streetfight handbook for an urban revolution

If transportation were any other field, 33,000 annual deaths would be a national public health crisis and people would lose their jobs. Our goal was to create a safe and connected bike network. The way we look at the health of our bike lane network is how many women and children are using the lanes. The pervasive myth that public transportation riders are subsidized and that people who drive pay the full cost of their trips has never been less true than it is today.

While spending money to build roads is seen as a public investment, critics characterize public transportation as a wasteful welfare subsidy. It can be accomplished quickly by using the basic materials that every city has access to-in New York City’s case more than six thousand miles of streets-and the basic stock that all city transportation agencies already have in their supply depots or available through existing contracts. Planners can reorder a street without destroying a single building, double-decking a street, or building a streetcar, light rail system, or highway interchange. Transforming a car-clogged street into inviting shared space doesn’t always require heavy machinery, complicated reconstruction, or millions of dollars. If governments sincerely believe that their streets are so dangerous they must compel people who ride bikes to wear armor, they should instead immediately redesign their streets to make them safer so people don’t need that protection in the first place. Yet there are so many of them that they’re running down pedestrians and therefore shouldn’t ride on sidewalks. They shouldn’t have their own lanes because there aren’t enough of them to take away space from cars. They shouldn’t ride in streets, which are hostile, car-only zones. They look ridiculous riding around in those helmets and reflective bike gear, more like Mad Max marauders than human beings. They don’t wear helmets or reflective bike gear, jeopardizing themselves. They ride too slow, dangerously obstructing drivers. They ride too fast, terrorizing pedestrians. Never underestimate the anger directed at bicyclists. “An advanced city is not one where poor people drive cars,” Peñalosa says, “but where rich people take public transportation.” It’s like dealing with obesity by loosening your belt. You can’t build your way out of congestion. If building roads actually resulted in less traffic, then surely after sixty years of interstate highway construction we would all be cruising at highway speed. It wasn’t really about the engineering of the space, the real battle was about the culture - about changing the hearts and minds of New Yorkers, of changing their minds about who their streets were for.

Streetfight handbook for an urban revolution