Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (35 page)

The connection was not obvious. How on earth could a bicycle path make someone proud?

“Because it gives them self-respect! Look: before, cyclists were just the poorest of the poor, and they were seen as a nuisance. So the biggest value of the bikeway is symbolic. It shows that a citizen on a thirty-dollar bicycle is equally important as one in a thirty-thousand-dollar BMW.

“It is the same with the bus system. We are not trying to be architecturally cute with these measures, and this is not just an exercise in environmentalism or transport. Social justice, that’s what we are constructing!”

The TransMilenio system’s director told me later that Peñalosa had insisted on choosing the lipstick-red paint color and even the name for the rapid bus system. Both were supposed to imbue the bus with a hip, modern cachet, so that riders would feel that taking public transit was a high-status experience, even if they had no other choice. Peñalosa also insisted that new libraries such as El Tintal be spectacular architectural icons designed by the country’s most respected architects, “in homage to every child, every citizen who would enter there.”

Fairness, Felt

There is an assumption in Peñalosa’s declarative flood that demands examination. It is that helping people
feel
more equal is a worthy policy goal—as though feeling equal can matter as much as actually
being
equal. In fact, achieving the former generally demands the latter, as his own interventions acknowledged. But let’s not let go just yet of this idea: that status, as a
subjective feeling
, matters.

There’s no doubt that we are all compelled by social comparisons. Ask yourself which world you would prefer: one where you drove the only Honda Civic on a highway full of BMWs, or a world where you rode the only tricked-out moped in a city of rusty bikes? Surveys suggest that most people say they would choose the second world—having less is okay, but having less than everyone else feels awful. We can’t help but judge our position relative to everyone else.
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Social scientists have known for a long time that poor people are often less healthy than the rich. Some of this health gap can be blamed on lifestyle, long work hours, and lack of access to nutritious food and health care. But not all of it. A decades-long examination of health and mortality in British civil servants—dubbed the Whitehall Studies—found what researchers called “a steep inverse association between social class, as assessed by grade of employment, and mortality from a wide range of diseases.” In other words, the more senior you were in the employment hierarchy, the longer you’d live. Messengers, doormen, and other low-ranking employees were more likely to experience heart disease, cancer, lung disease, and depression than higher-status employees. In the United States, poor people in cities with the widest income gaps are less healthy than poor people in more equal cities. Hypertension, high cholesterol, and decreased immunity—all of these come with low status. Changes in social status affects our brain chemistry. Being low in status is like standing in a shower of stress hormones every day. As biologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky puts it, “the disease consequences of feeling poor are often rooted in the psychosocial consequences of being made to feel poor by one’s surroundings.” If you’ve got food and a roof over your head, the worst part of poverty may in fact be the
feeling
of being poorer than other people.

Big gaps in socioeconomic status can mean trouble for society in general. In their book,
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
, British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrate how gross inequality can lead to higher rates of violent crime, drug use, children born to teenagers, and heart disease. “If you fail to avoid high inequality, you will need more prisons and more police,” they warn governments. “You will have to deal with higher rates of mental illness, drug abuse and every other kind of problem.”
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Some economists argue that status gaps are so harmful that we should treat them like pollution and use the tax system to close them.

All this may be valid, but it would be wrong to reduce the Bogotá program to a strategy for managing people’s feelings. By any objective assessment, the happy mayor’s efforts to make the poor feel more equal actually made them more equal. Consider Fabien Gonzáles, a lanky young man I met at Portal de las Américas, whose story was typical of the city’s poor: he pedaled his bike a mile to the Portal, then rode the TransMilenio fifteen miles to his job as a cashier at the Home Center, a big-box outlet on the wealthy north side of town. His monthly pay: the equivalent of about $240. Gonzáles had no choice but to use his feet, his bike, and the bus to get to work. He did not find the TransMilenio particularly sexy. But it did give him the gift of time.

“Before the TransMilenio I had to leave home two hours before starting work,” he told me as he squeezed onto a northbound express. “Now, forty-five minutes, maximum.”

This is the essence of Peñalosa’s happy city program. It actively redistributes the benefits of city living in order to make it fairer and more tolerable for the biggest number of people. The color of the bus matters, but even more important is the way it speeds riders across the city. (The average TransMilenio rider saves forty minutes a day.) While the upside-down road’s relegation of cars to the rubbly edge might please a status-conscious cyclist, what really matters is the ability of millions of poor people to move quickly and safely. El Tintal library may well inspire its poor neighbors with its postindustrial grace, but more practically, it gives them access to books, and to a place where they can gather and learn. And while it’s possible that the Ciclovía program creates warm and fuzzy feelings between the rich and the poor who gather on becalmed roads, what really matters is that millions of people who have no backyards or cars in which to escape the city can enjoy an ephemeral park and a sense of freedom for a few hours each Sunday.

War and Peace

Peñalosa learned when he was a boy that the redistribution of privilege always meets with resistance. But he was not one for compromise. He ordered the removal of thousands of cluttering commercial billboards, and he tore down the fences residents had erected around neighborhood parks. He went to war not just with cars but with anyone who appropriated public space in Bogotá, even if they were poor—in one case forcing thousands of struggling street vendors to remove stalls that had choked off public plazas. The city’s amenities were for everyone. Peñalosa campaigned to turn the city’s grand country club into a public park. Even the dead were targeted: while Mockus had the words “Life Is Sacred” painted on the walls of a cemetery in the central city, Peñalosa attempted to remove the graves so that the living could have more park space. (Both the country club and cemetery initiatives failed.)

This aggressive plan created plenty of enemies for him at first. Private bus operators and drivers who were pushed from TransMilenio routes were furious. So were the vendors and hawkers who were swept from popular plazas. But none were as vociferous as the business lobby, who were outraged by the bollards that went up along city sidewalks, effectively killing their free parking. They could not imagine customers arriving by foot, bike, or bus.

“He was trying to
Satanize
cars,” Guillermo Botero, the president of FENALCO, Colombia’s national federation of retailers, told me. “The car is a means of subsistence. It is an indispensable means for people to develop their own lives. If we keep squeezing roads, the city will eventually collapse.”

FENALCO and its allies threw the full force of their connections and their bank accounts into a campaign to impeach the mayor. For a while, it looked as though Peñalosa would lose his job.

Equity Wars

The Bogotá backlash was not unique. It is mirrored in cities around the world. No matter how desperate, dysfunctional, or unfair the circumstances, and no matter how rational the initiative, new plans that threaten the urban design status quo face deep and emotional opposition.

In New York City, efforts to redistribute street space—including the creation of 255 miles of painted or separated bike lanes—have met with near-hysterical response from some quarters. In 2011, opponents of a new separated bike lane on the edge of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park actually sued the city to have the lanes removed, though the suit was eventually dismissed.
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City councilors and columnists alike accused Mayor Michael Bloomberg of launching a culture war, favoring a “faddist minority” of bike-riding elitists over car commuters and anyone not rich enough to live in Manhattan. The argument was a complete reversal of the status narrative in Bogotá, and it was false. Two-thirds of the people who work in New York City commute on transit or by walking. Fewer than half of the city’s households even own a car. Only one in a hundred regularly commutes by taxi. The claims of elitism were dripping with irony: in New York and all over America, it is not the rich but the poor who are most likely to travel by bicycle.
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Resistance to urban renovations is driven partly by deeply held beliefs about the relationship between urban form and culture, and what it means to be free in cities. The system of dispersal is entrenched not just in roads and curbs and traffic signals and shopping malls; it has infused our very way of thinking about what streets and cities are for. In 2007, when Mexico City closed several major avenues to car traffic in its own version of the Ciclovía, I witnessed a woman attempting to push a police officer out of her path with the bumper of her Ford Fiesta. “You are violating my human rights!” she hollered out the window to the astonished Sunday strollers and rollers. Later, Mexican radio host Angel Verdugo called on drivers to simply run over cyclists. “They want to be like Europeans,” he complained. “They believe they are living in Paris and riding along the Champs-Élysées!”

Some of this backlash stems from stakeholders’ fear of losing the right to live and move as they have become accustomed. This is natural. As the benefits of urban systems get reapportioned, some people will be inconvenienced. But opponents of happy city redesigns generally lose the equity debate. Today’s urban mobility systems are flat-out unfair, especially in North America. As I detailed earlier, a third of Americans—those too young, too old, too poor, too infirm, or simply not interested—do not drive at all. In an auto-dependent city, that leaves one in every three people at the mercy of scarce public transit or dependent on someone else to chauffeur him around. Children and teenagers are the most obvious victims of this. They are trapped at home and denied the freedom to walk to school or to see friends as they wish.

Nondriving seniors are even worse off: they end up making it to the doctor, to restaurants, to social events, and to religious gatherings only half as often as seniors who can drive. Older African Americans and Latinos are twice as likely to depend on transit as Caucasians and much more likely to be stuck at home.

This unfairness is compounded by the way cities are organized. We have known for decades that poor people and minorities in the United States have less access to parks, green space, and recreation centers, and they even have fewer trees on the streets where they live. This is one reason their children are more likely to suffer the ailments that go with obesity. After decades of sprawl construction, they also have less access to jobs. (A third of low-income African Americans don’t even have access to a car.) They also have less access to food. (More than 2.5 million households in the United States live more than a mile from a supermarket and don’t have access to a car. And the less white the neighborhood, the worse access to supermarkets or healthy food tends to be.)

You might suggest that people simply walk to those stores—walking being the most basic of urban liberties—but minorities in the United States are much less likely than white people even to have sidewalks in their neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, where the wealth has been poured into freeways, the city has admitted that 40 percent of its sidewalks are in disrepair.
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It should be no surprise to anyone familiar with this state of geographic inequity that black and Latino Americans are much more likely to die on the road than whites are. This became salient for me when reviewing news stories of pedestrian fatalities around Atlanta. I found a tragic succession of similar narratives, in which poor people, usually black and usually children, were killed simply trying to dash across the highwaylike byways of suburban Atlanta to reach a suburban bus stop. One might dismiss them as foolish until you note that crosswalks on some of these suburban byways are more than a mile apart.

This is not merely an American problem. Poor children in the United Kingdom are twenty-eight times more likely to be killed on roads than wealthy children are. In Britain, which lost a fifth of its local services to big-boxing and car-focused growth between 1995 and 2000, the New Economics Foundation found that people without cars were finding it harder and harder to shop, get medical services, or even get to work. Eight hundred towns lost their banks. One in four young people reported missing a job interview because it was just too hard to get there.

The financing of this inequity is deeply unfair, too. Because they drive more and farther, the richest 10 percent of the population in the U.K. benefit from four times as much public spending on transport as the poorest 10 percent. In the United States, only about half of roadway expenses are financed by user fees such as gas taxes, vehicle registration, or tolls (and most of that money goes to highways, which pedestrians and cyclists tend not to use). The rest comes from property and income taxes paid by everyone. Here is where equity and efficiency collide: because of their light footprint, infrastructure for walkers and cyclists costs only a tiny fraction of auto infrastructure to build and maintain. So cyclists and pedestrian commuters who pay property and income tax actually end up subsidizing their car-driving neighbors.
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