Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are theKeys to Sustainability by David Owen

Author:David Owen [Owen, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Science, Environmental Science, Urban
ISBN: 9781594484841
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2009-09-17T06:27:18+00:00

NEW YORKERS DON’T NECESSARILY APPRECIATE THE REAL reasons that walking is such an important element of their daily life. In the late 1990s, Rudolph Giuliani, then the mayor, undertook a campaign to eradicate jaywalking—a major issue for him. Pedestrian barriers were erected near a number of midtown corners, stoplights and pedestrian crosswalks were shifted away from some intersections, and the police were instructed to issue summonses to pedestrians who crossed streets mid-block or against a light. The policy was almost universally ignored, by cops as well as pedestrians, and it was widely ridiculed. (“Yes, many of us who live in New York City did think Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was joking when he said he was cracking down on jaywalking,” Calvin Trillin wrote in Time in 1998. “But then a law student crossing Sixth Avenue got a $50 jaywalking ticket. What we had forgotten was that Mayor Giuliani is never joking.”11) The policy was also thoroughly misguided. In Manhattan, creative jaywalking is an environmental positive, because it makes traveling on foot easier: it enables pedestrians to maintain their forward progress when traffic lights are against them, and to gain small navigational advantages by weaving between cars on clogged side streets—and it also keeps drivers on their guard, forcing them to slow down. The real purpose of anti-jaywalking laws is not to protect pedestrians but to make life easier for drivers. That’s why anti-jaywalking rules are enforced (and observed) in Los Angeles, where the cars are entirely in charge. Rather than banning jaywalking, cities should take steps to enhance and enforce the rights of pedestrians, and to impede cars in areas where traveling on foot is feasible. (One useful step would be to follow New York City’s good example and make it illegal for drivers to turn right on red lights.) Tightly controlling pedestrians with a view to improving the flow of car traffic just results in more and faster driving, and that makes life even harder and more dangerous for people on foot or on bikes. In fact, studies have shown that pedestrians are safer in urban areas where jaywalking is common than they are in urban areas where it is forbidden.

A concept that has been very popular among forward-thinking urban planners in recent years is that of “traffic calming,” which is the practice of designing and managing roads in ways that force the vehicles that use them to operate at lower, safer speeds. The most common traffic-calming tool in the United States is probably the speed bump, but there are many more sophisticated ones: the elevation and clear marking of crosswalks (to underscore the priority of pedestrians), the mixing of road shapes and textures (to keep drivers attentive), the expansion of curbside parking, especially angle parking (to narrow the travel lanes, thereby impeding drivers and forcing them to slow down), the addition of marked bike lanes (to reduce the space for cars and make cyclists a more conspicuous presence), the planting of tall trees near curbs (to “reduce the optical

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