Posted Jun 11, 2021, 10:49 AM
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A gruff individual.
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Join Date: Aug 2003
Location: Greenville, SC - "Birthplace of the light switch rave"
Posts: 13,435
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Who Gets the Streets Now?
Who Gets the Streets Now?
The restaurants who needed them to survive? The humans who endured the pandemic city? Or their old owners, cars?
By Henry Grabar
Quote:
The city wants to build a bike lane, and the car people want to stop it.
If you follow local politics anywhere, you’ve heard this story before. But this time there’s a twist: Businesses on Washington, D.C.’s Ninth Street NW aren’t just fighting to keep parking spots so their customers can drive to dinner. Like so many restaurants around the country, establishments like Unconventional Diner and Cuba Libre have converted curbside parking spaces into open-air dining rooms. So when Mayor Muriel Bowser gave the go-ahead on a two-way, parking-protected bike lane that would eat up 80 spaces along the corridor, the neighborhood business group Shaw Main Streets warned DCist that the bike lane could prompt a “business bloodbath.”
As the pandemic ebbs, cities across the country must adjudicate what has suddenly become a dizzyingly open question: Who owns the streets? After a year in which all the old rules went out the window, some urbanites are eager for a return to normal—which is to say, a system that assumes the streets are for driving and for parking. But many, many others have had a revelation that my colleague Dan Kois so nicely summarized as the shutdowns descended last March: “[T]he coronavirus is revealing, or at least reminding us, just how much of contemporary American life is bullshit.” Just as the TSA suddenly permitted 12-ounce bottles of carry-on hand sanitizer, it took about 90 days for local governments to adopt enough new ideas for what a city should look like to tie up a community board for a decade. Was it an aberrant reaction to a hundred-year plague—or a sudden glimpse of the future?
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And sometimes it happens by public forum, as in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, whose main drive has been closed to cars since April 2020. At a rally to make that policy permanent, David Miles Jr., known locally as the Godfather of Skate, made the case: “You’re supposed to be able to enjoy yourself in a green environment and escape the hustles and bustles of everyday life. That only happens when the park is closed to cars.”
Those who would like cars to return to the park include the park’s art and science museums, which are concerned about the loss of parking spaces, as well as some local politicians who say keeping cars from the park makes it hard to access. The president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Shamann Walton, said the car-free park was “segregationist polic[y]” and “looks like the 1950s South.” His colleague Connie Chan, who grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, also argued it was a racial-equity issue to let people drive into the park. According to data from the city, visitor patterns in Golden Gate Park by district have not changed since the street was made car-free, though pedestrian traffic inside the park is up 42 percent and cyclist visits are up 441 percent. (And there are still nearly 5,000 parking spaces inside the park.)
In the Before Times, such conflicts often did pit drivers against everyone else. But it turns out that when you start offering up the pie of public space, everyone wants a slice, and compromise isn’t always easy.
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"To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end." -- Rebecca West for The New Yorker, 1947
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