Travel lanes vs parking vs active transportation

Getting back to removing travel lanes, we need to become bolder in our thinking and stop believing there’s a level playing field out there. The cities that have high rates of walking and bicycling also have conditions where driving is difficult, expensive, even painful. We cannot continue to think we can add or create walking and bicycling infrastructure while maintaining mobility for drivers and hope to see anything more than a miniscule modal shift. Rare and expensive parking is part of the needed pain for drivers, but off-street parking should be reduced before on-street parking is threatened. We should be advocating for new traffic engineering rules such as “Never have more than two lanes of traffic in each direction.” “Never require a person to cross more than three travel lanes at once.”

Michael Ronkin

Active modes of transportation -- walking and biking (among other, less common forms like, say, rollerblading) -- are an important element of moving people from place to place in urban areas. Because urban space is so constrained, this is more true than in, for example, suburban or rural areas, though those spaces could also benefit from increased biking and walking, where possible. Of course, the density in urban areas also facilitates these choices: you have to have things worth walking or biking within a reasonable distance for that.

If you've been paying attention to this stuff, you're probably aware of the increasing focus on parking, and the way it spreads out human settlements while also making it easier for people to deal with their cars. Cheap or free parking has a lot to answer for in the eyes of new urbanists, smart growth proponents, and others who love the vitality of urban areas. Are cities for cars, or are they for people?

Who are we accomodating: people or cars?

As I walked to the T this morning, I observed several snowplows getting a jump on clearing the streets as the first couple of inches of snow (4-6 predicted for Somerville, where I live) had fallen. Somerville does a great job of keeping the streets well-cleared.

Similarly, some of my neighbors had gotten a jump on the snow by clearing the first couple of inches off their sidewalks before heading to work. As in many cities and towns in Massachusetts, Somerville residents are required to clear their sidewalks of snow within a reasonable time after a storm stops or face fines (and cranky neighbors).

As anyone who's been walking around the urban and semi-urban areas around Boston this month has no doubt noticed, however, sidewalk-clearing policies still result in spotty walking conditions. In my neighborhood, where there's a high volume of foot traffic, I see a lot of people (myself included!) giving up on sidewalks and simply walking in the street.

Every time I see this, I think about how much we need to change the prevailing approach. Why does the city clear streets but not sidewalks? (Some cities do plow sidewalks with small plows, either throughout the city [Brookline] or in commercial areas [Belmont].) In more rural areas where few people move about by foot, this may be a sensible distribution of resources on the basis of people's use of sidewalks, but in areas with high numbers of foot traffic, it simply doesn't make sense.

People should be the beneficiaries of municipal policies, and in densely populated areas well-served by public transit, that includes people on foot as well as in cars. It's past time to realign our narrow, car-centric thinking to a more inclusive approach.

Contested Streets

Do you ever wonder what our cities will look like 10, 50 or 100 years in the future? I was recently watching the trailer for "Contested Streets: Breaking New York City Gridlock", which included some film clips from the early part of the 20th century, showing how city streets were shared by pedestrians and cars then, and, of course, now. I would dearly love to get a glimpse into the future to see what we're doing in 2088, but for now, I'll have to settle for looking back and thinking about planning well for a good future for our city streets.

If you're interested in seeing Contested Streets, but you don't want to buy the DVD, and you're in the Boston area, check out these screenings:

· Thursday, November 20, 2008, 4-5pm at the Harvard School of Public Health, Kresge G3 (Boston, MA)

· Thursday, December 4, 2008, 6-7pm at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Piper Auditorium (Cambridge, MA)

This movie is being offered as an extension of the "Bicycle Environments in the U.S. and the Netherlands/Denmark" class (Harvard School of Public Health). The showing of the movie is sponsored by the following groups in alphabetical order:

Harvard Urban Planning Organization at the Graduate School of Design (HUPO)
Harvard School of Public Health Post Doc Association (HSPH PDA)
Interdisciplinary Consortium on Urban Planning and Public Health (ICUPPH)
Livable Streets Alliance