Three Urban Interventions in Two Hours: NYC
Found myself in New York City the other day with a couple hours to spare, so thought I’d explore some of Manhattan’s recent urban planning projects. Two hours turned out to be just enough time to check out the (sort of) newly pedestrianized Times Square, trace the 9th Ave bike lane from 33rd to 20th, walk the length of phase 1 of the High Line, and head back to Port Authority alongside the 8th avenue bike lane.
It’s been a long time since I was last in Times Square, but I don’t remember it being anything like it is now. Replacing cars with tables and chairs gives the square a more mellow, relaxed vibe. The surroundings still offer ample visual stimulation, and now tourists can wander blithely across oddly painted swaths of blue and white swirls instead of in front of traffic. The new bike racks mentioned in David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries are also prominent, though I don’t think their design is particularly utilitarian.
I’ve read a number of articles about the 9th ave bike lane, some extolling its virtues and others calling for its removal. What I saw seems to me an enormous step forward, though still a work in progress. The bike lane occupies the left lane of the avenue, is ostensibly one-way, is (mostly) physically separated from auto lanes by, variously, concrete medians, plastic bollards, a striped DMZ sort of lane, and a parking lane. The route feels (mostly) protected and inviting. I did, however, notice that a number of cyclists traveled against the one-way arrows, and far more completely ignored the handsome bicycle-only traffic signals at intersections.
A woman in perhaps her late fifties or early sixties was walking her bike—an unpretentious old-school cruiser with collapsible metal panniers—around a section of the route closed for construction when I stopped her and asked her thoughts on the route, and on cycling in NYC in general. She owns a car, which she sometimes drives, and she also rides her bike as a means of transport year round, has been for thirty years. She said the bike route is hell of a lot better than no bike route. It is plenty safer than meshing bikes and cars, and has made the experience of riding a bike in Manhattan much more enjoyable. She specifically cited the complete physical separation from cars as its greatest attribute.
Pedestrians are still a problem, though, she told me, as they don’t pay attention to anything, bike, car, lights or otherwise. Cars still frequently fail to watch out for bikes, and cyclists don’t do themselves any favors by ignoring the bicycle traffic signals and blowing through intersections in spite of turning motor vehicles. As if to prove her point a half-dozen bikes zipped past, oblivious to or in defiance of the little outline of a bicycle glowing red in full view in front of them. A traffic cop overheard our conversation and added her two cents, pointing out that the biggest safety risk has nothing to do with design and everything to do with behavior. If nobody follows the rules and obeys traffic signals, somebody’s gonna get hurt. The woman on the bicycle agreed. Overall, though, she considers the lane a boon to cycling. As a motorist, however, she isn’t such a fan.
Driving and parking have both been made more confusing, and she claimed that the reduction in motor vehicle lanes makes traffic even worse. My guess is that as similar bike lanes extract more and more lanes from the dominion of cars traffic snarls will indeed get worse. Retail business in affected areas might drop for a time. But gradually the stick and the carrot will conspire to do their thing and behavior will change. If riding a bike becomes safe, convenient, and enjoyable, and driving a car becomes the slower, more confusing, more stressful option, why wouldn’t you switch?
At 20th Street I crossed over to Tenth Ave and climbed the stairs to the High Line, the much ballyhooed linear park that will eventually stretch for a mile and a half atop an old elevated railway. About ten blocks have been completed, and the damn thing really is as cool as advertised. The design aesthetic is both modern and quirky, and the numerous sections of the park maintain are different enough to offer multiple experiences yet consistent enough to feel cohesive. A stiff breeze ripped along certain sections, making the stifling heat of the day bearable (though I wonder how that wind feels in February), and varied seating options range from full sun to full shade. The plantings seem hardy, not the sort of flora one typically sees in urban parks. All in all, a stroll up and down the currently completed phase 1 of the High Line is a pretty wonderful way to engage the city and rise above it all at once.
Cargo Bike Spotted…
…in semi-suburban Pacific Palisades. The bicycle revolution is slowly making its way to Los Angeles…
Food for Thought: Thomas Paine
There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it.
- Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice
New Orleans—No Fate But What We Make
It is fitting that the New Orleanian who tagged this wall a few blocks north of St. Charles chose to quote John Connor. The Big Easy has been falling on hard times for decades, emerging from several Judgment Days of its own with stays of execution if not blanket absolution. Somehow, like the Weebles of my childhood, the city wobbles but it won’t fall down.
The world in which The Terminator franchise’s John Connor grows up is already doomed, it just doesn’t know it. Decisions have been made, courses of action charted, that will inevitably lead to its destruction. Greed plays a role, as it always does, but the Achilles heel of John Connor’s human society is the relentless pursuit of progress, of technological development, of high-octane evolution. New Orleans does not now and has never to my knowledge exhibited such an insatiable drive for success or corporate conquest. Its sins, whatever they are, do not include avarice.
Life moves slowly here. It drips with humidity, wilts in the sun. It sips sweet tea. Or beer or whatever else can be poured in a cup. New Orleans is fecund, a wellspring of music and literature and art, and often fetid, like the bayous that surround it and from which parts of it rose. New Orleans is never in a rush. It doesn’t care if it is late for your meeting. It’s not trying to be rude, but on its way to work it was called by a beat older than time and truer than language and when it heard that pure tone wail its hips started to buck, its feet to rise and fall, and in the music it saw God, eyes closed, shoulders swinging in time, as slick with sweat as the dancing city, and in the sonic ecstasy all suits and offices and meetings and mergers were forgotten.
New Orleans, as the last paragraph can attest, lends itself to hyperbole. It is the most corrupt city in America, or so they say: the most impoverished, the most dangerous, the least educated, the most original, the most musical, the most resilient, the most stuck in the past. Such rhetoric would suggest soaring peaks and chasmic valleys, but on the ground in New Orleans all these things seem to interweave. More than anything, it is an integrated city—culturally, architecturally, programmatically—especially by American standards.
I recently spent five weeks in the Crescent City, a city I had never spent time in before, a city about which I intended to blog throughout my stay. But New Orleans overtook me. I was unable to wrap my head around the place while experiencing it. Living in New Orleans, even so briefly, felt a bit like swimming underwater. Now that I’m a couple weeks removed I will attempt to share my observations in a series of posts. Hopefully, it won’t be as long between posts as this last lull.
Neuroscience and the Buddha Mind
If meditation can actually make minds and bodies healthier, could the same approach be taken with cities? What if, as a supplemental process to traditional quantitative analysis, planners and urban shapers meditated on their city? What does it mean to be that city? Would such a process reveal truths typically unseen?
The Dalai Lama says that no one should take any of Buddha’s teachings on faith; one should investigate them and decide for oneself. My extrapolation of this is that teachings taken solely on faith become dogma and are no longer truth. What dogma should planners investigate? Certainly, automobile-centric dogma has been questioned and in large part rejected of late, but what other supposed truths of urbanism falter when put beneath the microscope?
Recent Comments