The 2020 pandemic has changed
life in the city pretty dramatically.
In the height of citywide lockdowns
it can be very eerie to look out at a street
and see no people and no traffic.
Traffic in urban centers has been a constant,
but under the threat of coronavirus, many have been
experiencing what life could be like without it.
A little after 6:30 and we're
looking at the West LA area.
What is different in this picture?
Well how about this, it's probably about 10%
of the cars that are usually out here.
Traffic in the United States has been
a growing problem over the last decade.
Especially in San Francisco where each commuter
spends 103 hours waiting in traffic every year.
And the cost of congestion totaled over $5 billion in 2017.
And while it may seem like the natural solution
to pave more roads and increase freeway space,
the city's actually taking the opposite approach.
Like many European cities,
it's removing cars from its downtown.
And if it works, it might just help spread this idea
of building cities around people, not cars.
Now since I live in Brooklyn and likely
am not traveling to San Francisco anytime soon,
I'm recruiting the help of my colleague Laura Bliss.
Not only because she lives in the Bay Area,
but because she's been reporting
on car-free streets for years.
The amount of congestion on the streets
that's grown in recent years is really striking.
Texas A&M University has published a study
which says traffic here in California,
and especially here in the Bay Area, is bad.
Just since 2010, the number of vehicles
entering the city on a daily basis has grown by 27%.
This growth has been driven
by cheap gas prices, but also the rise
of ride-handling apps like Uber and Lyft.
And in San Francisco, the tech boom has meant
more people are coming to the city every day.
There's also a really sharp uptick in pedestrian
fatalities that the city has seen in recent years.
And this is an issue that all of the United States
has been experiencing over the last decade.
So the city has done a number of things
over the years to try to address its traffic problem.
Most recently, the city is launching
the Better Market Street Plan.
Well another plan is in the works to transform
San Francisco's Market Street.
It sure looks great on paper.
A mega makeover of San Francisco's Mid-Market Street.
What you will not be seeing?
Cars.
All the way back to the dawn of automobiles,
Market Street has struggled with a diverse
amount of transportation needs.
From pedestrians to cyclists,
cars and public transportation,
and even back in 1906 it could get a little hairy.
One of the most iconic things about
Market Street is that it's really
just kinda almost a free for all.
It's about 9 AM.
Just at the end of rush hour.
And we're gonna ride all the way
down to the Ferry Building.
And experience Market Street firsthand.
And all of its problems.
You've got Ubers, you've got private cars,
you've got delivery trucks, you've got buses.
Pepsi truck just blocking the way.
What is he doing?
You've also go a historic street car.
That's just kinda throttling along.
And even though Market Street
has dedicated bike lanes, when cars
need to turn right off the road,
those bike lanes kinda disappear and cyclists
end up weaving in and out of traffic.
Everybody's really happy
this morning as you can hear.
At best, this can lead to increased congestion.
And at worst, it could lead to an accident.
The city's Better Market Street Plan aims to fix this
by removing private cars from entering the road,
allowing dedicated lanes for trams, buses,
and cyclists to run unimpeded for the two mile stretch.
As well as a large renovation project
to the pedestrian walkway.
And while construction will take years to complete,
the first step, removing cars, is already in effect.
Three!
Two!
One!
Cutting that ribbon took
well over a decade of debate,
environmental review, and design planning.
They've been talking about limiting cars
on Market Street almost since cars were invented.
Or at least since BART was invented.
By November of 2019 the San Francisco
Transportation Administrators voted unanimously
to approve of Better Market Street Plan.
Generally speaking, these kinds of projects
do not go down without a massive fight.
Whose streets?
Our streets!
One of the most explosive fights in recent years
that's gotten a lot of attention
here in the United States was
the 14th Street Busway Plan in New York City.
It's not going to be
your mother's 14th Street anymore.
From 3rd to 9th Avenues it will morph
into something city officials call a TTP.
It means private cars can pretty much forget about it.
Similar to the Market Street Project,
the 14th Street Busway was a plan to remove
private cars from entering the road.
The intention here was to improve bus service,
but some New Yorkers didn't like it.
That's probably gonna just make the traffic a lot worse.
That don't seem good.
It's a bad thing.
I am furious.
We are furious.
And generally speaking, people oppose
pedestrian zones or car bans for three main reasons.
First, people fear that the traffic is gonna
get pushed to parallel roads and that those
side streets are just gonna be stuck in gridlock.
Second, there's the fear of the loss of on-street parking.
And finally, business owners fear that that loss
of parking could mean the reduction
of customers and revenue to their business.
A plan to ban cars on one of the busiest
cross-streets in Manhattan hits a roadblock.
Arthur Schwartz represents
the group that's suing the city.
There's a thousand cars an hour on the side streets.
That is not a good trade-off.
For anybody.
If anybody in their right mind thinks
that there's not gonna be a major impact
because of this, they're crazy.
But once the car ban went into effect,
the data came back and was pretty clear.
There was no Side Street.
Trafficopalyse.
Traffic-opalypse.
People love to get biblical with traffic.
Carmageddon and...
This is Trevor Reed,
a transportation analyst at INRIX.
And yes, he's also working from home.
Do you play football?
Does someone else play football in the family?
Well I'm back at home with my parents.
Nice.
I did play football and that's--
Is this all your childhood stuff?
Yup, yup.
Pretty much.
INRIX worked with a third party
consulting firm, Sam Schwartz Consulting,
to collect data around how the traffic
changed after the 14th Street Busway.
The end result of the 14th Street Busway
was an absolute success.
On all the parallel streets you're seeing
a travel increase in travel times by about
one to two minutes, which is negligible,
but you're seeing a 36% improvement in bus speeds,
which was 5.3 minutes faster on average,
which corresponded to a 24% increase
in bus riders, so over 6,000 increased riders.
And you saw a spike in bicycle
volumes of between 26 and 50%.
But Market Street is a little different.
Unlike 14th Street that's laid out
in a fairly traditional grid with streets
running parallel, Market Street only has
one side of parallel street options,
Mission that runs north and south,
and Howard that only runs southbound.
And while it may feel like all that displaced
traffic for Market is gonna have a bigger effect
on streets like Mission, the results were almost the same.
In the morning, on Mission Street Northbound,
we were seeing a change in the range of 30 seconds,
and then in the afternoon an increase of about a minute.
In the AM on Mission Street Southbound
it was a negligible change.
You're talking about 10 seconds or so at the 9 AM period
increasing to about a 50 second increase in travel times
at 10 in the morning, and your afternoon period change
was again about 10 to 15 seconds during the peak period.
And then overall, Howard Street was really
showing no statistical change.
And while there is a small uptick
in traffic delay, Trevor points out
that that's not looking at the whole picture.
It's not just displacement of vehicles
when you put in these busways, they also
absorb a lot of those vehicles as new riders.
It's not fate that you're gonna have
10,000 cars go into a point every day.
It changes and people adapt to change.
It only took one day for bike ridership to jump 20%.
After a month, that number jumped to 25%.
Bus speeds are running 6% faster on average
up and down Market Street, and some lines
have actually seen a 12% improvement.
You know, when you're measuring your benefit
in thousands of people, and the negative impact
in a dozen cars, it's really, it's a no brainer
as far as the benefit versus costs on these busways.
And as for how loss of parking
is gonna affect local business?
Vendors think that a much higher proportion
of their customers are coming via vehicle than they are.
It's 240 square feet to park a personal vehicle
and the odds are that's one customer.
No restaurant or store can survive in an urban
context just based upon people driving,
parking, and going to use that service.
There's actually been proven
a positive economic correlation.
A lot of these, in a lot of the context,
following the improvement of bus or bike infrastructure
because you're actually getting more people
into an area than you were previously
with the on-street parking.
Because of the shelter in place order,
it's been difficult to create any concrete
economic data around the Market Street project.
But around the world, evidence has been
pretty strikingly positive.
It used to look like this.
A parking lot with 75 cars parked here.
So the city council proposed to take away
60, so 15 left, and then the merchants here
said no, we want them all gone.
Because we're right off the pedestrianized zone
where sales are better.
After Central Madrid went car-free,
with a pretty large swath of its downtown area
now no access to cars, it's seen
nearly a 10% boost to retail sales
for businesses in that pedestrian zone.
And it's also seen greenhouse gases drop by 32%.
But not all car-free street projects
are looked at as successes.
In the US during the 60s and 70s cities
created what were known as pedestrian malls.
Streets were congested.
Parking was inadequate.
And pedestrians were endangered.
The solution?
Separate cars and pedestrians for the benefit of both.
In short, what was an ordinary typical main street
is now an extraordinary place
designed for the enjoyment of people.
It was an attempt to help failing
downtown areas attract customers as shopping
had moved to more car friendly
shopping centers in the suburbs.
And while some of these malls are still
thriving today, failures in cities like Chicago
have left a lasting distaste for such projects.
Pedestrian zones, car-free schemes
are definitely not silver bullet solutions
that are just gonna magically fix
an entire city's traffic problems overnight.
Even the most successful ones
still come with their considerations.
A big one is that people who rely on cars,
because they have disabilities, sometimes say
they feel left out of the planning processes
around making whole corridors car-free.
'Cause you still need to ensure that they're
as easy to use, accessible, pick up
and drop off zones for those folks.
Especially when public transit
is not incredibly easy to use.
Another issue is that community leaders
sometimes point out that car-free zones
are usually created in thriving commercial corridors,
but some planners say that that could
exacerbate existing socioeconomic gaps.
Especially since low income people of color
in the United States are disproportionately
victimized by car crashes, and very rarely do you
find these car-free zones in their communities.
It's one of many structural inequalities
built into cities that marginalize communities
and their allies say must be overcome.
Everyone's learning from each other
and you see what success looks like.
And it helps that a lot of these
interventions are very affordable.
Paint is cheap.
You created a subway line worth of capacity
on 14th Street with some paint
and a little bit of enforcement
and that cost benefit is just unbelievable.
And since traffic isn't as large a concern
for cities during the coronavirus pandemic,
some are actually closing off roads to cars entirely.
There are a number of cities that are
intentionally limited or blocking access
to vehicles on neighborhood streets as a way
to boost access to outdoor space
and create safer corridors for
essential workers by fare or bike.
Oakland, California was one of the earliest
cities to adopt this model.
Oakland Slow Streets is trying to send
a message that we want Oaklanders
to recreate in a socially distanced manner.
And it's a question out there right now
whether some of those car-free
streets could be made permanent.
Some cities including Seattle have announced
that they're going to keep theirs
in place indefinitely and Oakland officials
have suggested that they would like to.
But related concerns have come up including,
in Oakland, that the implementation of these projects
happened too quickly and without
very much input at all from neighbors.
Including low income communities of color who fear
they could be disproportionately policed in these spaces.
Another question on the urban planners' minds
right now is whether there's going to be
a surge in demand for driving private vehicles
and therefore a surge in traffic.
Even though very few cases around the world
have been linked to riding buses or trains,
there's this general concern about overcrowding
and the transmission of coronavirus that could
push people away from transit or even living
in dense areas where car-free streets make sense.
These are huge questions on city planners' minds right now.
As the coronavirus transforms the world
around us, the streets are no exception.