สวัสดี
And welcome back to Streetbeat!
It’s been a real busy month for me, between work and wedding season in upstate New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. (Yes, I am a Millennial now in their thirties.) But outside of all that, my eyes have been focused on two places: Washington and Glasgow.
The first, while often a sight for sore eyes, has lately been a hotbed of excitement, anxiety, dread and fear (it is Halloween!) these last few weeks with talks over enacting some of the most ambitious federal policy coming closer to reality than ever before in my lifetime. It will anger everybody, satisfy nobody, and maybe, just *maybe*, move the ball on some key issues.
The second is directly related: COP26, the United Nations’ conference on climate change, is back in session after a pandemic pause. And at what feels like a crucial moment, as we get word that an unfathomable 2.7 degrees Celsius is the direction we’re headed if we don’t change course. Like in Foundation (which I’ve been thrilled to watch, as a big Asimov fan), that’s the future the new world order faces when it meets next week in Scotland. What I’m particularly amped for: an entire day dedicated to cities and the built environment, a COP first. About time!
Now, onto the news:
What does a post-COVID downtown look like?
I’ve been toying around with this idea for some time (and maybe it will become a piece soon), but one of the most substantial shifts I’ve noticed in COVID’s wake is the tonal shift from businesses regarding streetscapes. From what once was a fret over losing parking or hindering deliveries, the push for outdoor spaces has not only become a lifeline for many businesses in a socially distanced time, but also, a perceived recipe, if not necessity, for success in a world of permanent remote work. (The numbers, too, back this up.)
We see it in all the cities nation- and worldwide looking to preserve their COVID-era dining parklets, sure, but on a more granular level, businesses themselves are becoming advocates in their own right. In New York this month, the SoHo Broadway Initiative proposed a quasi-pedestrianization of the downtown Manhattan neighborhood, not just to provide more space for people (always nice!)—they actually see this as a way to lure shoppers back. Similar sentiments are being raised in Flatiron and the Meatpacking District. Car-free streets could, in fact, be good business.
But the plan for Downtown Brooklyn, in particular, stands out. If the business associations there have their way, this gateway to the borough would have an entire neighborhood of Dutch-style shared streets, busways, and bike lanes by 2030. And after COVID, the reality of that happening seems closer than ever.
Read about the effort in my latest feature for Bloomberg CityLab.
A NYC transit doc gets its world premiere
A number of years ago, a filmmaker named Emmett Adler emailed me, asking if he could interview me about New York’s L train shutdown, which, at the time, was my beat for VICE. It was shaping up to be an immense crisis for the region, as a subway line (the L) crucial to some of the city’s fastest-growing areas then (i.e. Williamsburg, Bushwick) would have to be taken offline for over a year to address damage from 2012’s Superstorm Sandy in its underground tunnel. Adler thought the chaos would make for a compelling documentary. I agreed.
So over the course of several years, Adler and his team followed me around—to Manhattan, to Brooklyn, to my homeland of Queens, and even to London, where I ended up getting a degree in city planning. I sat down for numerous interviews, as did some of the leading transit voices in New York. And little did we know at the time that the L train shutdown would be the least of the system’s worries.
The result is End of the Line, a documentary chronicling the last few years of New York City transit as it faced a barrage of crises—a microcosm of American infrastructure writ large. And it will have its premiere next month (!).
If you’d like to see it, find out more details here.
The next phase of Open Streets
I’d be remiss not to mention what has quickly become a newfound fixture in my life: the 31st Ave Open Street. Especially this month, which was our most successful.
Not only did we co-host some truly spectacular events—including: a community cookout with free food and activities (>20 vendors), where we started smoking meat in a parking spot at 7am; baile folkórico dance; and a big ol’ Halloween mutual aid event—but we were heartened to hear that the city has deemed the two-block public space assembled each weekend by our ragtag (yet growing!) volunteer squad a successful pilot.
Now, discussions of permanent changes and potential full-time employees are underway. I first came across my local Open Street asking this very question: what comes next? Now, everyone’s looking to the next administration, whoever that may be after Election Day, to find out. Watch this space.
U.S. public transit’s rise, fall and… rebirth?
I’ve never been asked to write a book review before, so I was thrilled to connect with Cite, the publication of Rice University’s renowned design school. (Hello, Houston!). The text in question: Trains, Buses and People (Vol. 2), written by Christof Spieler, a transit planning aficionado. Spieler helped Houston revamp their bus system, a redesign considered a model nationwide.
He essentially wrote a textbook on America’s public transit, analyzing all the major systems on what they’re doing right and wrong, and how they could improve. In this volume, he threw in Canada and Puerto Rico, as well as a few new U.S. cities.
But what surprised me most about it is how unusual the book must be to read for so many Americans. Less than a tenth of the population takes public transit to work each day; we are, undoubtedly, a nation of single-occupancy cars. Hearing Spieler tell it, though, new systems are coming online, especially in growing mid-sized cities like Phoenix and Indianapolis, and it’s evident that more cities see good transit as good economics. All of this after a pandemic that upended ridership, and before, potentially, historic investment from Washington.
Read my review of the book here.
Infrastructure? Infrastructure.
2020 was a watershed year for our ailing infrastructure. We’re failing to handle the climate crisis, educate our children on/offline, house the population, and confront a public health calamity. So whatever happens, it’s time to rethink infrastructure—what it is, how we measure it, and how we invest in it.
That’s my cue to mention two research projects of mine. The first is with Center for an Urban Future, which just celebrated its 25th anniversary this month. (We had an in-person gala, and it was fun!) My next bit is on the future of the city’s branch libraries, which, to me, are the epitome of what infrastructure is (physical, social and digital spaces) in 2021. And the second is with Aspen Institute, a leading national policy organization. I’ll be authoring a report that (hopefully) lays out a different path on infrastructure for policymakers.
More on both of those soon!
City in Spotlight: Barcelona
Barcelona has long been an urbanist’s paradise. The city is home to the famed pedestrian-centric ‘Superblocks,’ which are about to get even bigger; the mayor has been a vocal proponent of affordable housing; and Gaudï, the city’s patron ‘starchitect,’ might have been one of the nuttiest urban designers in history. There’s a lot of love for the Catalan capital!
But this month, I want to highlight something else: the Bicibús. Or The Bike Bus.
Essentially, a handful of parents in Barcelona wanted a climate-friendly way of getting their kids to school. So they led a ‘bike bus’ of their kids to and fro, with safety in numbers. Then that grew—fast. Now hundreds of kids are cycling to school together in Barcelona, creating a secure passageway to their place of learning. It’s become quite a sight to see.
FWIW: kids used to do this in hordes, but as we built our environment around for cars—and responded in kind with minivans and SUVs—that number plunged. Now school traffic makes up a huge chunk of overall traffic, which we know is bad for healthy lifestyles and lungs. Here, Barcelona shows us something else.
Solutions Corner: Push the Overton Window
If you’ve been privy to policy debates recently, you’ve likely heard of the Overton Window. It was once an obscure term, coined by analyst Joseph P. Overton and all the rage in political science classes (I remember it well; outside of journalism, my other major was politics), but not so much in the mainstream.
The best way to explain it, in my mind, is first understanding the median voter theorem. If you imagine the electorate as an ideological spectrum, from far-left (socialism) to far-right (fascism), then most people fall somewhere in a shorter range, between liberal and conservative. If you’re a politician, you want to pitch policies that meet the voter in the middle (the median voter). Why? Because of utilitarianism: it’d be the most attractive to the most people, or votes. (Biden, I think, knew this well.)
Each issue has a different median voter. Take taxes, for example: liberals say raise them, conservatives say cut them, and moderates would say eh, do a bit of both. Knowing exactly what that is can be difficult, but right now, in our age of great inequality, raising taxes in some way is pretty popular. The median voter is likely center-left there, so politicians are trying to figure out where to lean in. Hence the current struggle over paying for the megabill in Washington.
Anyway, the Overton Window blows this idea up. An era-defining event or figure can change what’s politically feasible. They push the median voter in a certain direction—not necessarily towards their own position, but the parameters of what’s possible get closer to theirs. This is why the Overton Window saw renewed interest of late. We saw elected officials—namely former President Donald Trump, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—who made concepts like the “build the wall” and the Green New Deal part of the lexicon. Even if both likely won’t happen, the arena we’re now in allows them to exist, rather than shuns them as impossibilities. Additionally, we saw paradigm-shifting phenomena, like globalization, pandemic, and climate crisis, which gives a greater appetite for bolder solutions.
I was thinking of this when I saw a tweet this month from Slate’s Jordan Weissmann, who said the “ban all cars” folks are his least favorite group. Of course, the backlash from advocates was swift, citing the more definitive (Neo-Nazis are actually worse) to the more substantive; most would argue that cars should be banned from dense urban areas, with room for those with disabilities, or that we should aim for less car ownership overall. But that, to me, isn’t the main takeaway.
Even if I don’t fully agree with it myself, I personally think we should hear “ban all cars” in policy debates. Precisely because of the Overton Window—even if we don’t get there in the long-term, it starts to shift the goalposts in the near term. We can now imagine a car-free Manhattan, for example; a pipe dream, perhaps, but now something to consider, with the least interventionist options on the table being way more ambitious than they would’ve been a decade ago.
The pandemic is cited as this flashpoint, where we can start to re-envision what our broken systems can become. It may be a blip, but it’s one when the Overton Window is more fungible than ever. So let’s dream bigger, shall we?
Bright Side: Bill private to build public
I’ve long been a fan of what’s known as ‘land value capture.’ It’s when a governing body or agency leverages the land it owns to ‘capture’ value accrued.
In simpler terms: imagine you’re a transit agency, and you want to build new subway stops. Well, one idea for funding is to sell the air or land around the stop that you own. But if you want to keep monetizing it, get a land value capture agreement: if the property goes up in value, you’ll always get a slice. So private development yields public benefit ad infinitum. Win-win: the developer gets nicer amenities for tenants; the city gets more revenue for residents.
On that note, I was thrilled to see NYC finally approve the ‘Elevate Transit’ zoning proposal, which would essentially do that but for accessibility improvements. (Which the subway system desperately needs.) Now, developers can get more floor space if they agree to, say, build a station elevator. And they can keep buying in as much as they’d like. It’s a system that keeps on giving.
Parklet of the Month: October 2021
The business: Bad Habits (Astoria, Queens)
FKA: A non-accessible curb.
Now: An accessible outdoor patio.
The outdoor dining that arose during COVID has its fair share of accessibility issues. But this place—which, admittedly a) doesn’t have a great name; and b) drove my friend out with noise complaints—has a neat idea.
***
Got a parklet you want to give a shout-out to? Submit it here.
Streetbeat Gig Board
Public Realm Programming & Community Engagement Manager (Street Plans)
From the website: “The Public Realm and Community Engagement Manager will be responsible for the day-to-day management and operations of the W 103rd Open Streets project and lead on-the-ground engagement in support of the Park to Park 103rd initiative.”
Got a job you want to feature to Streetbeat readers? Submit it here.