Traffic Life : Passionate Tales and Exit Strategies
Edited by Stephan Wehner
An Anthology
 
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164 Manifesto So the first of our goals is this: to make the invisible visible. Who Owns the Streets? Everybody knows the theoretical answer: the streets belong to all New Yorkers. But reality is quite a different matter. The reality is that the Department of Transportation has one priority: to move as many cars as possible, as fast as possible. All other street users-pedestrians, cyclists, skaters, people in wheelchairs or children in strollers-are an afterthought at best. Again: try the experiment for yourself. Go to a big, busy intersection and time how long the 'walk' lights last. Go to 95th and Riverside, where people crossing from one section of Riverside Park to the other are expected to walk around three sides of a square, crossing four streets, in order to fa- cilitate the lordly progress of cars to and from the West Side Highway. Or look around in your own neighborhood: you're sure to find a similar example of through-the-windshield engineering. Consider former mayor Giuliani's pedestrian barricades in midtown Manhattan, erected to prevent pedestrians from crossing the one-way avenues on the 'downstream' side of intersections. Instead, we are expected to cross three streets instead of one, and wait for three lights, in order to avoid delaying drivers impatient to turn from cross streets onto the avenues. These cage-like structures, with their ar- chitectural rhetoric of incarceration, are the sort of thing we came to expect from Giuliani; but his successor, the sup- posedly enlightened technocrat Mike Bloomberg, has also refused to remove them. Think how much public space is devoted to free parking. Everybody knows how expensive New York real estate is, yet we reserve a huge amount of it for drivers to leave their cars in, and we don't charge them a penny. How much would you have to pay for another hundred square feet of space in your apartment? That's what a car takes up at curbside.
  
Right of Way 165 All this in spite of the fact that car owners are, by a substantial margin, a minority of New Yorkers: around 40% of households (not individuals!) city-wide, considerably less in Brooklyn and Manhattan. But car owners, like gun owners, are regarded by politi- cians as a constituency. The carless are not so regarded, because they have-so far!-no consciousness of their sta- tus as a disenfranchised majority. This, then, is the second of our goals: to awaken the sleeping giant-the majority of New Yorkers whose civic patrimony has been stolen from them for the benefit of a greedy few. What do we want? Bringing cars under control is not an insoluble problem. Cities elsewhere have done it. There's a well-understood set of techniques for the purpose. Enforcement. Easy, and obvious, and it pays for it- self in fines. Are you in the intersection after the light changes? You get a ticket. Brush a pedestrian out of the crosswalk? Get a ticket. Driving faster than is safe on a narrow side street? Get a ticket. A few hundred dollars per driver later, our drivers will be the envy of the world for their tameness and civility. Reduce the flow. One reason drivers are so hysterical in New York is that there are just too many of them trying to fit into too little space. Sure, there are people who really have a legitimate reason to be driving. But there are plenty who don't. There are lots of ways to sort out the two groups. One technique is simply to charge drivers what they really cost: including their costs in land use for roads and for parking, the costs of road and bridge maintenance, and the indirect costs of noise, pollution, policing. The list goes on and on. Traffic engineering for people, not for machines. It's time the Department of Transportation woke up to the

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