If every month in 2020 has felt like a year, then November was an eon.
For me, it started with a restless Election Night, and then an anxiety-induced Election Week, all resulting in the defeat of President Donald J. Trump at the ballot box. (Although he’d say I’ve got it all wrong.) Then as the world lurched into yet another wave of COVID-19, my current home in the United Kingdom entered lockdown 2.0, this one carrying a wholly different sense on the streets than the first. And the holiday season has been buoyed by news of vaccination, which is bringing actual cheer.
There’s a lot to cover! So let’s get started…
Transitional phase
First off, because it’s hard to ignore:
In April of 2018, I sat in an auditorium in downtown Manhattan and listened to then-Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, talk excitedly about using data sensors to predict potholes before they happen. It was for a CityLab story about mid-sized cities in the age of Trump: the Groundhog Day ritual of ‘Infrastructure Week’—which, we know now, is a souvenir of little worth—left municipalities without federal support for much-needed transport and utility projects. So local officials in U.S. cities, like Buttigieg, were taking it upon themselves to figure out workarounds. That pattern continued this month, with cities like Austin, Texas, passing referenda to fund rail.
It’s still too early to say what a Biden administration will bring to U.S. cities. There was buzz around transition plans that mentioned spending big on transport infrastructure—namely pedestrian and cycling interventions (a huge first!)—but the prospects of a divided Congress could dampen hopes of major stimulus. What I think will change, for sure, is the attention cities get in D.C. (I also do think it’s a big deal that the president-elect readily uses the phrase “climate crisis” now.) Gone will be the days of a president who declared that he was “elected to represent Pittsburgh, not Paris” when taking the U.S. out of the most consequential climate change agreement to date, even though the mayor of Pittsburgh himself had kept the city signed on. He’ll be residing in Mar-a-Lago, far from any major urban core.
Cycle parking ecosystem
Speaking of cycling: I joined up this month with the team at Oonee, who are hard at work building out safe bike parking facilities across the tristate area at scale. (Check out their shiny pods outside of Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, and Journal Square in Jersey City, New Jersey.) As anyone that has tried to lock up a bike outside in most major cities outside of the Netherlands may know, secure cycle racks are hard to come by—proving to be a key hindrance in usage. Oonee is looking to fill that gap.
I’ll be helping on the editorial front with a few potential opportunities that are still under wraps. Watch this space!
Cities on the precipice
Ange and I rarely get to work together these days. So when we can, it’s a total treat, especially when it involves topics relevant to this newsletter. Ange is behind the camera of this new video highlighting the great work at PEAK Urban, the five-partner research initiative that I consult with based out of the University of Oxford. It features Michael Keith, PEAK’s co-director, and while you won’t see me asking the questions, you’ll get to hear a lot of engaging responses on how cities—particularly in the Global South—are driving global change in 2020, and why they demand a multidisciplinary approach to understand them better.
‘Pop-up’ to permanent
If you’re an avid reader of this newsletter—shout-out to the avid readers (read: my dad)!—then you’ve likely seen me drone on about the streetspace interventions unfolding here in the U.K. The most widespread schemes have been low-traffic neighbourhoods, which look to cut rat-running through residential streets with bollards, planters and cameras. But there have also been footway widenings, full-on pedestrianisations, impromptu cycle lanes, and ‘School Streets,’ which ban through-traffic in front of schools in the morning and afternoon runs. All with the ultimate goal of getting more people walking and cycling in this socially distanced time.
Up until this point, those interventions have been largely funded by Tranche 1 of the U.K.’s “emergency active travel fund,” which was released to local councils by the central government in May as a big pot of pound sterlings (2 billion once all said and done) that could be spent with haste during a rapidly developing crisis. Councils sent in bids for projects; central government evaluated them (and denied a few); and money was doled out. Although councils were given emergency powers, the purse came with tighter strings than ever on design guidance, which advocates applauded. Westminster wanted to see actual infrastructure put in; not a few cones put together in a line.
Well, now Tranche 2 is here. It’s much larger than the first allocation of money (you can see the totals of what each council is getting here), and its renaming is telling: it’s no longer the “emergency active travel fund,” but rather just the “active travel fund.” The message from Grant Shapps, the Transport minister, has also changed—in May, it was get it out fast; in November, it’s make it long-lasting (and don’t always listen to the loudest voices in the room, like in Kensington). This is the first signs of post-COVID policy to actually cement these huge spikes in walking and cycling into greater modal shifts, reaffirmed by step five in Boris’s new plan for a “green industrial revolution.”
I’ve got two stories coming out soon about how the government here is going about doing just that—and whether or not we’re seeing the impact yet. More soon!
What to do with highways
A few weeks ago, my colleague and friend Adam Forman asked myself and several others on Twitter about highways and what to do about them. He mentioned an earlier era in New York where groups got together and convinced the city to tear down aboveground subway tracks, citing them as a blight on the local community. Although I’d say they made a huge mistake, what could be gleaned from their organizing tactics and message? What worked then that could work now?
Little has happened on this front in New York, other than the Sheridan ‘Boulevard,’ which deployed traffic calming measures on one of Robert Moses’ most notorious stretches. (I argued in an essay that it didn’t really rethink the traffic flow, though.) There are calls to turn the Jackie Robinson Parkway in Brooklyn into a walking and cycling corridor on weekends, and maybe add bus lanes to a few major roads. But nothing definitive exists, at least on paper.
The highway question has been around for a while now. Just recently, a cycling campaigner in London told me that while the aforementioned active travel interventions were surely welcomed, the central government is also pouring billions into road-building, which many critics say is the wrong direction to head in during the climate crisis. The alternatives seem to fall into two categories.
The first is decking over or burying highways, like in Boston and Dallas, which maintains the road but covers it in green. The second is getting rid of highways altogether; Utrecht recently finished restoring the canal that had been converted into a motorway in the ‘70s (which I had the privilege of seeing last February). The “Seoul Street” project in South Korea’s capital, utilizing a disused highway, is another monumental example.
But an outlier that has come my way is a natural wildlife overpass. It’s been a well-known design in Canada for some time, and Washington State has also experimented. The first one just opened in Utah. Essentially, road officials build an overpass and turn it over to local ecosystems, linking separate areas with a bridge and reducing the number of the animals that come onto the road, endangering themselves and drivers. It’s not getting rid of a highway, per se, but it gives us a sense of what’s possible.
You can watch the video of squirrels and black bears making their way over here.
And lastly, I’m excited to release a few more details about the class I’ll be teaching next spring at NYU, entitled “Advanced Reporting: The City.” (Kudos to Ange for the name.) From the syllabus:
Cities are living, thriving beings, in flux faster than they’ve ever been before. By the middle of the 21st century, an estimated two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in an urban area, making cities the frontlines of the biggest challenges facing our world. Throughout the semester, students will immerse themselves in the issues that city practitioners and dwellers confront on a daily basis, with possibilities including transportation; housing and community; the climate crisis; technology; the future of retail; public health; and open space. We will learn to perceive these issues through an urban lens, understanding how they affect our cityscape and why they ultimately matter. Wherever you’re reporting in from, your stories will hold resonance for cities everywhere. The battles may be local, but the implications are global.
That’s it for this month, folks! See you right before we ring in The Year After 2020.
Now, some food for thought:
Photo of the month
Quote of the month
“The politics of partying is something no one here really wants to discuss. Ignoring reality is part of the premise. The 20-somethings sharing spit particles on the dance floor seem to have a generational nihilistic streak, born as they were into a dying world, addled by a bunch of bad shit left to them by their elders. And now, the pandemic.”
- Brock Colyar, “New York Nightlife Never Stopped. It Just Went Underground.” (New York Magazine)