Transcriber: shirin etebar Reviewer: Chryssa Rapessi
When you think of most cities in the US, images like this come to mind.
Little green space, lots of fast moving cars,
bumper to bumper traffic and humans, waiting at curbs
and crosswalks clearly outranked by the automobile.
Since the dawn of car culture,
urban transportation planning has been fixated on moving automobiles quickly.
Now, one third of all the land in cities is set up for cars.
We add lanes to six lane highways.
We cut down trees to widen to lane residential roads.
We pave over scarce open space for surface parking.
Many car owners effectively pay double to reserve up space at home and work.
Providing for cars was a massive investment
and has provided us immeasurable flexibility in how we travel.
But our dependence on them.
The costs, the noise, the pollution have taken a toll on us.
We can now do better.
And, here is how,
I’ve been studying transportation and environmental design for 25 years.
I’ve encouraged designers, engineers,
decision makers and the public to look beyond our current car’s model.
But widespread change has been slow to come.
And then covid-19 hit and we went into lockdown.
Conventional rules that kept the auto at the top of the heap
were ditched almost overnight.
We opened up our streets for people walking in the middle of them.
We open them up for outdoor dining.
And those emerging techie modes of getting around town,
this meant more room for regular bikes,
electric bikes and all forms of wheel devices that are cleaner,
lighter and more convenient than cars.
Signs like this one up.
Scenes like this appeared using street space to preserve physical
and mental health became an imperative.
Now, many cities have been trying their hand at alternative street designs
For decades, these initiatives gain some traction
and natural experiment was unfolding.
What happens when cars take a backseat to people?
It propelled my colleague and me to start studying these changes
in 55 of the largest cities in the US.
And what we found is thrilling.
The cities that are innovators in our study are closer to finding solutions
to some of the most pressing and challenging problems of our time,
like climate change, equity, safety.
Seattle was one of the first to jump into action.
I was on their bicycle advisory board 20 years ago
with Bill Nye, the Science Guy.
For decades, they’ve dealt with their crumbling auto infrastructure,
all those bridges and viaducts.
They long been striving to bring more equitable access
to more people on the streets.
Shortly after the lockdown,
the city unfurled a 30 page playbook to use their street space better.
A few weeks later, 26 miles of streets were closed to through car traffic,
opening them up for people on foot and bike.
The city chose these particular areas
because they were underserved by existing pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure,
and they were in neighborhoods that were experiencing more of the impact
from the pandemic, both from a health perspective and an economic perspective.
A month later, the city mayor of Seattle announced
the 20 miles of these streets were going to be closed to cars permanently.
City engineers that are now working with neighborhood groups,
volunteer based organizations like Neighborhood Greenway’s
to bring together residents in designing alternative visions for streets.
Over the summer, on the other side of the country,
Pittsburgh rolled out a bike plus plan.
As the number of people opting to block in bike exploded,
this plan enabled the city to slow down car traffic on even more streets.
Now, Pittsburgh has a long standing commitment to innovation,
and this bike plus plan helps usher into the transportation system,
new innovative forms of mobility.
It might be that dusty Schwinn hanging on the garage,
now refurbished with battery power,
a cargo bike or an electric three wheeled variant of a bike
that provides more comfort, safety or protection from the weather.
You see these types of modes.
They can serve mostly the same purpose as cars, trucks, SUVs,
but they do so using a third of the space to get around.
And these new modes, they can be great for older people or those without a car
so that they can run errands or visit friends.
You see, Pittsburgh is redesigning their city streets now
to accommodate more of these human-scale vehicles.
They're doing so by dropping the average speed limits
on select streets from 30 miles per hour to 20.
This 10 miles per hour difference in the case of a crash can save lives.
And what we’re seeing is that they’re redesigning 50 miles of streets
over the next two years to bring in more welcoming environments
for bike plus type vehicles.
And, in so doing, they’re ensuring that technological advances
meet the needs of humans and not cars.
Further, the bike plus plan is helping the city
reduce transportation related emissions 50 percent by 2030,
all while expanding affordable access to jobs and destinations.
I'm excited to keep an eye on Pittsburgh as they share lessons
for St. Transformation's with other cities moving forward.
We also looked at Austin, Texas,
a city always on the fastest growing cities list.
Now, that growth can be good, but the residents have felt the strain.
They, too, launched a healthy streets program,
opening up select streets to just walking and cycling.
Now, this action proved valuable in helping residents realize and broaden
the benefit of their tax dollars that typically pay to serve cars.
New designs were implemented on South Congress,
the iconic main street of Texas in downtown Austin.
We see in these historic photos how the stretch of road has changed.
Character over time evolve with advances in technology,
civic priorities or public preferences.
With city councils direction,
this stretch of road now has two fewer lanes of car traffic.
A third of the street space was given over to people bicycling and rolling
on scooters, taking them off the busy sidewalks, better suited for dining
under the oak trees, and giving them increased comfort and safety.
Austin residents recently and overwhelmingly
approved more than seven billion dollars
in an unprecedented bond referendum,
a nice chunk of which is going to just transform streets
for active mobility and safety.
Hundreds of low cost,
high impact projects are going to help build out a new bicycle
and pedestrian infrastructure for residents of all ages and abilities.
Seattle, Pittsburgh, Austin and other leading communities,
they've all done the research.
More than half of all car trips in urban and suburban areas
are less than four miles.
Think about a trip to the grocery store, to the gym, or grab a bite to eat.
Unlike a few years ago, we now have more mobility options
for these short hops to be easily satisfied using vehicles
that are lighter, cleaner and greener.
Now, we didn’t need a pandemic
or 80 percent reduction in our local economies to realize that our love affair
with cars has lost its luster,
but the public emergency help spur quick change.
We can now build on this momentum and push it further.
You see, covid-19 has allowed us to time travel
to see what our cities would be like in 10 years
when there’s other ways of getting around town
and the car is not always king.
We're past sitting indifferent
as multiton vehicles go hurling by our homes at highway speed.
Cars are too big for these short trips.
We don’t need insulated hiking boots to attend ballet class
within 20 minutes of where most of us live.
That is, in our existing communities.
We already have the goods and services that we access on a daily or weekly basis.
Streets are the single largest physical asset in cities.
They are owned by the public and we can get more out of them to achieve our goals.
But to do so, we need to open up our aperture.
And look beyond having them always be set up for cars.
Rethinking streets ramps up our climate crisis plans nationwide,
it draws into focus how these spaces are engines
for equity by adopting new formula
for how infrastructure resources can be spent to increase accessibility for all.
And let's not lose sight of another public health crisis,
the number of people who die in car crashes
equal to a Boeing 737 going down every other day.
The city actions that have just described.
Document how streets can change
to accommodate emerging cost effective solutions,
all while out without sacrificing much comfort,
convenience or accessibility.
One hundred years ago, as cities were grappling with issues of clean water
and safe housing, streets were handed over to relatively narrow goal
of maximizing vehicular traffic flow.
Now, owing to technological, economic and environmental change,
we hold in our hand the prospects for a much brighter future.
And we know how to get there.
We're in a once in a century situation with the pandemic.
We have the public's attention.
Repurposing streets by inviting smaller vehicles into our lives
and deemphasizing cars is possible.
The evidence shows us that in the long run we’ll save money, lives
and we'll make our communities more just and resilient. Thank you.