals, we’d have earned our credentials as street re-placement planners.

When our streets are places of our own design, we will spend productive time in them with our families and friends, and for transportation, exercise, exchange, way-finding, sight-seeing. We will be surprised by the characteristics of our places that emerge from a slower, closer-up view. Over time, we will develop expertise in the microclimates surrounding our homes and places of work.  These observations will inform a more cohesive sense of who we are as a City of Angels.

If the Mayor is serious about implementing healthier, more equitable pathways to connect our wide city, he ought to commission a special Department of Street Re-Placing.

The department would hold a public repository of re-placement ideas and people-priortizing uses of our vast paved spaces, collected directly from our diverse neighborhoods.  It would also organize public walks, group transit rides, and bicycle rides, concluding with design workshops where we could discuss neighborhood-specific possimobilities. Second, this department would identify and bridge the existing jurisdictional gaps among the Mayor’s office, the Department of Transportation, Parks, CalTrans, and Metro, to facilitate the creation of new, people-prioritizing streets. 

When our streets are fashioned after our unique images, we might decide to close our own Broadway, too, and run a streetcar down it to connect Union Station with LA Live. But who’s to say? We can’t yet, because we haven’t imagined what our streets could become if we made people their priority.

Jen Petersen

Los Angeles , CA

how does memory make a place? how can being in a place re-place its memory?

i love staying in certain places for lots of reasons:

what their smells reminds me of;
the refuge they can offer from more difficult places;
what they teach me;
so i can bring them to people i love, and when i'm lucky, vice versa.

 the above is an email I sent to my ex-husband the other day.  We haven't shared the same place since 2005, but the last 'scape we co-navigated was New York City's, when we were both adjusting to emigrant status.  Los Angeles transplants, we made sense of winter and odd phenomena like close proximity (propinquity, i later learned in my fancy pants grad school classes) in our own westerly ways, through lenses set on our noses by a very differently-mapped place.  we had ways of referring to the miserable, all-weather-under-equipped chinese food bike delivery guy in our neighborhood--the epitome of human suffering--and coined various other quips to help us stay on top of New York's streets. 

My first winter without Ron was miserable.  So, too, my 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th, after which i scurried home for a year's respite in Los Angeles.  Those winters I fared by bike alone, without day's end swapped stories about frozen knees and snot and the revelation of a new strategic layering technique (one that kept you warm but not sweaty, even in the armpits), or charming NYPD out of giving me a ticket for running a red light. 
But I wished the whole way that I was better accompanied. 
Memory of that earlier, shared place kept me from delighting in the now place that--asphalt be praised!--I was making my own without even knowing it, crossing a new East River bridge than that which we'd shared.  Still, every third pedal stroke stirred the Ron-sized-void in me.  I didn't learn how deeply the 'asphalt be praised' had run into me until I left, returned to sunnier climes.  I missed it the whole time.

It's my first winter back in New York City, and I am loving every blast of wind's whimsy, and frigid bike ride into and out of Manhattan.  I've learned what body parts must be warm and how to protect them, and which can weather some cold.  I've learned that the usually W/NWerly wind this time of year resists me in the morning, and urges me back home in the evening.  And that the air temp can even be warmer at night!  And more than that, I recognize other year-round commuters, or people that reliably fill the places I pass, and they too are my personal place-markers.

But now that I live in downtown Brooklyn, my commute isn't long enough so I usually meander the crooked north Brooklyn coast, crossing the Williamsburg Bridge and reveling in the Midtown Manhattan view north along the bi-directional bikeway along Kent Ave. through Williamsburg, to Franklin Ave. in Greenpoint, to Newtown Creek, and then back, hugging the waterfront as warmly as I feel embraced by her.  I wasn't ever before open to being place- (and cold-) permeated like this.

I wrote to Ron (who never responds) the other day out of delight instead of longing for companionship.  During my 2 am ride home the night before, I'd laughed aloud about the seasonal phenomenon of sidewalks sprouting douglas firs tended by Montreal and East European urban foresters we've got here in New York--an image I'd never shared with anyone, and didn't need to.
 
Five years after, I am making my own place, and we love each other.

How the auto industry can bail us out

Quoting President Obama's announcement of the Detroit auto industry bailout almost a year and a half ago, Edward Niedermeyer's NY Times Op/Ed piece yesterday recalls how the $70 billion package was sold:

“This restructuring, as painful as it will be in the short term, will mark not an end, but a new beginning for a great American industry...an auto industry that is once more outcompeting the world; a 21st-century auto industry that is creating new jobs, unleashing new prosperity and manufacturing the fuel-efficient cars and trucks that will carry us toward an energy-independent future.”

Niedermeyer continues: "In particular, what Mr. Obama called his “one goal” — having Detroit “lead the world in building the next generation of clean cars” — is nowhere near being achieved." 

His Op/Ed piece highlights what has actually happened in Detroit these last 18 months, focusing on the products and their sales strategies that still aren't on course to attain even the lowest-hung among Obama's goals.  He indicts the industry's reproduction of a market in energy inefficient light trucks and SUVs (still by far out-selling their compact, 'fuel efficient' models), for its production/sales mismatch that mask GM and Chrysler's actual productivity, and the public trade of GM stock which, given these dynamics, incentivizes a long-term trend of over-production and cheap credit schemes used to stimulate sales.

But if we're going to revisit the bailout's decision and outcomes, let's talk about what it was really about.  If our future is crowded urban areas, why do we even have an auto industry, and why are we willing to continue greasing its expensive wheels when they grind urban circulation to a halt?  The ultimate purpose of the US auto industry isn't to manufacture cars.  Rather, the auto industry is meant to spin out an American lifestyle that presupposes single family homes, parking lot-rimmed shopping malls, interstate highways and local freeways, and a subsequent, created preference for at-will, solitary mobility over long distances among all these.  It is, in other words, a lynchpin for many other distance-dependent industries: home sales and much construction, retail and commercial development, public infrastructure construction, and of course oil and its various wars and machinations.

But as we know, spread-out single family home sales are a cash cow milked dry.  Suburban malls and strip malls are turning to ghost towns.  The lifestyles the car once afforded us are now responsible for escalating health costs of care for diseases of passivity.  And they obviously aren't helping our stress levels [PDF] and air quality.


Even as it bails out the auto industry, the federal government has recently begun to gaze more deeply into a future of sustainable mobility infrastructure--one meant to move people instead of cars, insure long-term economic growth, and keep communities healthy.  This year alone, the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER I and II) grant programs funded almost $2 billion worth of what the federal Department of Transportation is calling innovative, multi-modal, regional solutions to long-term transportation needs in and around US urban areas--a marked turn from the car-focused funding priorities that have long characterized federal mobility investment.  These infrastructure projects--a regional streetcar system in Atlanta, highway removal projects in New York and New Haven, a subway line extension in Los Angeles--all suggest that, while cars may play some role in our mobile futures, our paths are being actively redrawn.

Obama's decision to throw the rope to Detroit was about expedient political appeasement.  But sadly, the segment of the unionized middle class jobs still clinging to the US auto industry's emaciated frame, will not ultimately be preserved by it.  As when in the 1910s Henry Ford stimulated demand for his early car models by raising his factory employees' wages, Obama's reprieve for the US auto industry stimulated temporary demand for cars and temporary employment--in a world that can't any longer sustain automobile dependence on the scale it once did.  As the expiration of its energy-profligate, co-dependent industries (above) hollow out the country's suburbescape, the US auto industry won't have products that carry its workers or their neighbors anywhere worth going.  These places, once rich with a middle class that had 'survived' the city, are rapidly losing economic ground.

Perhaps when we re-visit the Detroit bailout at the 3 and 5-year marks, Congress and whomever is then signing bills in the Oval Office will see different mobility demands sufficient to justify re-skilling autoworkers.  These engineers and factory assembly teams could then play a meaningful role in constructing the street cars, light rail, smart buses, and even smart, shared cars that will carry us into the future.  First, though, we have to imagine that secure jobs, meeting our mobility needs, freedom and independence, livable communities, and conservation aren't mutually exclusive.  These qualities are already showing signs of overlap in certain modest-sized US cities.  But some of our largest cities, even if billed for their 'green' policies--New York is loudest among them--have growing wealth gaps not worth shouting about.  While less boastful of a green hue, Los Angeles, Boston, and other large metro areas offer models of what will befall us if the wealth gap continues to widen and more cities trade exclusively in knowledge-based industries and services.  We could start now to build the country's next, healthier mobility network, creating more secure jobs in the process.  But for as long as GM and Chrysler convince US taxpayers to buy their one-trick-wonders, we're all stuck.

Who wants streets for a New York City worth leaving?

New York City streets are finally worth staying in, but some residents they benefit most, want to leave. 
     In a City best accessed by shared transit and foot, bikes have lately commanded more attention because their movement is finally patterned into more pavement.  And since NYCDOT began to roll out an ambitious array of new bike and ped facilities in 2007, bicycling has dramatically increased.  It took a beat, but motorists are beginning to notice that their own far and fast style of movement has accordingly been curbed, and they are not happy.  And instead of seeing the many ways peopled streets will make them richer in a place valued for staying, these motorists are insistent upon the return of streets better for leaving.  

On Thursday December 9, the City Council's transportation committee held a standing room-only public hearing on bicycling.  In its coverage, the NY Times cast the hearing as a battlefront, capturing the truculence prevailing in streets where cars and people are pit against each other.
Cyclists turned out in droves--many were turned away when the small hearing room reached capacity.  They testified at length to the health, economic, environmental, and civic good of bicycling prompted by these better facilities.  The naysayers were vocal and vehement--implying or directly insisting that more space for human-paced movement violated their "rights" as motorists.  Former Mayor Dinkins' Deputy Mayor Norman Steisel is the opposition's public face, and used his status to jump the speaker line and extend his 2-minute slot to 16.

Steisel has been on a months'-long mission to convince his neighbors directly-adjacent to Park Slope's Prospect Park West--where a bi-directional bike lane and median-style parking lane have improved park access for bicyclists, slowed traffic and diminished the crash rate--that these lanes are underused and un-necessary.  He even claims they are blighting the surrounding neighborhood.  Steisel even teamed up recently with another Park Slope resident, former DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall, and met with bikes-supportive Park Slope City Councilman Brad Lander, to express their disapproval of the lane on PPW.  One source close to Weinshall reports that she's upset because unloading groceries from her car feels more difficult than it used to.  Rumors are circulating that her husband, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, has also entered the fray and may be involved in behind-the-scenes efforts to choke the lane's future and return PPW to its speedway status.


For his part, long-time Park Slope resident and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz,  sang a mocking ode to the bike lanes of his borough, likening them to various seasonal, ephemeral flavors--like eggnog.  Only in Brooklyn.

Oddly, Steisel, Weinshall and Markowitz  (let's call them the Park Slope Car Crusaders or PSCC) fail to recognize their self interest in defending bike lanes rolled out on the asphalt adjacent to their properties.  Many studies have demonstrated the positive impact of dedicated bike lanes and paths on two things homeowners care about most: declining crime rates and rising property values.  In a neighborhood where real estate is spectator sport, ignorance of this compelling fact by such long-time homeowner/insiders is shocking. 

But I suspect the PSCC is mistakenly conflating the benefits of homeownership with those of car ownership, a correlation which just doesn't work for Park Slope.  In communities whose value is largely traceable to the single family home, car ownership is essential to creating and sustaining the value of all surrounding land uses.  Commercial land uses from retail to industrial developments require the labor and money inputs of single family homes in order to produce their goods and services which can in turn only be profitably exported by personal automobiles in high volume.  But Park Slope and most of the developed land in all five boroughs do not derive their value from the single family home.  Instead, they are valuable because of the density of social resources and economic activity supportable in this small city on top of the world.  Most people do not go to work or for regular shopping trips in personal automobiles--we ride the subway and buses, occasionally take taxis, walk, and increasingly, we ride our bicycles.  We do this because the distances we navigate are not vast, and the places they contain are rich with the resources we seek.  And yet, for the better part of the last century, we planned our streets in a way that gave car movement the right-of-way, as if its circulation was a better value import-export mechanism than these other modes.

For generations, the abundance of free, on-street parking, signal timing, and lane apportionment sent the message that personal mobility in cars was somehow key to unlocking the City's highest and best use.  And while this may have been an almost reasonable conclusion at the height of US suburban expansion or in the depths of the City's fiscal crisis, it could have only resulted from intense dependency on public subsidies for everything from fuel to air pollution, public health costs to central city property's devaluation.  We now know that what we imagined were 'investments' actually cost us our place.  As such, we can no longer demonstrate that everyday use of personal automobiles in New York City retains any meaningful role in its economic growth or the quality of life required to sustain it.  While the City has at other times been worth leaving, its current global economic primacy results from its qualities worth staying for.  Density is primary among these in a knowledge-based economy like ours has become, and creates economies of scale that only reinforce this strength.

At an earlier moment in New York's development, density was a breeding ground for cholera, and as its population exploded during the City's rapid industrialization, lack of open spaces and pollution were serious.  Private automobile ownership's increase in the City, particularly through the 1920s, was welcomed by many urban planners and downtown business owners as a savior.  Especially once the first urban highways were built, the personal automobile was expected to relieve congestion that harmed downtown business.  But few anticipated how compromising the car's gradual dominance would be to the City's basic qualities of place.  Its central business district remained choked with the cars of suburban commuters eager to leave at day's end.  Its elevated highways sliced neighborhoods in half and created dead, shadow zones underneath them.  Instead of being saved by the automobile, its ownership created blight.

But today things are different.  We aren't any longer an industrial manufacturing city.  Instead, we anchor clean industries--education, arts, finance, professional services--all of which like a nice place to stay.  More bike lanes and pedestrian plazas are part of the Bloomberg administration's attempt to protect the City's place-based strength, and retain these propinquity-dependent industries.  In this way, bike lanes, waterfront parks and pedestrian plazas are direct social investments in the City's economic health.  Air and noise pollution and congestion decline with decreased automobile use, and generally make better use of the City's most productive raw material: its land.  Together, these new street uses offer more reasons to make daily trips in our bodies instead of our cars, and in the process we offer ourselves an important form of health insurance by reducing our weight and risk of diabetes.

Cars are for going.  Bicycling, walking, skating, rollerblading, scooting, skipping, cartwheeling are all modes of staying.  Their increase among people of all ages in our streets is a phenomenal sign that we are a place worth staying in, which is worth congratulating.

The current DOT's efforts to reapportion streetspace for human needs is confusing for motorists to understand because it changes the message they have long read in the asphalt from:
"we can't live without you!"
to
"wait your turn." 
And people like the PSCC are just not accustomed to being told to wait. 


Maybe they could find a way to hear this new pavement, unbuffered by their windshields.  The asphalt, afterall, is speaking a different language, and they might feel less attacked if they learned it.  The PSCC polyglot could mount a bicycle (equipped with a handsome basket for groceries), wave at a neighbor, notice a kid's two-wheeled delight, and instead of "wait your turn," they might hear:
"Stay!!"

But if "free" parking and access to leaving--even if slowly--on a personal whim are more important to the PSCC than health, safety, and economic growth--let alone _sheer delight_, then perhaps they ought to relocate to places better for leaving.  Many localities still readily absorb the high costs to public life and place imposed by free parking and speed, along with congestion that accompany high rates of automobile ownership.  My hunch is, however, even the placeless places that have survived under conditions of automobile dependency, if they mean to endure in a post-industrial US, will be busy planning streets for people instead of cars.