I have included the full article, as not everyone has access to it on line. I
have omitted pictures.
ken h
Bikes, pedestrians and the 15-minute city: How the pandemic is propelling urban
revolutions
In Europe, cycling caught on in a big way this year as COVID-19 discouraged
cars and crowded public transit. Some cities' leaders hope to make the habit
permanent and make congestion a thing of the past
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-bikes-pedestrians-and-the-15-minute-city-how-the-pandemic-is/
One of my heroes is a minor socialist politician you’ve never heard of – Miguel
Anxo Fernández Lores.
He’s the mayor of Pontevedra, Spain, and he has a spiritual loathing for cars.
He ended his city’s status as a “car warehouse” – his words – more than 20
years ago, and the results were spectacular. Pontevedra is cleaner, safer and
thriving like never before.
Today, nearly a year after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, other European
cities are starting to take Mr. Fernández Lores’s lead. The pandemic is giving
them a rare chance to reinvent themselves. When the deadly virus arrived,
citizens suddenly
didn’t want to stuff themselves into subways, buses and taxis, and the spring
lockdowns convinced them that streets without cars could be rather pleasant.
Gone were the diesel fumes and the noise. You could hear the birds sing, didn’t
have to shout to have a conversation outdoors, or fear that your kids would get
flattened if they chased a ball into the road.
Biking went mainstream virtually overnight, and cities such as Paris and Milan
pushed the notion of “the 15-minute city,” where all of life’s necessities are
within a 15-minute reach by foot or bike. The concept will trigger profound
economic and social change if it catches on. I think it will; it’s already
happening. Sixty years after she wrote The Death and Life of Great American
Cities, Jane Jacobs, the late American-Canadian urbanologist who advocated
mixed-use 'hoods devoid of expressways, is being vindicated.
For decades, cities everywhere have tried to reduce traffic congestion, but it
never really worked because everyone owned cars, and drivers voted. So mayors
mostly tinkered. Parking rates went up, and a few streets in the urban cores –
very few – were narrowed or cut off from traffic. Road and highway construction
continued, and ever-fatter cars and SUVs naturally filled the available space.
The Urban Institute think-tank in Washington says local and state governments
in 1977 spent US$93-billion on highways and roads (in 2017 inflation-adjusted
dollars). In 2017, the figure had almost doubled, to US$181-billion. Cutting
road and highway budgets was considered political suicide, and more than a few
mayors adopted aggressive pro-car stands even as their cities filled with
eye-watering smog and hideous parking lots. One of them was the late Toronto
mayor Rob Ford, who merrily eliminated bike lanes.
Mr. Fernández Lores didn’t tinker. He went radical.
Pontevedra is a Galician city of about 83,000 on the Atlantic, just north of
the Portuguese border. When Mr. Fernández Lores, now 66, was elected mayor in
1999, he inherited a pretty but ailing little metropolis. The historic centre
was plugged with cars, and its narrow streets were filled with fumes and drug
dealers. The street in front of his office saw 14,000 cars pass by a day. In a
2018 interview with The Guardian, he said he found the centre “dead."
Within a month, he and his team swung into action. The entire historic centre
was made a car-free pedestrian area. Surface parking spots were eliminated,
opening up almost 1,700 spots for public use, and underground ones were built
on the periphery. In the outer zones, they replaced traffic lights with
roundabouts to ease traffic flow and end the gunning of engines at green
lights, and brought speed limits down to 30 kilometres an hour. Footpaths, bike
lanes and green space were added.
It wasn’t supposed to work, but it did. He got some pushback from motorists,
who thought they had the right to park two tonnes of metal and rubber next to
medieval buildings, but only some. Years before the pandemic persuaded other
mayors to follow a similar route, Pontevedra was lauded as an urban renewal
model and has won several international awards, including the UN-Habitat award
in 2014. “Most children now walk to school alone, and the streets have become
alive and filled with people,” the UN said.
The city claims zero traffic deaths since 2008, a 70-per-cent reduction in
carbon dioxide emissions, 12,000 new inhabitants (no small achievement in a
country whose towns are depopulating fast), a drop in crime and a 30-per-cent
increase in business revenues. Ms. Jacobs, who was instrumental in stopping the
Lower Manhattan Expressway in the 1960s and Toronto’s Spadina Expressway a
decade later, would have approved. She always asked: Are we building cities for
cars or for people?
Open this photo in gallery
<https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-bikes-pedestrians-and-the-15-minute-city-how-the-pandemic-is/#c-image-2>
Transforming Rome, where I live, into an enormous Pontevedra might never
happen. Romans love their cars and motorbikes, and the city has never elected a
mayor with the clout and imagination to do what Mr. Fernández Lores did. Still,
the city is a bit more liveable than it was before the pandemic. Mayor Virginia
Raggi is having 150 kilometres of permanent and temporary bike lanes built, and
the national government has subsidized the purchase of new bikes, which are in
such high demand that manufacturers can’t build them fast enough. (I bought a
Belgian bike in August and it has yet to arrive.) Rome’s notoriously awful
traffic is a bit less awful today.
The city that does have the potential to become an enormous Pontevedra is
Paris, whose Spanish-born mayor, Anne Hidalgo, was making the streets more
people-friendly well before the pandemic hit. She has used the disease to
accelerate that effort. “Paris is a really important model for other cities,”
says Brent Toderian, who was Vancouver’s chief planner from 2006 to 2012 and
now runs an urban design consultancy called Toderian UrbanWorks. “She had
entirely rethought vehicle use and movement.”
Ms Hidalgo, 61, is a member of France’s Socialist Party and was first elected
Paris mayor in 2014. She came in with a vision – a clever one. Instead of
launching a war against cars and climate change per se, she went after air
pollution, a quality-of-life issue that ensured broad buy-in. Who could be
against breathable air?
By 2016, she had introduced “Paris Respire” days that eliminated cars from most
areas of the centre on the first Sunday of each month and made public
transportation free on those days. Later, she turned the busy highway that runs
along the north side of the River Seine into a riverside park. “European
cities, like Paris, were smart to focus on air pollution rather than climate
change,” says Mr. Toderian. “Air pollution is real for people. You can see it,
smell it. People liked what she did.”
Before the pandemic hit, Ms. Hidalgo ramped up her effort to reduce pollution,
which meant getting Parisians out of cars and onto bikes and pedestrian
walkways. She is creating 1,400 kilometres of bike lanes throughout Paris –
almost every street will have a lane – and has removed thousands of surface
parking spots. Her plan is to get rid of 60,000 of them, or about 70 per cent
of the total. The major east-west artery, Rue de Rivoli, went car-free when
Paris emerged from lockdown in May. From 2024, diesel cars will be banned.
The pandemic is accelerating Paris’s transformation, and there is more to come
with the attempt to create a 15-minute city, an idea pioneered by Carlos
Moreno, a professor of innovation at the Sorbonne University in Paris and an
adviser to the mayor. The idea is to give Parisians access to all essential
services – stores, public transportation, schools, banking, medical care,
parks, even garden plots – in the area in which they live, removing the need
for car ownership.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo inaugurates a new bike path on Rue de Rivoli in 2018.
Bike lanes like these have played an important part in Paris's post-pandemic
transformation.
RAPHAEL LAFARGUE/ABACAPRESS.COM/THE CANADIAN PRESS
Creating a 15-minute city will be a slow burn. It will require zoning and bylaw
changes to allow mixed-use neighbourhoods, such as licensing nightclubs to
operate as yoga centres during the daytime, and high schools as adult learning
centres at night. Big-box retailers would have to create downsized stores that
fit into normal streets (as IKEA is experimenting with). More local schools
would have to be built to reduce the need for kids to travel far.
The idea of divided cities – work here, live there, shop way over there – would
end. The idea is to make car journeys unnecessary, and that means electric-car
journeys, too. It’s ambitious but doable. In cities, the rhythm of local life
prevailed before the onslaught of the car and the arrival of the entirely
car-dependent suburbs. The work-from-home phenomenon, a byproduct of the
pandemic, will help cities go back to the future.
More than a few European cities are emulating, or hope to emulate, the Paris
model. One is Milan, Italy’s commercial capital, which is also discouraging car
use by handing over streets to cyclists and pedestrians. The Lithuanian
capital, Vilnius, where a former mayor once used an armoured military vehicle
to crush a car parked in a bike lane, is doing the same.
But it won’t work everywhere. Athens botched its “Great Walk” project,
conceived only last year, to turn car-clogged streets in the centre into
gracious, tree-lined pedestrian boulevards. The project was poorly designed,
executed and marketed to the public. Edinburgh, one of northern Europe’s
best-preserved old cities, is struggling to add bike lines and pedestrian-only
streets.
Anthony Robson, an Edinburgh solicitor and bike-lane lobbyist, says
Conservative factions and motorists are resisting the idea of adopting a
strategy similar to Paris’s. “The Conservative councillors equated more cars
with more shopping,” he says. “They said, ‘No cars, no commerce.' We’ve been
trying to debunk this notion.”
Maybe those councillors should hop a plane to Paris or Pontevedra, two cities
that, for decades, focused on making life easy for motorists. When they
reversed course, the cities became more liveable, breathable, pleasant and
vibrant. There’s a reason millions of tourists flock to Venice (or did before
the pandemic). A city without cars is a magical experience for them.
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