"Like watching decades of activism happen in a month": how city mayors are using Covid-19 to clear cars from the streets
From BBC Future
Who’s moving fastest to take advantage of the pandemic’s shake-up of the norms, in order to strike for saner, more sustainable, less destructive societies? It looks like it’s the city mayors of the world (who we’ve kept an eye on from the start of A/UK).
This Guardian piece reports on the meeting this week (virtually, of course) of the “C40” cities network, led by the Mayor of Milan, who wants to “look towards how we will keep our people safe in the future” as head of the Global Mayors Covid-19 Recovery Task Force.
What that seems to entail is a tidal wave of plans to downgrade the dominance of cars in the streets of these cities, and upgrade greener forms of transportation. See the following, amazing list:
Milan has introduced one of Europe’s most ambitious cycling and walking schemes, with 22 miles of streets to be transformed over the summer.
In Paris, the mayor has allocated €300m for a network of cycle lanes, many of which will follow existing metro lines, to offer an alternative to public transport.
In Bogotá, the Colombian capital, a 75-mile network of streets usually turned over to bicycles one day a week will now be traffic-free all week, and a further 47 miles of bike lanes are being opened to reduce crowding on public transport and improve air quality.
New York has unveiled plans to open up 100 miles of streets for “socially responsible recreation” during the Covid-19 crisis, with a focus on areas with the most need, while Oakland, in California, is closing off 75 miles of its streets to passing cars and setting aside up to 10% of streets for recreation.
Mexico City is planning 80 miles of temporary bike lanes, and Barcelona is adding 30,000 square metres to its pedestrianised networks and 13 miles to the biking network.
In the UK, the Scottish government has announced £10m to create pop-up walking and cycling routes, while mayors in northern England have suggested a national programme to retrofit homes with renewable energy technology.
On Thursday Manchester city council announced it would pedestrianise part of Deansgate, in the city centre. In London, boroughs including Lambeth and Hackney have announced measures to widen pavements, close roads to traffic and improve walking and cycling.
The BBC Future site also picks up this initiative, and asks if we are witnessing the death of the car. Perhaps the combustion-engine car, yes, given that most cities still figure electric and hydrogen powered vehicles into their future plans. But there is still apparently a massive policy shift underway. As the BBC nails home:
…the sudden drop in pollution and improvement of air quality around the world has been a wake-up call, not least in light of studies showing that pollution makes Covid-19 more deadly and could even contribute to the spread of the virus. The coronavirus pandemic struck at a time of climate emergency, an emergency caused in part by the huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere – much of which comes from cars.
…a decline in car use cannot be expected unless people have efficient, accessible and affordable alternative options. But mobility is linked to every aspect of life in cities, and a change in car use may only be possible if issues around housing, public services and work culture are addressed too. Such huge volumes of commuting, for instance, may not be necessary if working from home is made easier, services are more equally distributed geographically or people can afford to live within walking distance of their work.
Policy and behaviour change may take a long time, but there exists a building momentum across the world that recognises car-free streets as a critical way of tackling the urgent climate crisis, as well as a strategy to improve health and wellbeing.
Finally, this exultant tweet thread from Brett Pelzer (kick off tweet is here) expresses what he sees as the “Great Reclamation” of cities from cars, triggered by Coronavirus:
The Great Reclamation: I am losing track of the number of cities that have moved suddenly and ambitiously to reclaim hundreds of kilometres of streets from the car monopoly and reallocate these public commons for people walking, cycling and using wheelchairs. 1/n
It is like watching decades of activism happen in a month. Like watching generations of 'cycling and walking plans' or 'sustainable mobility plans', which have always been aspirations, turn into facts (literally) overnight. The fight for urban space has turned competitive - 2/n
It has taken a crisis that is new, sudden, total and full of unknowns to break, albeit briefly, the car monopoly on urban space which has been in place for 70-100 years in the rich West, and far less time elsewhere, but which has been profoundly successful in legitimating & 3/n
...reproducing itself. This has produced, as @_Anna_Nikolaeva et al call it, an artificial abundance of space for private cars both moving and stored, and an artificial scarcity of space for everything else - walking, cycling, sitting, wheelchairing, assembling, markets, etc. 4/n
Maintaining this divide requires immense resources. The consensus by which people driving cars have the right to abundant urban space, while everyone else fights over the margins, has been built up over decades, but like the Death Star, it *does* have a flaw. 5/n
That flaw was always a potential systemic shock that broke, for a moment, the spell by which building our urban public realm around cars-first, everything-else-in-the-space-left-over has lasted this late into climate change. That spell is now broken, everywhere, for a bit. 6/n
This lull means that the car-petrol-suburbs-malls-steel automobility complex has briefly left the arena in which physical urban space is fought over. Some cities have rushed in to reallocate space in the way they've been promising to do for generations... 7/n
Briefly, the power dynamics are more equal; cities can mobilise the force of this emergency to unfreeze their decades-overdue response to the deeper emergencies that have lost their power to shock us: physical inactivity, motorists who kill, cities voided of collective life 8/n
From Anna Nikolaeva
Proviso: This systemic shock we're in has brought lonely deaths and frantic suffering to most of a planet at once; it has precarised or immiserated thirds or halves of entire societies at a stroke. Everything that can be done to fight it, should be done. 9/n
Personal space is newly and visibly political under this pandemic, especially in cities. It has always been, but well-resourced lobbies have been highly incentivised to make us forget that; to frame new images of children cycling freely in streets look like "the 80s"... 10/n
This obscuring of the spatial needs of motorists into building regulations, even heritage regulations (!), has worked until right now, when the wide river of tarmac is empty and we all squeeze past each other on the crowded banks, wondering why that is necessary. 11/n
These new thoughts are powerful. The sudden necessity of 1.5m-2m distances between people, has produced by fiat an enormous and powerful 'walking lobby' of a kind that has always been (1) missing or (2) outgunned by the car lobby in the past, in most (esp. rich) countries 12/n
Suddenly this walking lobby is all of us, as if we'd received membership badges in our postboxes, at the exact moment when the car lobby is weaker than it has, perhaps, ever been, including the Oil Crisis of the 1970s. This is the moment to seize space and not give it back. 13/n
There is a brief window in which is it non-obvious that people should ask permission from cars to cross a road, rather than the inverse. It is briefly non-obvious that there should be lots of free parking but never free public transport. 14/n
It is briefly non-obvious that one person driving a car should know, in advance and without checking, that they can drive it to the heart of any community; need no permission to pump smoke into nearby strangers' lungs; that most of our city commons should store cars. 15/n
Most especially, it is non-obvious that the huge river of tarmac in front of your home isn't for children to play in or people to sit in or trees to grow in, that all those activities should continue to be physically risky, while piloting a car at speed is the sole OK use. 16/n
If you live in a city that is doing this, please loudly and brightly support it. If you don't, please frame radical demands and disseminate. This is the moment in which it is non-obvious that you and the people you care about should (continue) not (to) have these things. 17/n
If this thread is of interest, there are resources/writers that can provide orientation/insight. The first and best port of call if you have time and want to learn is a free online course, the Cycling Cities MOOC by @fietsprofessor & co-conspirators. 18/n
Recently, readable and (justly) provocative histories of street space allocation and the fight for cycling have been written. In my own research I use Peter Norton's 'Fighting Traffic' , David Prytherch's 'Law, Engineering & the American Right of Way' 19/n
and, for me, the gateway book, Ruth Oldenziel et al's 'Cycling Cities', an account of a century of these struggles in European cities . 20/n
And of course, the Bruntletts' Building the Cycling City (2018) @modacitylifemodacitylife.com/building-the-c… for a comprehensive account of how Dutch cities, in particular, have succeeded in charting a different course. Much, much more can be found at @Cycling_Embassy. 21/n
Lastly, if you can access journal articles, some very pragmatic ones are @NelloDeakinasking, What *is* a fair space allocation? and Anna Nikolaeva's work on 'commoning' urban mobility @_Anna_Nikolaeva 22/n
And finally, for all other questions, run, ride or wheel yourself to the Urban Cycling Institute urbancyclinginstitute.com , where the most beautiful templates for action and provocation have been carefully assembled by @georgeintraffic, @dutch_ish and others already mentioned /end