People drive and travel in cars, don't they?

What is it about cars that make their drivers bully pedestrians and
bicyclists? Is it a tyranny of speed and size?

Bob Shanteau


***
<http://sf.streetsblog.org/2009/07/08/enrique-penalosa-urges-sf-to-embrace-pedes\
trians-and-public-space>

SF Streetsblog
Enrique Peñalosa Urges SF to Embrace Pedestrians and Public Space
by Matthew Roth on July 8, 2009

Celebrated Colombian urbanist and former mayor of Bogotá Enrique
Peñalosa told a standing room audience of more than one hundred people
at the San Francisco Public Library last night that San Francisco can be
friendly to cars or to people, but not both. Further, he argued that
there is no fundamental technical reason why streets have to function
only as free-flowing arteries to move cars, but that the state of our
cities in America is a political decision that we can overturn and that
American's perceptions of what is possible in cities will follow suit.

"I don't say this as a car-hater--I have a car, I think cars can be
wonderful to go to the countryside--but clearly the faster cars go in a
city, the wider the roads are, the less pleasant is it to be around. The
narrower the street, the slower the speeds, the wider the sidewalks, the
better you can feel. High-velocity urban roads are sort of fences in a
cow pasture."

Road space, he argued, is the most valuable asset in a city and it is a
resource that society can use as it pleases, distributing it between all
transportation modes or only one. He stated what is obvious, but what
seems to rarely be acknowledged by traffic engineers and politicians in
San Francisco: less space for cars will mean less cars. "There is no
such thing as a 'natural' level of car use in a city. There is nothing
technical about how much space you should give to cars or to
pedestrians. It's not like you have to ask a transport engineer
permission. What is clear is this is a political decision."

Peñalosa's trip was underwritten by the Institute for Transportation and
Development Policy (ITDP) and was part of the kick-off of the Great
Streets Project, a join initiative between the SFBC, SPUR, Project for
Public Spaces, and The Livable Streets Initiative (parent company of
Streetsblog). Peñalosa earlier in the day met with Mayor Gavin Newsom,
which he said went quite well.

"I think [Newsom] was very sensitive to all these issues and he even
told some of his people to look into how these things are being used in
other cities, the designs that are being used to improve the pedestrian
and bicycle spaces there," he said.

In a nod to San Francisco's Freeway Revolts, Peñalosa argued that one of
the most important citizen movements in the last fifty years has been
the slow reclamation of cities from private cars and freeways. He also
stated emphatically that there is no reason that we have to be inured to
the number of people who die from cars, particularly children. Citing
the statistic that 250,000 children die on streets every year worldwide,
he said we should rethink our fairy tales where the big bad wolf is
actually a wolf.

"We are living in an environment where our children are constantly in
danger of being killed, but what is shocking is that we think this is
normal," he said. "A good city is good for children, for the
handicapped, for low-income people, for the elderly, for the most
vulnerable citizens."

In addition to changing the physical boundaries of streets and sidewalks
to privilege vulnerable populations, Peñalosa spent a good deal of his
discussion on the need to remove parking at curbside to open up the
space for other users and to make transit as convenient and cheap as
possible, two issues particularly relevant in San Francisco.

"All constitutions have many rights, pages and pages of rights. With so
many rights, I've never found that any constitution includes the right
to park," he said. "Governments have the obligation to provide health,
to provide education, to provide housing, but not necessarily to provide
parking. This is a private problem."

Instead of providing so much curbside parking, Peñalosa suggested that
sidewalks should be widened as much as possible, that sidewalks are
extensions of parks and public space that should be treated with the
same regard as actual parks. "People tend to think sidewalks are
relatives of streets, because they live next to each other," he said.
"But in fact, sidewalks are not for getting from one place to another.
Sidewalks are for talking, for doing business, for playing, for kissing.
Sidewalks really are relatives of parks."

As for transit, he clearly sees public mobility as a public right that
trumps the right to private mobility and he believes that car drivers
should pay more to subsidize transit.

"Whenever people use public transit, it's not because they love the
environment. In advanced cities in Zurich or in London, most people use
public transit, even the rich. Why do they use it? Because they have to.
If we want people to use public transport, we have to improve transit
but we also need to restrict car use, a little bit of the carrot, a
little bit of the stick."

The easiest way to restrict car use is to restrict parking, he said.
"Most cities in the world where people use public transit it's difficult
to park." Other strategies he liked were charging for car use, such as
congestion pricing and higher gas taxes, provided that money is used to
subsidize transit.

In closing his presentation, Peñalosa urged the audience to set its
sights as high as possible to completely re-imagine cities so that not
only "those who have a private motorcar have the right to safe mobility.
People in government will have to take a risk, they will have to make
decisions that are unpopular to at least some people. You have to do
uncomfortable things."

"If we're going to talk about transport, I would say that the great city
is not the one that has highways, but one where a child on a tricycle or
bicycle can go safely everywhere."