9
On our first night in Marrakesh my wife and I took our two-year-old son to the central square, the Jemaa el Fna, the largest public square in Africa, famed for its food stalls and entertainments. As the sun began to descend behind the Medina, the orange-juice sellers packed up their wares and the strings of lights that ran around the rickety kitchens of the street canteens flickered into life. Massive vats of stew, steaming soups and grills began to bubble and sizzle in preparation for the evening.
The square itself began to fill as leather sellers touted their goods from outstretched arms; snake charmers found their spots, settling down upon carpets, placing a wicker basket in front of them, encouraging the clusters of watchers to speculate what was inside; storytellers cleared their throats as the hypnotic Sufi rhythms of the Gnawa players provided a throbbing soundscape to the proceedings. We wove through the milling crowds, intoxicated by the warm smells of the food, stopping at various points to get our bearings, but allowing ourselves to become lost amongst the throng.
After steaming bowls of delicious harira soup, tumblers of freshly squeezed juices, encounters with Barbary monkeys and de-fanged cobras, it was time to make our way back to the hotel, leaving the nightly carnival to run its course. Walking away from the square we found the main road where our taxi was parked, patiently waiting on the far side of the street. Despite having navigated the crowded square for the past three hours with some ease, crossing the road was a different matter altogether. Looking in both directions, there were neither traffic lights nor a pedestrian crossing to help us.
Between us and the taxi the road was crammed with cars and it took us over twenty minutes of watching how the locals weaved amongst the slowly moving vehicles until we gained enough courage to launch ourselves out. Our child was clasped tightly in our arms as we forced the traffic to stop, signalling desperately to the drivers in our path, ignoring the klaxon of car horns which we soon came to learn are used in Morocco not as a warning of last resort, but as a universal communication system. The whole experience was a stark reminder, if we needed one, that we were not at home.
So what does traffic tell us about the city?
Congestion is the Faustian bargain that we have negotiated for our urban freedoms. It is also a significant source of pollution within the city and a major threat to the environment. In 2005 the average American spent over thirty-eight hours stuck in traffic, though this is by no means the worst example. Gridlock can damage a city – it is estimated that traffic in New York adds $1.9 billion to the cost of doing business, a loss of $4.6 billion in unrealised business, and nearly $6 billion in lost time and productivity – but the solutions are not as straightforward as one might assume. The irony is that the more we want to be free, the more we sit in traffic jams.
Lagos, Nigeria, has some of the worst traffic problems in the world. In a recent report this congestion was caused by a ‘perfect storm’ of converging factors: a poor level of urban planning unable to cope with the rapidly rising urban population (Lagos is considered the fastest-growing mega-city in the world) and insufficient public-transport schemes. That the roads are of poor quality forces cars to move slowly while the lack of pavements and parking regulations, and the addition of cattle on the highway are further causes of gridlock. Accidents are frequent and there are insufficient services to respond in a timely fashion. As a result many people find it impossible to live and work in the city.
When American journalist Joshua Hammer took a 40-mile drive around Lagos, he did not expect that it would take him twelve hours. In addition, he was surprised when finding himself stuck in one jam to hear a terrible banging: ‘These crazy men – they steal the headlights!’ my driver exclaimed. Crowbar-wielding thieves were prowling the traffic jam, preying on captive motorists. “Don’t get out the car,” the driver warned.’1 As Hammer notes, there is a direct correlation between the level of corruption within a state and the number of accidents on the nation’s roadways. Drivers themselves are the problem, for as one tourist website reports: ‘much of the traffic madness is caused by drivers’ refusal to obey simple traffic rules’; instead they overtake in the wrong lane, drive up one-way streets in the wrong direction, park in congested areas and disobey traffic signals as well as parking wardens.
On the other hand, traffic can be a sign of a city’s success. I was reminded of the dictum ‘You are not in a traffic jam, you are the traffic’ as I sat in the back of the autorickshaw in Bangalore, moving from my hotel for a meeting in a neighbourhood I did not know. I could make no suggestion, nor offer my own special short cut, or even get out and walk, as I was a stranger in an unfamiliar city; I was stuck. This congestion is another result of the city’s rapid expansion as it became Asia’s Silicon Valley; restricted by its original form as a colonial capital, a garden city for retiring officers, it has found it very difficult to cope with the pressure of growth and the traffic infrastructure is beyond breaking point.
The roads in Bangalore are at gridlock, to the extent that many IT moguls have threatened to move away unless something is done. Yet in spite of tax schemes and congestion controls to regulate the 5 million cars, trucks and motorbikes, the number of vehicles on the road has risen. There have been attempts to get people to walk or take public transit and a new light rail system was announced in 2011, hoping to serve 500,000 workers a day. For the busy engineer, however, the problem of congestion is a waste of time as much as it is an ecological disaster and so in 2010 it was decided to make it easier to reach Electronic City via an elevated highway, reducing driving time from the centre to fifteen minutes. It is a solution for the few, and in time most likely will become as congested as the problem it was created to solve.
The Bangalore overpass, riding above the city to high tech suburbs
The contrast between Lagos and Bangalore illustrates the extremes of the problem of congestion in the city. The most straightforward response to congestion must surely be to build more roads, or to find a way for the traffic to move more efficiently. But although redesigning the city to accommodate the needs of the citizens who live there sounds a very smart thing to do, it is not as simple as one might imagine.
The history of the city can be charted by its road schemes. Today, archaeologists map out the ancient outlines of the Roman London street plan through the discovery of ancient coins that were haphazardly dropped by travellers. From the air one can see how the London streets still radiate from the point where the first London Bridge once stood on Fish Hill, leading in all directions to the other Roman settlements beyond Londinium. This shows that the growth of the city can be measured by the arteries and capillaries of avenues, streets and alleys. It is often easy to believe that a city is made up of its roads; but congestion itself was not created by cars. Throughout history, traffic has been an urban problem. In ancient Rome, Julius Caesar issued laws banning all wheeled traffic in the city centre during the day, and he also incorporated the vigiles, a protean traffic police. Our contemporary cities, as we have seen, have been built around the automobile, and now we are starting to count the costs. What to do? In the future do we change our cities or do we change our behaviour?
First we need to understand traffic itself. On the one hand traffic can be defined by individual behaviour, sitting behind the wheel, sealed off from the rest of the world, avoiding human contact. However, once you add a number of drivers in their cars, all behaving in their own interests, forced to react to each other, this collection of singular elements transforms into a unified flow, showing all the personality of a stream of liquid. Traffic is not a rational, ordered problem. It is not a simple equation between the numbers of cars and the quantity of asphalt available. Rather it displays the same characteristics of complexity as the city itself. The river of traffic is influenced as the roadway widens or slows as it merges into a bottleneck; traffic lights or signposts bring the flow to a stop like a closed tap and then opens, releasing the stream; changing lanes without indicating can often cause a disruption that disturbs the hydrodynamics of movement, sudden braking ricocheting backwards. It makes sense therefore that if we reduce the friction of stoppages and flows, the traffic will move faster.
Perhaps the shape of the city itself is to blame and, therefore, in order to address these grave problems in the future we have to start again from scratch. For many the ordered regularity of the grid system offers the ideal form. This organised, rational system has ancient origins, reaching back further than Athens or Rome, to the first cities of the Indus Valley. Centuries later New York gained its formal networks of streets with the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. The grid itself was decided on when the commissioners put a sieve on top of the masterplan and copied out the regular patterns. Yet Manhattan still suffers from congestion, so clearly a rational street plan is not enough. The complex question of congestion deserves a complex answer, rather than a logical one. If we are looking for the most efficient flow of traffic through the city, perhaps we are looking in the wrong place for an answer.
The Prussian city of Königsberg has an unexpected place in the history of walking. In the early nineeenth century it was said that the locals could set their pocket watches by the sight of the philosopher Emmanuel Kant, who would take his daily perambulation of the city at five o’clock sharp every day without fail. On these walks he would allow himself a brief respite from his deep philosophical musings. Seven decades earlier, Königsberg mathematician Leonhard Euler also took to the streets to solve a very different kind of problem. In 1735 he was given the challenge of finding the quickest route through the city over all seven bridges that crossed the river but without ever using one more than once. Euler had to invent a whole new area of mathematics, graph theory, in order to find the solution.
Euler’s challenge has evolved into a famous thought-experiment called the Travelling Salesman Problem. A door-to-door merchant must find the shortest and quickest route between various points in order to maximise his time and profits. As the number of stop-offs increases the variable of potential routes rises exponentially: between two points, the variation of journey is simple; between four points, the variables increase to twenty-four; soon, however, you start to get very large numbers, and finding the quickest route between ten points means checking 3.6 million options. Many scientists have used huge computers to crack this solution: in May 2004, a team of mathematicians found the shortest route between the 24,978 points charted on a map of Sweden using 96 Intel Xeon 2.8 Ghz processors running concurrently, taking a total of 84.8 years of computing time.2
But rather than using complex mathematics there is another way that will show us how best to design the most efficient route between a series of random destinations: ants. The common black ant is in constant pursuit of the shortest route between points, but rather than expecting to find the solution individually, the whole colony works together. Each ant lays a pheromone trail and as each ant finds the shortest route, collectively the best trails begin to be identified by the strongest scent. In 1997 Marco Dorigo and Luca Maria Gambardella created a colony of virtual ants to simulate a possible solution for the travelling salesman’s problem. The experiments showed that the shortest route is not always the most obvious. The ants were faster than the computers, and collectively made calculations that no individual planner could make in a lifetime.
Even more improbably, slime mould also has a lot to tell us about the best way to design our road systems. In October 2010 a group of Mexican scientists alongside Andrew Adamatzky, of the Unconventional Computing Department of the University of the West of England, reported the results of their study, with the astonishing title ‘Approximating Mexican Highways with Slime Mould’ in which they set up an experiment ‘to approximate, or rather re-construct, development of transport networks in Mexico’. They did this by replicating the Mexican highway system in a Petri dish, cutting a ‘Mexico-shaped plate of agar [jelly], represent[ing] nineteen major urban regions by oat flakes and plac[ing] a plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum [slime mould] in place of Mexico City’. By recording how the mould moved across the Petri dish towards the oat flakes, creating connections and routes between the locations, the scientists mapped out the shortest and most efficient routes between the many different destinations.
The experiment was then repeated with similar samples representing Australia, Africa, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Iberia [Spain and Portugal], Italy and Malaysia. What it proved was that slime mould is naturally better than the official planning brains in creating an efficient transport network, but that some nations were better than others: Malaysia, Italy and Canada planned the most efficient highway systems in parallel with the slime-mould patterns.3
Our current road system is thus hindered by a number of factors that make it slower and less efficient than we imagine, and yet we cannot rip it up and start again. But rather than building more roads, or a new road system, another group of planners believes that making drivers more responsible can improve safety and reduce congestion. In a Swiss/German paper published in 2008 by Stefan Lammer and Dirk Helbing it was suggested that the traffic-control system should be liberated from all human influence and be allowed to self-organise. In effect, traffic lights should decide themselves when to go green or red.
Alternatively, the Belgian traffic engineer Hans Monderman has suggested that we should do away with traffic lights altogether. In a 2005 exercise, which has become known as the ‘Shared Space’ experiment, Monderman turned out all the traffic lights and most of the signposts in the central square of the Dutch town of Makkinga, through which 22,000 cars passed a day. When a New York Times journalist visited the site with Monderman he was surprised to find: ‘It was virtually naked, stripped of all lights, signs and road markings, there was no division between the road and sidewalk. It was basically a bare brick square.’ However, when Monderman attempted to cross the road he ‘deliberately failed to check for oncoming traffic before crossing the street, [but] the drivers slowed for him. No one honked or shouted rude words out of the window.’4
Monderman’s dangerous idea was counterintuitive: by creating a shared space between cars and pedestrians, risk is reduced rather than increased, forcing drivers to be more aware of their surroundings. On the junction in Makkinga that had seen thirty-six accidents in the four years leading up to the trial, there were only two between 2006 and 2008. Such responsibility might force the common commuter to drive more slowly through the centre of town but, in the end, they might arrive at their destination quicker; as one citizen reported: ‘I am used to it now. You drive more slowly and carefully, but somehow you seem to get around town quicker.’
In 2012 Exhibition Road was re-opened as a ‘shared space’, a broad Victorian thoroughfare lined with the major museums of London – the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert, the Science Museum, plus Imperial College and the Royal Geographical Society – linking South Kensington to Hyde Park. This is one of the main tourist areas of the city, attracting foreigners, families and children. Monderman’s Makkinga experiment was conducted in a small town where one is more likely to recognise the people crossing the street, and therefore have a stronger connection. Does the rule remain the same in a city?
Witnessing this latest upgrade is a disconcerting experience. I have visited the museums here my whole life, as a child wondering at the dinosaurs in the NHM, pushing the buttons that make the engines work at the Science Museum, marvelling at the Renaissance Court in the V&A. I now go there with my own children hoping to pass on some of the joys of discovery that I once felt. Now there are no stone flags to define the edge between road and pavement, only a shallow brick lip. The painted lines of the centre of the road and the parking spaces have disappeared, replaced by subtle steel studs. Bricks in a criss-cross pattern traverse the roads and ride up onto what was once pavement.
‘Shared space’ in Exhibition Road, London
Walking along this once familiar road, I now feel more unsure than I used to; I am more aware of the traffic, hoping that it will notice me and my children as it cruises by. I try to suppress the fear that this is an accident waiting to happen, but that is the point. Safety comes from making sure one behaves safely, not by copious restrictions and barriers.
The results from the Exhibition Road experiment are still coming in but in a more thorough study of a similar project, on New Road in Brighton, 92.9 per cent of all people interviewed considered the ‘shared space’ an improvement; many felt that the design had increased a sense of empowerment, encouraging a sense of ownership amongst the local businesses, as well as a desire for shoppers to spend time there. As a result, 80 per cent of shops saw a marked increase in takings.5 The solution to the congestion problem therefore lies not in building more but getting people to change the way they behave. ‘Shared space’ seems to offer an answer to congestion; it does not necessarily reduce the number of cars on the road.
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, transport is the second-largest source of carbon emissions in America; while electricity generation produces a third of all greenhouse gases, transportation takes up 28 per cent – of which 34 per cent includes private cars, while trucks, SUVs and minivans represent the next 28 per cent. Traffic has been on the increase since the 1990s, accounting for nearly 50 per cent of the rise in all carbon emissions. In the UK, cars and all road transport account for approximately 20 per cent of all pollution. Globally, the figure falls slightly to 15 per cent; however this was partially affected by the economic downturn as the distribution of exports declined. Much of this traffic occurs in the city and it is a crisis that we can all individually do something about.
Will greener cars, with more efficient energy usage, allow us to cut down emissions? Certainly we have the technology to be able to do this, and if there is demand for electric cars or cleaner engines, the big manufacturers will see there is a market for these new vehicles. However, this does not offer the solution one might hope for. Since 2008, Sweden has led the world in purchasing green cars, but car emissions have steadily increased. It appears that while the newer, more efficient cars produce less carbon emissions, the drivers have increased the amount of time they spend in their cars. Why this might be is a cause of some controversy.
For some, such as New Yorker and writer David Owen, this is an example of the Jevon Paradox, named after the Victorian English economist William Stanley Jevon, who proposed that as technology makes energy use more efficient, we are likely to use more of it, rather than less. Cleaner engines, therefore, might reduce emissions; they also encourage us to increase car usage. This, in the end, will more than likely result in still too many cars in the gridlock. A change in engine technology does not, therefore, reduce the number of vehicles bumper to bumper on the road; what is needed is a strategy to get people out of their cars altogether.
Driving around the city, one of the main problems often faced by everyone is the search for a free parking space. In Park Slope, Brooklyn, 45 per cent of all traffic is created by cars circling the block. The situation is even worse in China, where traditional cities cannot cope with the rapid rise in car ownership. Today, there is a desperate lack of parking spaces in the major cities: at the beginning of 2011 it was calculated that in the Shijingshan neighbourhood of Beijing, which is home to 110,000 cars, 11,000 are without parking spaces; the city of Chongqing lacks a total of 190,000 spaces, and this deficit is growing by 400 cars a day. In Xi’an, only 600,000 of the total 1.1 million cars have a parking bay. In addition, private parking can amount to a third of the annual costs of running a car. In 2012 the Shanghai city authorities therefore imposed a new rule making it impossible to buy a new car without first securing a parking place.
The problem in Chinese cities is now so great that even the former president, Hu Jintao, stepped in, commanding that parking be integrated into all new developments.6 The future of the Chinese city depends on estimating the highest number of parking facilities that the city can tolerate; already, pollution and congestion makes life in Beijing difficult. Failure to prepare the Chinese cities that are currently growing faster than any other urban region in history could be an environmental and economic disaster.
But the cost of parking could be one way to dissuade people from using their cars in the city, and the reduction of parking bays and the high price for leaving one’s car in the city centre can have very positive effects on congestion. In 2009 the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency produced a report on parking restrictions following the idea of ‘Parking Guru’ Donald Shoup. In his book The High Price of Free Parking, Shoup had shown how inefficient free parking could be and how much energy was used searching for a space in a popular neighbourhood. Shoup advises that parking, because it is a fixed supply, should be priced according to demand. In addition, information on where parking is available needs to be displayed on roadside boards, so that drivers know where to go to rather than waste time on a random search for free spaces. The end report also recommended extending meter hours, and only allowing cars to park for four hours. This would bring new revenue to the city, reduce congestion and pollution, and force cars to move on faster.
The San Francisco parking scheme aims to have 85 per cent of all parking bays occupied at any given time, and clear real-time information to allow drivers to find their spot without inconvenience. This will certainly clear some of the congestion, yet it is the cost of driving itself that will dissuade people from bringing their cars into the city in the first place. Congestion charging is also a way of hitting drivers where it most hurts. The first such urban scheme was in Singapore in 1975 and was one of the first policies used to develop the city state as the business capital of the Far East. The effects were dramatic. Before the scheme, in June 1975, 32,000 vehicles were registered as entering the city each day, a figure which dropped to 7,700 as soon as the congestion charge was imposed. Similar schemes have been introduced into other cities including Rome, Stockholm, Milan and, in 2003, London.
The scheme was first introduced in Stockholm in 2007 and it was calculated that within three years inner-city traffic volume had reduced by 20 per cent and traffic jams by 30 per cent. London is the most congested city in Europe, and contains five of the top ten traffic hotspots in the UK. Even worse, most of the congestion can be found on the city’s main roads so that 30 per cent of traffic clogs up only 5 per cent of the city’s network. On the first day of the scheme in London, 17 February 2003, a total of 190,000 vehicles entered the congestion zone, an instant 25 per cent drop in car numbers.
But over time the results have been less conclusive. Whilst having fewer cars in the centre of the city reduces pollution, by 2008 congestion levels had returned to the 2002 gridlock, and is set to increase another 15 per cent over the next five years. So congestion continues to be a big problem in the city and traffic speeds continue to fall. In 2011 it was estimated that £2–4 billion in revenue was being lost every year because of traffic. In addition, air pollution was getting worse. At least 4,000 deaths a year are said to be attributable, at least in part, to the city’s poor air quality.
Congestion charging cannot work by itself, for while cost might dissuade some drivers from getting into their cars, the city cannot function unless people can travel freely, get to work or home at every time of the day. As a strategy for getting cars off the road, the congestion charge affects the poor more than the rich, and becomes an issue about the right to the city. As a green policy, for improving air quality and pollution levels, the jury is still out. However, in some circumstances, no traffic is even worse for the city than gridlock. For writers such as David Owen, author of Green Metropolis, traffic jams might just be good for the city, for as he notes: ‘Traffic jams are actually beneficial, environmentally, if they reduce the willingness of drivers to drive and, in doing so, turn car pool, buses, trains, bicycles, walking and urban apartments into attractive options.’7 So what is the right kind of traffic?
It is hard to forget the experience of standing in the centre of the Santiago de Chile bus terminal. I had never seen so many buses, each with a name in the front window, telling passengers where they were going: southwards along the length of the country to Punta Arenas, northwards across the Atacama Desert and Peru, up to the mountains and westwards to the ports and cities along the coast. It was my second day in the city and I was still attempting to make sense of the place.
If you want to understand how Latin America works, visit the bus station. After buying my tickets, I went to the café and ordered coffee and my first empanada, a small pasty filled with meat and potato. As I waited for my bus I watched queues of people snaking around the vehicles, cramming their goods and bags, livestock even, into the storage compartments. My first journey, an eighteen-hour trip to Puerto Montt, only a third of the way down the country, made me realise how small Britain was. On another occasion, I took a twelve-hour bus trip to Entre Lagos in the south, which had a dinner service, waitress and a bar.
In a city where the majority of the population do not have cars, an efficient public-transit system is vital. Transport is any mayor’s most pressing priority, and the scale of such projects are mind-boggling. In 2010 it was estimated that the New York subway system alone used as much electricity as the entire city of Buffalo. On an average day in London, at least 24 million journeys are taken. The bus, tube and light-railway network cover a total sum of 3.5 billion miles in a year – approximately forty times the distance between the earth and the sun.8 This is what we experience every morning as we move from home to work and back again, get the children to school and make sure we reach the hospital in time for the appointment. We take public transport for granted and complain when there are delays or overcrowding. It is the single main cause of complaints to the 311 phone line in New York; the cost of tube tickets was one of the key issues during the 2012 London mayoral contest. More importantly, transit can transform a city.
In his book, Human Transit, Jarrett Walker questions whether we have the right priorities when it comes to transport policy: public transit is by far the most efficient way of transporting large numbers of people around a dense urban space, but not everyone can agree on what that actually entails. When we think about transit we often consider it as a secondary alternative to driving ourselves and therefore ask questions like ‘Do the buses go where you want them to?’ ‘Do you want them to be faster or cheaper?’ ‘Do we want a more frequent service or one that prioritises rush hour?’ ‘Should public transit focus its attention on servicing the poor and non car owners, or everyone?’ Walker makes a clear distinction between what one wants and what is possible. There are many different types of transit to fit all forms of city, he concludes, and the provision of buses and railways is more than a purely functional or financial question; it is a debate about what kind of city you want to live in.9
An example of this debate can be found in Curitiba, the capital of the Brazilian province of Parana. It was no accident that in 2001, when UNESCO was searching for a city on which to model the rebuilding of post-invasion Kabul, the ravaged capital of Afghanistan, it chose Curitiba. It is a curious story: until the 1960s the city – in which the population had leapt from 180,000 to 360,000 in just ten years – had been designed around the automobile, with wide boulevards radiating out of the centre. In the 1980s there had been concerns that rapid urbanisation would make expansion unmanageable, the centre gridlocked with traffic, the air thick with exhaust fumes. So the idea of a new masterplan was born with the philosophy: ‘a city is not a problem but the solution’. The initial plan was to knock down some of the more elegant turn-of-the-century houses in order to widen the main routes in the centre, as well as force an ugly overpass through the middle.
However, these proposals met with unexpected opposition, led by Jaime Lerner from the architecture and planning school of the Federal University, who complained that ‘they were trying to throw away the story of the city’.10 Thus in 1988, almost by chance, the 33-year-old Lerner found himself named mayor. The first thing he did was to transform the central road, the Rua Quinze de Novembro; but instead of attempting to manage traffic through the middle of the city, he pedestrianised the thoroughfare. Lerner was so concerned about the level of opposition to the scheme that he completed the whole operation in a weekend; closing the road on a Friday night, workmen planting over 10,000 flowers over the next forty-eight hours, and opening again on Monday morning. Beforehand, local shopkeepers had threatened to sue for lost earnings; by Monday lunchtime there were petitions for other areas of the city to be made car-free.
However, Lerner also knew that public transport had to be at the heart of the new masterplan. The project began by devising a transit system running from the centre along the five main corridors into the suburbs. It was designed to connect all the neighbourhoods, and in response zoning laws were used to build neighbourhoods integrated around the network, so that a shiny new bus stop was one of the first things to be constructed when new housing was created. In addition, the system needed to be efficient, fast and well designed to ensure that people got out of their cars and used it, so the BRT Express Buses were given their own exclusive lane running alongside the car.
Lerner’s brilliant design for bus stops in Curitiba
Yet perhaps the most surprising innovation occurred as Lerner stood at one bus stop and watched how people took so long to get on and off the bus. He noted that it took time for everyone to climb the steps and then pay the driver as they embarked. Instead he sketched an idea for a glass ‘tube station’, a bus shelter raised up from the pavement to the height of the bus door. A new payment scheme was devised, so there was no waiting at the bus door, and a single flat fee, originally priced at approximately £0.20. As a result, every time a bus drove up to the platform passengers could alight at all five doors, allowing a maximum of 300 travellers to get on and off in under fifteen seconds. Frequency of buses was also increased so that there was never a long wait during peak hours.
Whenever possible the new system was developed with the participation of users and locals rather than bringing in experts and adopting expensive innovations. So when the bus manufacturers Volvo suggested that they could devise a sophisticated door system to line up the vehicle with the station platform, an experienced bus driver suggested to the committee that a simple painted line on the platform floor would suffice. Such common sense has meant that the network has never needed city subsidies but has paid its own way since opening. Despite Curitiba having the highest ratio of car owners in the whole of Brazil, the buses have changed people’s lives. In 1974 the system serviced only 25,000 passengers a day; today, this has risen to 2 million. At the same time it is calculated that the programme has replaced 27 million car journeys a year, and as a result Curitiba uses 30 per cent less petrol than any other Brazilian city and enjoys the lowest air pollution. As the city prospered during the 1990s, new neighbourhoods were designed with the transport system in mind in order to cope with growth as the suburbs grow.
The social impact of a smart transit policy is made even clearer in the example of Bogotá, Colombia, and the story of another series of visionary mayors – Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa – who saw the importance of using public transport to ensure access to the city for all. Mockus first came to prominence when he was forced to resign from his position as Rector of the National University, having mooned his students in order to get their attention. The act of ‘symbolic violence’ encouraged him to stand for mayor, refusing to join any party but rather to stand on a policy of ‘No Ps’: no publicity, no politics, no party and no plata (money), pronouncing, ‘You can’t fix Bogotá by putting “I love Bogotá” stickers on your car. Instead, say “I hate it but I’ll do something to improve it”.’11 At the time, Bogotá was at the point of crisis: growing at 4.5 per cent every year, it was beyond control; at least 40 per cent of the population lived outside the governance of the city, below the poverty line, without basic services such as water, sewerage, transit, education and health. City hall was effectively insolvent. The streets were lawless, with a corrupt police force, an average of 250 murders each month and 95 per cent of all crimes going unpunished. Mockus had no money to make change so he had to persuade people to rethink their behaviour.
In 1993 he launched the non-political programme ‘Cultura Ciudadana’, making the city its own government: ‘The crucial part of a citizen’s culture is learning to correct others without mistreating them or generating aggression. We need to create a society where civility rules over cynicism and apathy.’12 He led the campaign by example and dressed in a Superman costume to encourage others to be ‘super citizens’. He printed 350,000 cards with thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons, which people could use to give to pedestrians or drivers who were behaving well or badly. He hired 220 actors to wander through the streets, mimic and shame people who were jaywalking, disrupting neighbourhoods or causing offence. At Christmas time, when excessive drinking caused an increase in violence, he offered a gun amnesty, and then melted the arms down into cutlery. When it came to transport he invested in the Ciclovia programme which, every Sunday, closed 50 miles of inner-city roadways to cars, leaving them to cyclists, skaters and walkers. The project was extended into the poorer neighbourhoods and a free bike-hire scheme was launched, offering a means for the various groups in the highly segregated city to mix.
In 1998, on the back of his successes in Bogotá, Mockus stood for election as Columbia’s president, which he lost. As mayor he was succeeded by Enrique Peñalosa, leader of the local Liberal party. Peñalosa inherited a city that was in the process of social transformation but also on a solid financial footing: Mockus left a budget surplus of $700 million. As a result Peñalosa was able to continue the progressive social agenda but also invest in structural change within the city – in particular reinventing the role of transit as a means of addressing inequality. As he announced: ‘Urban transport is a political and not a technical issue. The technical aspects are very simple. The difficult decisions relate to who is going to benefit from the models adopted.’13
Enrique Peñalosa on his bike
For Peñalosa, the modern city should be rebuilt with the poor and children in mind, and as a result it needs a radical new way of thinking about public spaces and how people travel around: ‘Everything we did we tried to increase equality, to maximise integration. In this way we are also constructing democracy . . . A city is a physical entity, a place where people go to schools or libraries that are physical buildings, they walk on sidewalks, and use public transit and roads. If the physical quality of the city is poor, the quality of life there also will be poor.14 This was enshrined in the 2000 Territorial Ordering Plan of the Capital District that emphasised the need to work on urban renewal, the built environment, sustainable development and low-income housing.
New schools, parks and libraries were built. There were 100 new nurseries for children under five years old. Water was provided to all slum regions and wide-scale housing schemes were developed for the homeless. Yet Peñalosa also wanted the Bogotános to rethink the city itself. For many of the poor, the street is where much of life is conducted, so he proposed taking the street back from drivers, suggesting that the car was the symbol of inequality.
Between 1991 and 1995 the total number of cars in Bogotá had increased by 75 per cent; by 1998 private cars occupied 64 per cent of all road space but were used by only 19 per cent of the population. Thus Peñalosa pedestrianised large sections of the city, including a 17-kilometre stretch, the longest pedestrian street in the world, as well as a 45-kilometre greenway that was originally planned as an eight-lane motorway. He banned parking on pavements, commenting that ‘motor vehicles on sidewalks were a symbol of inequality’ and placing concrete bollards along the street. Then he went on the attack against the car itself. He raised the tax on petrol and forced commuters to leave their cars at home at least two days a week, later creating a car registration reader monitoring car usage during the rush hour, making sure that 40 per cent were off-street at peak times. One Thursday every year was declared a car-free day when everyone had to leave their car at home.
In place of the car, Peñalosa encouraged the bicycle, announcing that ‘cars isolate people. Bicycles integrate socially’.15 He extended the Ciclovia scheme, adding another 300 kilometres of dedicated bike lanes, protected from automobile traffic so they could be used by children without fear. In addition, the car was replaced by a complete overhaul of the transit system which was designed to serve the most needy.
The development of TransMilenio, inspired by the successes of Jaime Lerner’s Curitiba BRT, was proof that transit could be used to transform a city as large as 7 million. Until 2000, the city transit system was in the hands of a cartel of private companies, and as a result there was a constant conflict between high fares and the number of buses, often in terrible condition, on the road. While the average car journey was 42.6 minutes, an average bus journey was another 50 per cent longer: 66.8 minutes. The poor who depended on this unreliable service were punished both in cost and time.
TransMilenio was a public–private initiative initially designed to cover two main city routes: Avenida Caracas and Calle 80, a length of 42 kilometres, with the aim of carrying 35,000 passengers an hour in each direction, at a cost of $0.85 per person. There were 470 buses in the initial fleet and a dedicated lane in each direction was given over to the scheme. An elevated station, similar to those at Curitiba, was planned every 700 metres or so with pay booths, registering machines and surveillance cameras. In addition to the main lines, a series of feeder buses brought travellers from the outskirts, with stops every 300 metres or so, especially in the poorer neighbourhoods. After 2006, the system grew to include nine separate routes covering more parts of the city, and another two lines were opened in 2011.
The TransMilenio transformed Bogotá. Today, it provides transit for 45,000 people per hour per direction, at an average speed of 29 kilometres per hour. As the system has grown and become popular, travel times have improved as more people leave their cars at home and jump aboard. The scheme has been as popular with the rich as the poor, and as a result is one of the great melting pots of the city rather than a badge of shame, with 76 per cent of users rating the system as good or very good. In addition, it has reduced air pollution, with a decrease of 1,000 metric tonnes of particulate emissions a year, delivering health savings of an estimated $60–70 million. There was also an 88 per cent drop in traffic fatalities.
It is for this reason that traffic and transit experts around the world are looking to Latin America for the next innovation in how transportation can make the cities of the future work. In his 1995 book Hope, Human and Wild, the leading environmental writer Bill McKibben presented Curitiba as an alternative for urban living. This appeal was then taken up by the British architect Lord Rogers, who visited the city and then, in his 1995 Reith lectures, pronounced it as a model we could all learn from. In 2006 the American National BRT Institute produced a report looking into whether the success of the TransMilenio could be replicated in the US, concluding that while the benefits of the scheme are manifest, the popular ignorance of those benefits and the social stigma of carlessness would make such a project difficult. In short, US cities lack mayors like Lerner and Peñalosa who are willing to make the case for the relationship between social change and transit.16
Public transit is not the only way to think about the relationship between the city and transportation. The impact of walking has long been ignored, and is only now being revealed as one of the key components in developing a happy city. As Enrique Peñalosa says: ‘God made us walking animals – pedestrians. As a fish needs to swim, a bird to fly, a deer to run, we need to walk, not in order to survive, but to be happy.’17
I first became interested in cities by walking, sometimes lost and without purpose, later coming to learn the urban ways and rhythms until it became a place called home. Walking is still the way that I wish to encounter any new city on arrival. In cities like Venice walking is perhaps the only practical means of getting around. As you arrive at the main railway station, having left your car in Padua or elsewhere, there is little that prepares you for the scene you encounter stepping out of the shadows of the Modernist loggia in front of the Stazione Santa Lucia. In summer the long, low steps in front are covered with travellers facing out towards the Grand Canal and the choppy waters and bustle of the vaporetto stations. To the left, one is immediately confronted with the Baroque wonder of the city, the church of the Scalzi; straight ahead stands the noble copper dome of St Simone Piccolo.
Walking across the broad stone piazza and crossing the canal, one is instantly thrown into the human throng. There is no room for more than the rare buzz of a Vespa amongst the narrow alleys and walkways around the city; no buses, no cars, no trains. Venice reminds us of the joys of finding a city by foot, of the fact that the metropolis is best discovered at the pace of the human step, and at eye level. It is only at times like this that one feels the city as part of the crowd, rather than sealed away behind the wheel of a car. Indeed walking in the city, and making cities more walkable, has a remarkable impact on our individual sense of well-being as well as on the building of happy communities.
In the late 1960s, the English urban planner Donald Appleyard, who was at that time teaching at Berkeley University, California, conducted an experiment comparing three streets in San Francisco which were similar except for the level of traffic passing down the route. He named each street depending on the density of the traffic: Light Street saw 2,000 vehicles per day; 8,000 travelled on Medium Street; while Heavy Street suffered 16,000 vehicles on a daily basis.
Appleyard’s subsequent results were surprising. He discovered that traffic had a huge impact on neighbourliness and community: an average resident of Light Street will have three more friends and at least six more acquaintances than a resident of Heavy Street. The community on Light Street was more integrated and likely to share the time of day on the front step; children were more likely to play together. As traffic increased, the sense of common ownership decreased rapidly, with little or no pavement life to be found on Heavy Street, which had a particular impact on the lives of the elderly and the very young. It is thus important to remember that every time you get into your car you are driving down someone else’s street and your trip will have an impact on their lives.
In order to get people into buses, we need to create effective transit solutions; in order to get people to walk in the city, we have to create appealing public places and streets that we want to be in, that are safe, visually stimulating, popular, and open. At the moment, however, it is easy to see why one might not bother to go for a walk. When the city has been designed for cars, by planners such as Robert Moses, there is little to attract the casual stroller and as a result between 1977 and 1995 Americans walked 40 per cent less. What can we do?
There is reason to be more cheerful than expected, however, because city dwellers are in fact more likely to use the pavement than is commonly assumed. As New York Magazine reports: ‘The structure of the city coerces us to exercise far more than people elsewhere in the US, in a way that is strongly correlated with a far better life expectancy.’ We walk in the city more than we imagine we do: to the train station or bus stop; to the corner store or to the gym. The compact nature of the city allows us to consider walking as an option rather than jumping into our cars to run a local errand.18 A native New Yorker in fact walks more than most other people, and faster; and as epidemiologist Eleanor Simonsick discovered, this quicker pace is a reflection of health status.
Living in the city can, in fact, make us fitter and healthier. In another paper by Lawrence Frank of the University of Vancouver on the relative fitness between young men in inner Atlanta and the city’s suburbs, the average city dweller, compelled to walk more often, was 10lbs lighter than their suburban neighbour, who preferred to use the car for routine trips. When one considers that obesity is now the cause of nearly 10 per cent of all National Health Service expenditure in the UK,19 the impact of encouraging people to walk more is persuasive. The reduction in body mass index caused by increased exercise also has a knock-on effect on levels of heart disease, diabetes and even cancer. And, of course, the reduction of CO2 emissions means a cleaner and healthier neighbourhood.
The creation of more walkable streets also has a huge impact on the resident community. In a study completed in 2008 by Transport for London, it was calculated that living in a walkable neighbourhood could potentially raise property prices by £30,000 and, on a specific project looking at improvements to The Cut in Southwark, it showed that widening pavements, improving lighting and adding trees had increased the overall value of the street by significant sums. This is also true of the relationship between walkability and retail: a pedestrianised high street increases both the number of visitors and the amount people are willing to spend.
Walkability can also be one of the many benchmarks of inequality within the city. Richard Florida celebrates the fact that walkable communities are better educated and more creative neighbourhoods than others: they are ‘a magnet for attracting and retaining the highly innovative businesses and highly skilled people that drive economic growth, raising housing values and generating higher incomes’.20 By contrast, there is a perceived fear that poorer neighbourhoods – often because they have fewer parks, facilities and more degraded civic amenities like lighting and pavements – are more dangerous and crime-riddled, making them more unwalkable. If the benefits of walkability are so palpable, it seems absurd that they are the preserve of the rich. Perhaps one should redefine the right to the city as access to the benefits of open, walkable neighbourhoods.
Designing the city around walkability sounds like an impossible fantasy, in the face of the ever-spreading suburban sprawl that is centrifugally spinning the metropolis further outwards. The railway line that delivers me to work was first laid in the 1870s, and now stretches over 35 kilometres from the furthest northern reaches of the suburbs into the heart of the West End, within twenty minutes arriving at Canary Wharf in the far East End of the capital. On an average day I am just one of the 400,000 people travelling along this route, totalling over 127.5 million journeys a year. Ten years ago, when I lived in the inner city, it only took twenty-five minutes for me to walk into work in the centre of London, but now it would take at least an impossible two hours on foot. We need to think of creating walkable communities connected to the rest of the city by a robust and efficient transport infrastructure.
But how do we create places that make us want to explore rather than sit in traffic? For Robert Cervero and Kara Kockelman, the possible solutions to this can be found in the three Ds – density, design and diversity – a reminder that the design of the city around the automobile has more than just an impact on infrastucture and road-building: it also affects the social life of the inhabitants. The end result of the autopolis was that home and the office were divided by a freeway to be traversed as quickly as possible; speed was prioritised above sociability and as a result the modern city has few places worth walking to; supermarkets and malls were constructed out of town, killing off the high street, turning places of local diversity into soulless cloned thoroughfares of identical outlets; personal relationships were allowed to wither: regular interaction with the bank teller became an encounter with the ATM. These are not places that register in the memory or encourage exploration; they are non-places. But there is a chance to reclaim the streets, to make them more walkable and make them more equal. And in some cities, these opportunities are already being seized.
There are few more delightful urban pleasures than walking along the south bank of the Seine on a bright, crisp November Sunday morning. Strolling along the erstwhile Expressway, built in the 1950s to alleviate the central Parisian traffic, it feels strange and somehow luxurious to follow the flow of joggers, cyclists and idle wanderers like ourselves. Navigating from the Pont de l’Alma towards the Tuileries Gardens, it seems as if the heart of the city, a 2-mile stretch of riverside promenade taking in some of Paris’s most splendid sites, has been rediscovered.
Beside the Seine: the Paris Plage, 2010
In 2010 the city mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, who had already gained some renown by converting a similar stretch of embankment into an urban beach each summer, announced that he was declaring war on ‘the unacceptable hegemony of the automobile’.21 As he explained, 70,000 cars used the Expressway every day, while cars caused two-thirds of the city’s total pollution, but such a project was about more than just carbon emissions: ‘It’s about reducing pollution and automobile traffic, and giving Parisians more opportunities for happiness. If we succeed in doing this, I believe it will profoundly change Paris.’22
In August 2012 Delanoë confirmed that a 2.5-kilometre stretch along the south bank would be permanently pedestrianised between the Musée d’Orsay and the Pont de l’Alma and that plans were afoot to add parks, sports courts, restaurants and even a floating botanical gardens. Where former president Georges Pompidou once announced that ‘Paris must adapt to the car’,23 the city is now being returned to the walker. If this can happen in the centre of a busy European capital like Paris, it is possible anywhere.