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.