With goals of relieving traffic congestion, making our citizens healthier, and preventing ecological disaster, how can we encourage municipalities and individuals to commit to buses, trains and bikes? What would make you give up your car?

Tom gave the Final Word

Strangely, my car is currently in the shop — so I have given it up. And this raises the question of why any New Yorker, living in a general transit-rich, walkable environment would make the choice to own a car, with all its negative “internalities” (e.g., in the past year I’ve had my window smashed and my rear-view mirror clipped clean off). The answer is that it’s just useful enough for me to have one for the things I do/places I go where transit is not an easy option, and it’s just easy enough to find parking on my local streets. But the truth is, I really use the car quite infrequently, because it’s typically the option that makes least sense for me in my daily life. And herein lies the classic problem. The car is an incredibly wonderful tool for point to point personal transportation, one whose utility diminishes with each additional user and, importantly, each additional use. People are often wont to blame the congestion problem on an increase in population, but comparing population increases to annual Vehicle Miles Traveled rates over the past few decades, it’s the latter that has soared. Each year, we were basically spending more time in the car, driving to places and activities that were never driven to before (e.g., taking the kids to school) — the tool became a lifestyle; the romance with the car became car dependency. I’m always struck when visiting relatives in an exurban community and I see people on weekends out ‘power walking’ — this idea that walking has been made a kind of specialized recreational activity that you have to make time for, wear ‘proper’ clothes, etc. It’s as if we’ve forgotten how to walk, culturally.

I think most of the solutions have already been expressed by the previous commenters. But just to reiterate that I think it will take a careful balance of incentives and disincentives. Places like Copenhagen didn’t just become cycling meccas — in the 1970s the city was on an American-style path toward autodom. It was made gradually more difficult to drive a car, and gradually more easy to ride a bike. And what happened? You’ve got a nearly 40% daily cycling commuting rate. As I write, the Brooklyn borough president is making the charge that cycling advocates want the city to become like Amsterdam, that we want to ‘stigmatize’ the car. It’s not about stigmatizing the car, it’s about restoring the balance of livability and transportation in increasingly crowded 21st century cities where the secret to moving people around is not going to be solo drivers in massive SUVs. I liked the comment made by a writer recently in the magazine Monocle; he didn’t want to see cities turned over to entirely pedestrianized streets, but that the car needed to be made to feel a guest in the city — not the owner. So gradually reducing the space allotted to cars, balancing it with other options; changing the design of the streets to make them feel less like traffic channels than viable public space ‘between the buildings’; accurately charging drivers for their use of public space and the congestion and other externalities instead of our Soviet-style system of controls and subsidies; changing the design (and size) of cars that are found in cities; and of course offering plenty of carrots (good transit, bike parking, et al) on the other side. My city is far more important to me than my car.

Friday, October 22 at 3:55pm