Our cities were not made for this onslaught.
This essay is part of Streetsblog’s “Car Harms” series, a package of stories designed to remind policymakers and the public of the hidden costs, dangers, inefficiencies and just plain old sadness that come from building our city around the needs of drivers. Auto-dependency has undermined the joy and beauty of our great urban spaces, and that must change. Click here to read the full series.
One measure of the pernicious dominance of cars on urban streets – even on Manhattan streets – is how often you don’t even notice them.
Because I write frequently about urban transportation and transit, I often hear complaints – from all sides – about people’s day-to-day movement through the city. One of the most common complaints: that the bus lane or the bike lane is a waste of space because it is “empty.” People stewing in traffic on Fifth or Madison Avenue look out from the back of a car, whether their own or an Uber or taxi, and see the vast red blankness of the avenue’s twin bus lanes – room they could be using to whiz by. Or, drivers idling in traffic on Ninth Avenue look to the bike lane and think: that empty lane is causing traffic.
Continue reading the entire piece here at StreetsBlogNYC
______________________
Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here. Nicole is the author of Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, available now.
Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images
