Traffic as a Public Health Concern

Check out this short piece from the Streetsblog network:

Why Isn't Traffic Reduction a Top Public Health Concern

As anyone who has ever been in a car accident can attest to: driving is dangerous. In addition, cars spew all sorts of particulate matter into the air (y'know that stuff that we breathe to stay alive). It doesn't take a scientist to bike or walk down the street and realize that the exhaust coming out of most cars' tailpipes is not the healthiest mixture. If you get caught behind a big enough/poorly maintained vehicle, your gasping for breath will be all the evidence you need.

So why do we take traffic for granted and just assume that it is a constant that we need to live with? Why is it so hard to imagine urban and suburban places with severely decreased automobile and truck traffic?

Suburban Infill : the choice is Yours

Urban redevelopment is a great way to utilize the efforts of the past towards better futures. It is also a way to enliven often decrepit and quiet areas that were once centers of life. It is efficient and it does not waste land. It brings people closer together.

But what about those stuck out in the suburbs of America? Some, maybe most, suburbanites actually enjoy the sprawling, car-laden world in which they live. They could do without the five o'clock traffic jam, but having a nice lawn and a garage and a place where the kids can shoot baskets outside until 10 pm and few strangers are roaming by--there is a sense of security that many find in the suburbs.

Those who truly love urban life for the pedestrian opportunities and the immense possibilities that open when life is put on the streets (rather than behind the wheel of a car or running on a treadmill) likely find the suburbs to be suffocating and dull. Where is the life on the streets? There are no shops, few people walking around, there are not even sidewalks on every street. Bikers beware too, for the streets are rarely wide enough for bikes and cars to both fit, and suburban drivers are in a rush. Everything is a drive away: work, school, grocery, gym, friends, restaurants, bars,^ shopping malls, hospitals. The suburban life is wasteful. There are too many parking lots and too much gasoline, too much land and too many mega-malls, too many damn highways. Even worse, the suburban life, lived to its most extreme, is a life spent inside in isolation (especially during the cold of winter or the heat of summer).

If, however, the suburbs are here to stay, can they slowly become better urban areas without torching the zoning code and letting the poverty of the city creep in? Or: do we really need any more suburbs than we have now? The answer is yes and no. Yes suburban areas can become more amenable to pedestrians, bicyclists, children below driving age;* and no, we don't need any more than we have now.

The bottom line is that most suburbanites aren't gonna pick up and move to the city, to join all the enlightened urbanites on streets of pigeon shit, hippies and dried coffee. Why not then, bring the city to them? At least the good parts of the city: streets with wide sidewalks, and public parks with benches and beautiful old trees, bike lanes and public transit hubs, corner stores and restaurants that aren't buried away in shopping malls and strip centers. Why not make the suburbs more urban?

Density is an issue. Just how many people does it take to support a corner store and how many suburbanites live within walking or biking distance of the certain lot where said corner store will be? Won't this corner store need a parking lot so folks can drive up and fill their cars with groceries?

The suburban desire to separate residence from commerce is another. Who wants to live next to a corner store (or a parking lot)?

And of course, collective action. How are all the different suburban voices going to decide where the corner store shall go or who will shoulder the burden of increased density, increased urbanity? Surely there must be a few more people to support suburban commerce.

I don't have the answers to these questions; if anyone does they can't fit in the virtual space of a blog post. They are life-sized and real, like going to work or picking up a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk. They require political will and capital and a desire to change the suburban lifestyle. Maybe most of all they require folks to look at their lives and their hulking exhaust-spewing cars and realize that maybe we're not walking down the right path. Hell, we're not walking much at all, unless of course we belong to a gym, or the dog needs to take a dump, or we dropped some extra flow on that new treadmill that was advertised on TV.


^ Of course suburbanites do not drink and drive - they are generally law-abiding folk.

* As a child of the suburbs I can heartily testify to the great powerlessness a thirteen year old boy feels when he is stranded at home carless in a world built for people with gasoline motors.

What do fruits and vegetables have to do with urban planning?

Today I tried to imagine the perfect city. There were plenty of bikes and pedestrians everywhere and a marked absence of private vehicles. There were shorter blocks and more mixed uses of land. And there were farms: block-sized farms full of apple trees, kale, beans and carrots.

Then it got me a-thinkin': just how much space does it take to feed a person/family/city?

The answer is that it depends on what those people/families/cities are eating. Turns out that the production of meat is wildly more inefficient than the production of vegetables. Not only that, but animal excrement (i.e.: shit) pollutes that other stuff that is necessary for life: water.

So what does this all mean? Well, I guess it depends on the purpose of the city. If cities are to be places for efficient living, then perhaps what the citizens eat is as important as what transportation decisions they make. And as no city exists in a vacuum, it is also important how the choices of the city affect the surrounding suburbs and farmland.

Cities should promote life. They are centers of life, where people concentrate to work, play, sleep, eat, reproduce and live. Should they not then, also be places where life-affirming activity is concentrated? Where space is maximized for farmland and physical activity? Or are they just amusement parks for those with enough wealth to afford the high rents and tourists looking for the perfect picture (and the perfect steak)?

In order to build and maintain the perfect cities of the future, we need to make the right decisions: for ourselves, for those around us, and for those to come. In this broader sense, cutting back on meat intake is as important as riding a bike or taking public transportation. In another more specific and tangible sense, growing and eating food from the land that we live on gives us a greater connection to the land and reminds us that we inhabit a real space that is capable of generating and sustaining life.

UPDATE: turns out some hotshot from the Washington Post is one of the 5 people that read this page. Check out his article on meat consumption and its effect on global warming. Not the same point I was trying to make above, but its all related.

Public Health

We often think of the public health in mechanical terms. What is the average life span? Which diseases are most prevalent? How can money be made by selling health to people? How much does it cost to provide "health care"?

I suspect this train of thought is simplistic.

It is driven in part by big insurance and its dollars and cents approach to health (and life); driven also by the legal system, using the adversarial system as a means toward rewarding those made ill by other's negligence, but also succumbing to the ideal that money can heal and punish; driven by the business of medicine and the view that health may be bought and sold.

But of course it may, you might think. Those with money can afford to live in safe areas and purchase healthy food, live in well-built homes, buy the latest drugs and health-fads, and pay for insurance and hospital visits. This consumptive view of medicine and health, however, ultimately has a deleterious effect. It reduces public health to a budget line and obscures our understanding of what the public health is.

At its foundation, better public health is both easier and harder to achieve than universal health care and cheaper prescription drugs. It is easier in the sense that it may be reduced to simple concepts: we should create living environments that promote life and wellness, where ample shelter, fresh food, and clean water is available and people have the opportunity to engage in physical activity and nurture positive relationships. It is harder in that it requires a holistic and multi-modal understanding of health that reaches far beyond the hospital and the insurance companies' balance sheets.

Public health has as much to do with things like walkability, bike lanes, farmers markets, crime reduction and open spaces as it does with access to hospitals and advances in pharmaceutical technology or surgical procedures. We limit our understanding of public health if we conceive of it in purely medical terms. Instead, it will benefit urban areas to think about the public health impacts of every decision, particularly decisions regarding transportation and public space.

Several years ago, I spent a few months undertaking research for a paper on the importance of walkability towards creating and fostering urban relationships. My thesis was not revolutionary. I merely argued that walking brings people in closer contact with their cities, that it is more democratic than driving, and that a pedestrian friendly city will ultimately be a better place to live than an auto-centric city.

An idea that I tossed around in my head but never committed to paper was the life:death ratio. When making public decisions, I thought, we should think simply about whether our plans nurture life or risk harm, disease, and death. It seems obvious that walking environments promote life and don't increase death or disease, but that auto-centric environments lead to more carbon dioxide, more obesity, more unnecessary fatalities. Of course it is also true that automobile technology and open roads allow emergency personnel to react quickly to fires and heart attacks, but that is why we have the ratio. The ability to give and sustain life must be balanced with the susceptibility for disease and death.

Walking up Scott street the other day, from Lower Haight towards Alamo Square, I noticed a freshly planted tree and for a second envisioned the potential of the road before me and before us all. I saw trees in strange places, scattered down the middle of the road, and imagined the flow of bikers multiplying as the parked cars vanished to their place in history books. I saw a space that was public and open, one that promoted life and activity, a street where children could pick fruit from trees and people could walk to their neighbor's house without the threat of anything more imposing than a stream of bicycles and pedestrians.

Biking Around

This is Rocinante: an old steel road bike, made in France somewhere in the 70s or early 80s. I picked it up at a bike repair shop down in South Beach for a modest sum and have been trekking around the city these last few weeks. Even rode into work for the first time on Friday, sharing the road with the buses and taxis, delivery trucks and private cars, watching the people walk down the broad sidewalks of Market Street and feeling the cool morning air, a natural air conditioner to balance the effort of the ride. There are not many better ways to spend the morning commute (not to mention the fact that my ride was at least ten minutes faster than the typical bus commute on the 21-Hayes).

Along with walking, bicycling is a great activity for both transportation and community development. I know that may seem like a bold statement for something as simple as pedaling a piece of metal down city streets, but bikers do more than travel from point a to b. They survey their surroundings and bring a human element to the streets. They also empower themselves with the ability to transverse the city with their own two legs and an exhaust-free machine. Maybe most importantly, they bring themselves (or the bicycle brings them) into direct contact with the physical space of the city.

Bikes also allow people to travel with a minimal use of energy (maximum efficiency). The bike is much more efficient than an auto, even more efficient than walking. So why aren't more Americans riding bikes? Why aren't more San Franciscans riding?

The average suburban American lives somewhere that is only accessible by highways and neighborhood roads. Highways have no dedicated bike lanes, neighborhood roads lead nowhere (but to neighborhood houses). Mega cities are built on the scope of the automobile, rely on its oversized frame to bear the citizens from one to the next. People ride bikes in these areas, but often only for joy or exercise, not as a practical method of transport.

But even if the above is a satisfactory explanation for the lack of bike-riding in America as a whole, what explains the relative lack of riding in a place like San Francisco. Although there are many cyclists in the city, the city and citizens would benefit and could handle an exponential increase in ridership. I suspect the biggest obstacle to most would-be riders is the perceived dangerousness of urban riding. Cars are big and careless and bikers are relatively unprotected (although many wear helmets). Ultimately, a city that is sincerely dedicated to accessible transportation, public health, and the improvement of the streetscape must do its best to promote cycling and walking. Cyclists must also do a good job of sharing their excitement with their friends and neighbors. The more bikes on the street, the safer it will become for riders.*

My proposal: San Francisco should pick a weekend day and shut down 10 to 20% of the streets to all through-traffic except buses, a mega-Sunday Streets of sorts. Preferably the carless streets would be commercial corridors: Divisadero, Union, Mission, Fillmore, Polk, Chestnut, Valencia, Columbus, 16th Street, 24th Street. The possibilities are endless. I guess we'd have to allow cars some way to cross the streets at defined intersections, but we could probably employ intersections with traffic lights, or even get a few policeman out there to interact with the folk and direct traffic. Perhaps I'm overlooking the logistical complexities of such an event, but there ain't nothing wrong with dreaming big. Improving the transportation corridors of the cities of the future will take vision and tenacity. The city is an experiment that is never complete.



* The pack offers protection. Or maybe it just seems to. All I know is that it feels safer to be riding with other bikers on the road. I would be interested if anyone has statistics to share.

The Age of Participation

The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association held a Grand Opening party last night for its new Urban Center at 654 Mission Street. The event was a great success, with the party taking over the new building, a bar next door and the Annie Street alley. The jazz band outside was incredible, dropping some jazz standards mixed in with some interpretations of classic 80s tunes. They even came into the Urban Center at one point during the night, playing the entire time as they were relocating.

Anyhow, at one point during the night, I ended up speaking with a San Francisco urban designer. Although this designer has been in the city for a while, she told me that she began her career in Europe. This led me to ask her how the urban design process is different here than in Europe.

She gave two examples in response. First, she said that there is much less leeway to stray from the "master plan" in European cities (although many American cities have master plans, they are usually policy documents and not legally binding on city councils and planning commissions). Second, she said that the participation process is much more robust here.

I was excited to hear this second point. It reminded me of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and his first impressions of new world democracy, where citizens were constantly participating in the formation of their own societies. Unfortunately, de Tocqueville's America seems largely brushed under the rug these days, or at least seated on a giant nation-sized couch watching the latest episode of Grey's Anatomy. Although many of us keep at least half an eye toward the government, much of that attention is directed towards Washington, D.C. and the latest goings-on with the Obama Administration. In contrast, how often do people devote their attention to the beneficial growth of their own city/town/suburb?

Coincidentally, I spent a couple hours on Wednesday night at a community workshop meant to kick off the Northeast Embarcadero Study (Embarcadero from Washington to North Point streets). What struck me most about the workshop was just how old everyone was at the meeting. The average age had to be well past 50, with only a handful of people below 40 (not counting the representatives from the Planning Department). I understand that these things start fairly early (this one kicked off around 5:45 p.m.), that it is hard for people to get out of work, and that people under 50 may have "better things to do" than go to a community workshop, but it was disheartening to think that my generation (and those slightly older and younger) was so improperly represented at what seemed to me a very important discussion.

We (as Americans, as San Francisco residents) have a great opportunity to be part of the urban development process and to steer the future of this city (and our country), yet it seems like local government (well, all government) is often overrun by special interests and those with too much time on their hands. Are we to blame? Or is the system rigged from the start and we are better off not wasting our time?

The answer is likely to lie somewhere in between. Most San Franciscans probably have no idea that these meetings even exist. Only after the fact, when the development has begun or finished, will they applaud the new space or decry the poor planning. The opportunity to participate in the process will be lost by that point and they will attribute the results to some higher planning/development power that makes all the decisions in this fair city.

But what if the common man and woman did care about local government and planning decisions? What if the front page of the paper discussed city development rather than the latest inane thing that Rush Limbaugh said?

As discussed before, we may have a problem with our focus and our perception of which issues matter and on what level. The development of our cities and towns has a profound effect on our lives and the lives of those to follow us, yet we spend little time giving these issues any attention.

Urban Mathematics = Cities are Alive

A rap scholar once said, "You wanna know how to rhyme you better learn how to add." Steven Strogatz, professor of applied mathematics, makes the persuasive argument that if you want to understand cities, it might help to learn some math too.

Strogatz illustrates, among other things, that larger (more populous) cities need less infrastructure than small ones. He attributes this to economies of scale:

For instance, if one city is 10 times as populous as another one, does it need 10 times as many gas stations? No. Bigger cities have more gas stations than smaller ones (of course), but not nearly in direct proportion to their size. The number of gas stations grows only in proportion to the 0.77 power of population. The crucial thing is that 0.77 is less than 1. This implies that the bigger a city is, the fewer gas stations it has per person. Put simply, bigger cities enjoy economies of scale. In this sense, bigger is greener.

Strogatz ultimately argues that this same ratio is applicable to other living organisms: proof that cities are living, breathing things. Makes sense to me.

For the full NY Times column click here.