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
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