Jylene,
The prospects for reduction of vehicular traffic will vary
from place to place, depending on what other forms of
transport are available. I'll comment briefly on NYC to
feed this very important thread. Thanks for starting and
nurturing it.
Due to the subway system here there are fair chances to
reduce auto use. The city has suspended the construction
of parking garages as separate structures. This, along
with gradually increasing tolls and other measures, is part
of a policy of slowly squeezing auto users out of the city,
kind of like boiling a frog by incremental increases in
heat. No drastic shut-downs, just let congestion and costs
and lack of parking teach the drivers a hard lesson.
Beyond that, some of us are advocating gradual takeover of
street space and parking lots for uses other than more
buildings -- parks, playgrounds, flea marketing, street
fairs. So that sses and squattings that are now allowed
temporarily slowly become permanent occupations. Then as
usage custom becomes strong, codes and regulations will
follow from political pressure, as has been done with
community gardens and parks.
This is, and will be, opposed by the real estate and auto
industries, the vain twins of urban and country-side
exploitation. So we don't take them on frontally, just
slowly shut off their sources of new growth and squeeze the
old ones. By offering better land uses, as preferred by
inhabitants, than they can offer. Through physical
interventions, not the legal-financial mechanisms they so
artfully dominate. We think they will respond to successful
models.
NYC sidewalks are cluttered with quasi-legal encrustations
-- newsstands and boxes, delivery bicylces, props and
signage, coffee bar benches, garbage racks, pots of
vegetation, homeless in boxes, fruit stands and their
enthroned watchers, stacks of goods -- all kinds of objects
competing with, and attractions for, pedestrians. While at
the curb and two or three lanes out, hulks of metal autos
and delivery trucks and cabs and buses and motorbikes and
skaters and crazies daredevil the creeping traffic with its
periodic suicidal hotrodder or battering-ram gigantic tandem
debris truck.
For us, this is nuts, that so much space is wasted for high
intensity use for 12 hours then almost none for the next.
All the elaborate transit studies of the 50s and 60s have
been reduced to a laissez faire approach -- let the humans
and machines fight it out, while the planners snooze among
their piles of reports.
The vaunted Regional Plan Association, set up in the 20s
here, still issues its beautiful and thoughtful annual
statements, to silence. Talk to their planners and they
drift off into the kind of talk we enjoy from Steve
Pirella, high intellectual discourse on why people are too
ignorant to understand them. Remember, though, that they
get their funding writing and talking this way so its not
to be discarded, just supplemented, boil the frog slowly.
We suspect we can do better with a bottom up approach
to discourse, not to disdain the haute sort, just to say
that the good ideas may need a change of clothing now and
then so they will not be automatically rejected as sterile
artificial fruit. I would extend that to say that
political organizing probably needs more concrete results,
more architecture, if you will, and to give credence to the
verbalizations.
Or that's what we are doing here to keep our heads above
the muck in this cesspool of savagely civilized discourse
about
who gets what piece of the shrinking pie for the burgeoning
feeders.
The prospects for reduction of vehicular traffic will vary
from place to place, depending on what other forms of
transport are available. I'll comment briefly on NYC to
feed this very important thread. Thanks for starting and
nurturing it.
Due to the subway system here there are fair chances to
reduce auto use. The city has suspended the construction
of parking garages as separate structures. This, along
with gradually increasing tolls and other measures, is part
of a policy of slowly squeezing auto users out of the city,
kind of like boiling a frog by incremental increases in
heat. No drastic shut-downs, just let congestion and costs
and lack of parking teach the drivers a hard lesson.
Beyond that, some of us are advocating gradual takeover of
street space and parking lots for uses other than more
buildings -- parks, playgrounds, flea marketing, street
fairs. So that sses and squattings that are now allowed
temporarily slowly become permanent occupations. Then as
usage custom becomes strong, codes and regulations will
follow from political pressure, as has been done with
community gardens and parks.
This is, and will be, opposed by the real estate and auto
industries, the vain twins of urban and country-side
exploitation. So we don't take them on frontally, just
slowly shut off their sources of new growth and squeeze the
old ones. By offering better land uses, as preferred by
inhabitants, than they can offer. Through physical
interventions, not the legal-financial mechanisms they so
artfully dominate. We think they will respond to successful
models.
NYC sidewalks are cluttered with quasi-legal encrustations
-- newsstands and boxes, delivery bicylces, props and
signage, coffee bar benches, garbage racks, pots of
vegetation, homeless in boxes, fruit stands and their
enthroned watchers, stacks of goods -- all kinds of objects
competing with, and attractions for, pedestrians. While at
the curb and two or three lanes out, hulks of metal autos
and delivery trucks and cabs and buses and motorbikes and
skaters and crazies daredevil the creeping traffic with its
periodic suicidal hotrodder or battering-ram gigantic tandem
debris truck.
For us, this is nuts, that so much space is wasted for high
intensity use for 12 hours then almost none for the next.
All the elaborate transit studies of the 50s and 60s have
been reduced to a laissez faire approach -- let the humans
and machines fight it out, while the planners snooze among
their piles of reports.
The vaunted Regional Plan Association, set up in the 20s
here, still issues its beautiful and thoughtful annual
statements, to silence. Talk to their planners and they
drift off into the kind of talk we enjoy from Steve
Pirella, high intellectual discourse on why people are too
ignorant to understand them. Remember, though, that they
get their funding writing and talking this way so its not
to be discarded, just supplemented, boil the frog slowly.
We suspect we can do better with a bottom up approach
to discourse, not to disdain the haute sort, just to say
that the good ideas may need a change of clothing now and
then so they will not be automatically rejected as sterile
artificial fruit. I would extend that to say that
political organizing probably needs more concrete results,
more architecture, if you will, and to give credence to the
verbalizations.
Or that's what we are doing here to keep our heads above
the muck in this cesspool of savagely civilized discourse
about
who gets what piece of the shrinking pie for the burgeoning
feeders.