Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (30 page)

Jarrett Walker, a public transit consultant and author of
Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives
, points out that an experiential gulf often separates the people who plan transit services from the people who use them. Take a typical transit map like Seattle’s, which until recently featured a latticework of basic lines showing every bus route in the city. Although that map was factually correct, Walker argued that it was functionally wrong at various times, since only a fraction of bus routes offered frequent service. A map-inspired traveler could end up waiting an hour or more for a bus—enough to convince anyone that public transit is a hell best avoided. Luckily, Seattle took Walker’s advice and cleared the cognitive fog with new maps that highlight the
real
frequent routes.

But now that the air around us seethes with data, no traveler need be left in the dark. Portland, Oregon, has proved it. In 2005 the city’s transit authority, TriMet, opened up access to the digital information produced by its buses, trams, and trains. Since then, independent developers have produced dozens of smartphone applications offering real-time transit data, arrival times, and maps. For those without a smartphone, a service called Transit Board allows any business with Internet access and a cheap monitor to stream bus or tram arrival times for the stop outside its window, so travelers can duck inside for a microbrew instead of waiting in the drizzle. It’s cheap, it’s good for business, and it takes the anxious edge off the shared ride. Of course, these innovations tend to take place in cities where policy makers actually ride public transit. When transit is seen as a handout to the poor, politicians tend not to invest beyond the most basic levels of service. (People in jurisdictions like Clayton County, Georgia, where transit was cut
entirely
in the great recession, know this too well.)

Freedom from Owning Things

Forty years after Britton’s futurist investigations, cities are indeed finding the technology to reshape the future of mobility. As it turns out, that technology has nothing to do with fantastical new devices for moving and everything to do with new ways of thinking, sharing information, and adjusting the way we use the machines we have been using for years. Through open data, smart cards, wireless communications, and geographic positioning systems, familiar machines are being reenergized and woven together into complex systems that are more powerful than the sum of their parts.

To demonstrate how radically urban systems can build freedom in motion, Britton led me down from his office out onto Rue Joseph Bara. From here we could walk two blocks east to a commuter express train station or a couple of more minutes west to the Vavin Métro station, or we could saunter down to the rapid bus station on Montparnasse. Instead we wandered north, up immaculate sidewalks and through the iron gates of the Luxembourg Gardens. We followed the wide promenade beneath the shade trees toward the cream facade of the Luxembourg Palace. Chrysanthemums exploded from great stone urns, catching the early-fall light. Model sailboats drifted across the great octagonal pond. If we happened to be short on time, we could maximize our time in the park to the second, Britton said, because we were never more than a three-minute walk from a personal metro device. It was hard to understand what he meant until we had skirted the palace, crossed the Rue de Vaugirard, and paused by a row of sturdy-looking bicycles. Then, with a theatrical flourish, Britton swept his wallet above a metallic post. I heard a click. He pulled one of a dozen bicycles free from its berth.

“
Et voilà!
Freedom!” Britton said again, grinning from ear to ear. A sensor in the post recognized Britton’s Navigo card and unlocked a sturdy bicycle. Now it would track his time with that bicycle and note the location of the post where he would lock it again.

That bicycle is the most revolutionary item on the new mobility menu. It is a system whose name—Vélib’, a fusion of
vélo
and
liberté
—encapsulates its remarkable philosophy and utility. “Yes, a personal metro system that we can take in any direction we want. This changes everything!” said Britton.

Hundreds of cities, including Lyon, Montreal, Melbourne, Boston, Washington, New York, and Chicago, have now launched modest shared-bike programs. But no system in the Western world matches the ambition of Paris.
*
The Vélib’ is everywhere, all the time. More than 20,000 of these bicycles are situated at 1,250 stations around the central city. In most places, you are never more than a quarter of a mile from a station. Unclick a Vélib’ from its hitching post and it’s yours for half an hour, virtually free.
^†

With just three gears, and the industrial heft and curvy, solid gray aesthetics of Bauhaus sewing machines, the bikes are certainly not fit for the Tour de France. But since they were introduced, in 2007, they have utterly changed the face of mobility in central Paris.

Each bicycle in the Vélib’ fleet gets used between three and nine times every day. That’s as many as two hundred thousand trips a day. The flood of bicycles in the streets has risen even higher as newbies try the Vélib’, realize the ease of city cycling, and buy their own bicycles.

The Vélib’ is more than a tool for convenience; it embodies a political philosophy that many Americans will find radical. It was created to help Parisians simultaneously save the world and become more free
by owning less stuff
.

Denis Baupin, a Paris Green Party leader, spearheaded the Vélib’ plan as the city’s transportation chief. “If everyone on the planet lived like Parisians did,” he told me, “we would need three planets to supply all the required energy, materials, and garbage space.” Following the chilling math of the environmental footprint theory, the Parisian footprint was a third the size of that left by Americans, but Baupin insisted that Parisians had a duty to shrink their ecological footprint by two-thirds. Baupin, who wore a white linen jacket and had the cheery face of a cherub, didn’t see this as a depressing message at all.

Personal Metro Systems

With stations (
left
) never more than a five-minute walk away, the Vélib’ bicycle share has become a personal metro system for Parisians. On streets with no bicycle lanes (
right
), this is still a freedom reserved for the brave.
(Charles Montgomery)

“Do we say to Parisians, we must agree to be three times less happy than now in the future? Of course this is impossible! We have to explain that when we restrict our consumption, our waste, and so on, we can be even more happy than today.”

For Baupin, the shared bicycle is the ultimate postconsumer machine. It offers a new kind of liberty for anyone willing to share space and equipment. “What is really special about the Vélib’ is that you don’t own it. Like a park, the bicycle is for everybody to share,” he told me. “We don’t take shopping carts home after using them at the supermarket. We don’t cart around our own elevators or restaurants or airplanes. Why should we be forced by urban design to own cars and bicycles?” he asked.

For most people living in capitalist societies, the “right not to own things” sounds a bit like “deprivation” in disguise. The idea can be especially challenging for Americans, who have been advised by heroes, pundits, and presidents that they will risk democracy itself if they stop shopping.

I told Baupin that where I come from, not owning things generally means you are poor. And when you are poor, you are not free. You are stranded. No, no, he said. In the new Paris, the opposite was true. There was simply no room for everyone to drive. There wasn’t enough room for everyone to park. For residents of central Paris, ownership was a tremendous burden. If you owned a car, not only did you have to pay for it, but you had to take care of it and repair it and spend hours on end searching for parking. Ownership could be equally arduous for bike owners, who had to lug their vehicles to their apartments in Paris’s six-story walk-ups or risk having them stolen.

The Vélib’ was a way to break free of those chains. You didn’t have to worry about storing the bike at home or parking it at your destination. You didn’t have to fix it. If you got a flat or if it rained, you just clicked it back into a station and hopped on the Métro. You kept moving.
*

Extreme Sharing

What is true of many purchases—that we don’t want the thing so much as we want what it can do for us—is especially true for transportation. Whether it is a train or a bus or a bicycle or a car, any vehicle’s utility begins when it starts to move. Most private cars spend the vast majority of their life span sitting, doing nothing but costing their owners money in insurance, lease payments, parking, and depreciation. Not only do automobile owners need to earn substantially more just to be able to afford to drive, but we increasingly work in order to drive to and pay for fitness facilities to get the exercise that should be a side effect of the daily journey.
*

In Paris, and around the world, new systems of sharing are setting commuters free.

In 2011 Paris launched Autolib’, an electric car-share system that works much like the Vélib’, with a fleet of rentable vehicles scattered at recharge stations around the city and accessible using the Navigo card. In more typical car-share systems, such as Zipcar, whose fleet of nine thousand vehicles is spread among cities in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, you book a car by phone or online, pick it up from its designated parking spot, and return it when done. But even Autolib’ and Zipcar feel clumsy compared with the versatility of what we might call smart sharing. For example, Daimler, the German car company, has scattered hundreds of Smart cars around dozens of cities, including, in 2011, Vancouver. Daimler’s CAR2GO concept is deliciously simple. Like Zipcar, you find a car using the Internet or an iPhone or Android application. Like Zipcar, you unlock it with the swipe of a magnetic card over a reader on the windshield. But then you can drive that car wherever you want to go within the service area for as long as you like, and when you arrive at your destination, you
just leave it there
. The system tracks cars with GPS, so you don’t need to return it for the next user to find it. No planning required. The thirty-five cents per minute charge covers taxes, insurance, mileage, and even fuel.

The CAR2GO system accommodates the unpredictability and spontaneity of daily life. It has taken Daimler one step toward Britton’s new mobility: the cars leave the factory ready for sharing. And it has added one more layer of freedom to my own city. With two car-share outfits, a CAR2GO system, a tight bus network, and three rapid transit lines, people in Vancouver are selling their cars or leaving them at home. (In 2005, the average family in Vancouver owned 1.25 cars, compared with 1.7 in suburban Surrey.) The city is now looking at proposals to repurpose downtown parking garages. The top floor of one has been converted into a produce garden. “The bottom line on all these changes is more choice, less cost for those who can forgo car ownership, less car traffic, more exercise, safer streets, and liberated garages,” boasted former Vancouver city councilor Peter Ladner.

Car sharing has now found a particularly American form. Just as Baupin fought the notion that everyone should have to own his own vehicle, a San Francisco start-up called Getaround has enabled those who do own to get more bang out of their vehicles by renting them to complete strangers. In 2010 Getaround began providing car owners in the San Francisco area with small Wi-Fi and GPS-enabled units. Owners choose when and where they want to offer their vehicles, and renters find them and book them via an iPhone app. One peer-to-peer user reported that she left her car in San Francisco while she went hiking in Peru—and earned $350 per week in rentals while she was away.
*
Meanwhile, even ride sharing has gotten smarter. A smartphone application called Avego enables drivers and prospective passengers to link up through their phones. At the end of each journey an automated accounting system pays the driver out of the passenger’s account.

In some ways, these peer-to-peer systems work like oxytocin, the trust hormone: they offer an inducement and immediate reward for behaving cooperatively with other people. The cooperative impulse manifests in subtle ways: Vélib’ users in Paris have adopted the custom of twisting bike seats sideways when they return a damaged bike to a station so subsequent users won’t choose them and be disappointed. As these systems grow and eventually guide millions of strangers into mutually beneficial transactions, it will be interesting to observe more changes in user culture and in trust among strangers.

Freedom and Physiology

Car-share devotees may not need to worry about parking and repairs, but they still contribute to—and get stuck in—traffic congestion. This is the great advantage of the bicycle in dense cities, where, moving at between nine and twelve miles per hour, cyclists achieve the same average speeds as drivers (and even shorter trip times, if you take into account time spent parking), in part because they take up so little room.