Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (59 page)

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The amalgamation and supersizing of schools has been a disaster for children’s freedom and health. If school is more than three-quarters of a mile away, children just don’t walk there. The journey passes the convenience threshold, and parents frequently deem it too dangerous to let kids go it alone. Less than 13 percent of children walked to school in 2004, compared with half in 1969. Many fears cause parents to limit their children’s free time in cities, but the real and present danger to suburban children is posed not by muggers and child-nappers, but by cars. Thanks to generations of safety-engineered and accidentally fast roads, kids walking to school in suburbia face more than fifteen times the risk of being in an accident than car passengers. In a hideous irony, the people who run over school-bound children are often the parents of other children.

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A survey of shoppers at the forty-eight-acre Kenaston Power Centre in Winnipeg, Canada, found that they behaved like an entirely different species from people in the urban core. Almost none of them were willing to make even the three-minute walk between Walmart and its big-box neighbors. They jumped back into their cars and began the search for a closer parking spot whenever they moved from store to store. A third of Kenaston’s visitors actually parked their cars three or more times during one visit.

Why wouldn’t they walk, as people do downtown? Shoppers complained that the journey between retail islands meant trudging along the gravel berms of arterial roads, circumnavigating drainage ditches, crossing vast plains of pavement, or all three. The landscape is visible on Google Street View: from the roof of the Google truck the terrain between the Kenaston Power Centre’s Safeway and Walmart is as empty and never-ending as the Arctic tundra.

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In 2006 the city of St. Petersburg, Florida, installed bike-riding lanes on two streets. The average speed of the bicycle riders even in this often uncomfortably hot city was between eleven and twelve miles per hour, before and after the bike lanes were installed, which works out to about .2 miles per minute.

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The problem, Walker speculates, might be semiotic. When drivers see a cyclist wearing a helmet, they read it as a sign that the rider is more experienced and predictable, so they give themselves narrower margins of error when passing. Walker’s work suggests that just by wearing a helmet, cyclists make collisions
more
likely. What’s remarkable is how drivers tend to adjust their behavior according to less-than-logical assumptions. For example, when Walker wore a wig of long hair, suggesting that he was female, drivers gave him much more room. Walker offers fascinating graphs on his home page:
www.drianwalker.com/overtaking/overtakingprobrief.pdf
.

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It helps to compare cities and their transportation systems to forests. Rich, diverse ecosystems are always healthier and more resilient than monocultures. Just as a mixed forest can better survive a beetle infestation than a tree farm consisting of one variety of pine, a city that enables endless combinations of mobility will be much more resilient than a city that organizes itself around just one way of moving. It will adjust more easily to shifts in economics, human taste, and energy supply. It will fill in the blanks that master planners cannot see within the tangle of the complex urban system. It will make the most of technologies that can solve the problems particular to cities: tight spaces, congested streets, and, most of all, people with wildly varying preferences.

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Mobility smart cards have proliferated around the world. The smartest of all is Hong Kong’s Octopus, a contactless electronic payment card launched in 1997 to collect fares for the city’s mass transit system. The Octopus gets you on virtually every public transport in the city. Load it up with cash, and it also works for parking meters, car parks, supermarkets, and service stations. You can even set it to open the lobby door of your apartment building. Most American cities still occupy the old universe. Seattle, for example, has no less than three transit providers, each requiring its own fare either at the beginning or the end of your trip. The city has to post flowcharts explaining when and how you pay to ride.

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The Hangzhou bicycle company plans to offer a mind-boggling 175,000 bikes for share across that Chinese city by 2020.

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Subscriptions to the system cost one euro per day, five euros per week, or twenty-nine euros per year. After the first (free) half hour, the system begins to charge an incrementally higher rate for each additional half hour, in order to keep bicycles in circulation.

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Ironically, Baupin’s postconsumer bike system was built and paid for and is now run by JCDecaux, the biggest advertising company in France. In a complex deal, the city gets all the rental fees while JCDecaux gets revenue from the ad space it sells on more than sixteen hundred on-street billboards throughout the city. So while riders experience the joys of nonownership, their public space is plastered with messages tweaking their status impulses, reminding them that they would be happier if they bought more stuff. This was a compromise between Baupin’s Greens and the French Socialist Party, who made up the city’s coalition government at the time.

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Any honest assessment of travel time has to include the hours you spend working to pay for your vehicle, as well as the time spent on your journey—a concept known as effective speed.

Most drivers tend to wildly underestimate the time they must spend earning money to pay for their trips. (In England, for example, the Royal Automobile Club has found that vehicle expenses are more than double what drivers believed they were.) You must work to purchase gas and oil, of course, but you must also work to pay costs hidden in loan financing, parking fees, repairs, tolls, accessories, maintenance, and depreciation. This stuff adds up. Throw all those work and driving hours together, and you arrive at your effective speed—how many miles you are really traveling for every hour of effort. Let’s break it down:

The average American office worker drives twenty-seven miles a day and spends about an hour on the road. According to the American Automobile Association, that drive costs her about $18.36. (In 2013 the AAA estimated that it cost about $9,122 to travel fifteen thousand miles, a rough estimate of the average person’s mileage.) Let’s say she nets $20 an hour as an office manager. She needs to work an extra forty-five minutes just to pay for her drive, which means, in the end, she takes almost two hours of combined work and travel time to cross those twenty-seven miles. Effective travel speed: just over fifteen miles per hour. Suddenly the average car commute doesn’t look so fast.

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Through a deal with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, users get the same insurance coverage as owners. The states of California and Oregon have both changed their laws to ensure that car owners cannot be held liable for the accidents of their borrowers.

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Even in New York City, where cyclists have the reputation similar to that of Paris drivers, the number of cyclists is growing much faster than the number of cyclist-involved accidents.

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Woonerven
zones depend on two critical rules: First, auto drivers don’t have equal rights; they are guests, legally bound to give the right-of-way to bicycles and pedestrians. Second, nobody in a
woonerf
moves much faster than the speed of perceived safety, which amounts to a brisk walking pace.

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By the 1960s, only one in five Copenhageners cycled to work.

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The zone was briefly extended west to include Kensington and Chelsea, but public opposition led the extension to be canceled in 2010.

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Rude behavior on crowded sidewalks is so hard on mental health that Leon James, a University of Hawaii traffic psychologist, created a Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome Scale to measure pedestrian rage. If you regularly fight your way down crowded Midtown Manhattan sidewalks, chances are you have experienced some of James’s syndrome traits, which range from “thinking denigrating thoughts” about other walkers, to displaying a mean face, to aggressive passing and bumping maneuvers. Each aggressive thought or action heaps new stress on the walker and the people around her—which means that New Yorkers are in trouble because their sidewalks got 13 percent more crowded between 2007 and 2011 alone.

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Status comparisons are an almost inescapable habit. Most people say they would forgo a pay raise if it means that their colleagues will get an even bigger raise. Other surveys find that people tend to be less happy with their jobs the more their spouses earn.

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This may be part of the reason for the strong connection being found between inequality and the happiness of societies in general. If economic growth makes a country richer but less equal, it can actually corrode general happiness. This is terrible news for the United States, where there has been a steady upward sucking of wealth and power in the past three decades. Thirty years ago, an American CEO would make forty times as much as the lowest-paid person in the company. Now the ratio is more than four hundred to one.

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The opponents’ various claims—that the lanes are neither safe nor popular—contradict reality. City studies found that cycling doubled in the city between 2006 and 2010, and that when protected bike lanes were installed, crashes causing injury for all road users typically drop by a whopping 40 percent.

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A 2011 study found that the poorest quarter of all Americans make nearly one-third of all bike trips.

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Sidewalks in Los Angeles and other California cities are in such bad shape that they are facing civil rights lawsuits from disabled people, who find cracked and broken surfaces, and curbs without ramps, totally impassable.

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The number crunchers at the Victoria Transport Policy Institute estimate that for every mile that someone in the United States travels in an automobile, on a bike, or on foot, the costs in public infrastructure are 29.3 cents, .9 cents, and .2 cents, respectively.

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In American cities, extra commuting costs incurred after a move of twelve to fifteen miles can eat up all the savings offered by cheaper housing.

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Vancouver and Melbourne, frequent winners on surveys of livability, ranked just behind Hong Kong as the least affordable in Demographia’s 2012 International Housing Affordability Survey of cities in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, and Hong Kong. The survey is ideologically driven—its founder, Wendell Cox, is a vocal opponent of smart-growth policies and a paid consultant for various free-market think tanks—but it does make a clear point about the cost of housing. (Detroit was the most affordable among surveyed cities.)

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The project contains 536 market condos, 125 subsidized apartments for singles, and 75 family nonmarket housing units.

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By nearly 250,000 tons a year.

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After the charge was introduced in 2003, the city reduced emissions by almost a fifth when most city’s emissions were climbing.

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Mexico experiences an average of twenty-three pedestrian deaths a day. For the drug war to beat that, there would have to be more than 8,395 killings a year.

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When we walk or cycle, we burn food calories and get fit. When we drive, we burn fossil fuels but few calories. Imagine getting from, say, the Mableton Post Office in suburban Atlanta down to the Big Kmart at the Village at Mableton. According to the rough online calculator at Reroute.it, you would burn 159 calories walking the 1.5 miles (burning roughly the energy contained in two chocolate-chip cookies or a bottle of beer), 47 calories biking (burning a mandarin orange), or blow 1.2 pounds of carbon dioxide by driving.

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Proponents of electric cars have argued that they fall outside this carbon equation. Indeed, electric vehicles charged from systems that derive their power from hydroelectric or nuclear power plants produce fewer emissions. But this ignores the emissions created just building any car. Given the energy used to manufacture a new, energy-efficient Toyota Prius, for example, one would actually save more energy and emissions by continuing to drive a mid-’90s Geo Metro.

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This includes health-care costs, lost wages due to illness or disability, and value of future earnings lost by premature death. Direct medical costs alone add up to $61 billion (adjusted to 2008 dollars).

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Society reaps even more indirect emergency service and health-care savings when cities provide attractive transit service, because for every mile traveled, riding a bus is ten times safer than driving a car.

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According to the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index (
http://htaindex.cnt.org
), an average household in 2008 in Weston Ranch emitted more than eleven metric tons per year from auto use and spent more than $5,000 on gas (assuming that they did not commute outside of Stockton for work). In comparison, the average household in San Francisco’s Mission District emitted about four metric tons per year from auto use and spent about half as much on gas.