Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (29 page)

Later I will lead you to cities that have inverted the public transit status equation. But my point here is that we all live in systems that shape our travel behavior. And most of us live in systems that give us almost no choice in how to live or get around. Americans have it worst. Even though a majority of Americans now tell pollsters that they would like to live in walkable communities where shops, restaurants, and local businesses are within an easy stroll and jobs are a short commute away, these places are in massive undersupply. Most people live so far beyond the five-minute walk to a frequent bus stop or the ten-minute walk to a rail station that public transit lies beyond imagination.

If you woke up this morning and decided to try a completely different method of getting to work, could you do it? Could you walk there? Ride a bicycle? Or catch a bus or a train that would get you there in the time it took to read the paper? Could you mix and match your modes? Now take it further. Does getting to a grocery store or a doctor’s office or a restaurant without a car seem like a pretty big chore? Can your children walk or cycle to school safely on their own? If you think these are unreasonable questions, then chances are, real choice has been designed out of your city. You may still benefit from the tremendous utility of your automobile, but the system is impoverishing you and your family and friends in ways you may never have imagined. How do we build systems that truly make us free in cities? Sometimes it takes a radical shift in the urban imagination to point the way.

9. Mobilicities II

Freedom

Automobiles are in no way responsible for our traffic problems. The entire responsibility lies in the faulty roads, which are behind the times.

—Norman Bel Geddes, 1940

Possession is becoming progressively burdensome and wasteful and therefore obsolete.

—Buckminster Fuller, 1969

In 1969 a consortium of European industrial interests charged a young American economist with figuring out how people would move through cities in the future. There was a lot of money to be made by whoever could divine the single technology most likely to capture the market in the coming decades. It was the era of James Bond gadgets and
Apollo 11
. Everyone was sure that some fabulous new machine would emerge to change everything. Eric Britton dove into the task. He gave his clients a thorough accounting of even the most fantastical possibilities. He keeps the faded report on a shelf in his apartment, a few blocks from the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris’s Sixth Arrondissement.

In hundreds of tables, Britton soberly cataloged and assessed the capacity, the energy consumption, and the maximum range of freight monorails, mini-monorails, carveyor belts, hydrofoils, multiple-speed moving platforms, and telecanapes, trains that slowed for boarding without coming to a complete stop. He estimated the congestion that might be caused by passenger bunching on high-speed walkways and the energy required for magnetic suspension. He rated technologies that seemed fantastical at the time, only to reemerge decades later, such as hybrid cars and hydrogen fuel cells.

Britton was swept up in the excitement of the possibilities, but as he shared his dossier of futurist ideas with the people who were actually trying to solve the problems of cities in both the rich and developing world, he was forced to wipe the stardust from his eyes.

“I realized that none of these technologies was going to solve the problems of cities, not in Europe, not in the U.S.A., nor anywhere else in the world,” Britton told me as I perused the now-faded report in his Paris apartment. “The future was not going to be defined by some kind of deus ex machina solution to all of our problems, but rather by step-by-step innovations and improvements applied to the tools we already had to work with.”

Britton’s clients were surprised. In the age of the Jetsons, it was unfashionable to suggest that after a couple of generations, people would still be getting around pretty much the same way they had since the dawn of the internal combustion engine, using trains, buses, cars, bicycles, motorcycles, and, as always, their feet. But history has proved him right. After the decades-long experiment with automobiles, governments simply do not have the money to completely transform urban infrastructure to suit any one radically new technology. Moreover, Britton came to realize that the question of mobility was not merely a matter of technology or economics, but one of culture and psychology, and of the vast variation in our preferences.

To depend on just one technology for urban mobility would be to deny human nature itself. Each of us has a unique set of abilities, weaknesses, and desires. Each of us is compelled and thrilled by a unique set of sensations. Every trip demands a unique solution. Britton likes to begin his journeys around Paris with a stroll down the glorious formal parterre of the nearby Luxembourg Gardens, where he can feel the bone-colored gravel crunching under his brown Rockports and cast his gaze on the patch of grass where he secretly buried his late mother’s ashes. His neighbor prefers just to hop in a car and go. Another prefers to dash straight to the Métro. Another carries an iron bicycle down to the street, but walks it for a block before mounting it. Each journey, each aspiration, distinct. This, says Britton, illustrates the essential condition of society and of cities. We are all much more unique in our preferences than planners acknowledge.

“You may think that French people are very different from Americans. But if you look at statistics of their choices and preferences, you see that French people are more different from each other than they are from Americans.”

The word for this condition is heteroscedasticity. It suggests that the bigger the size of any group, the harder it is to predict the variation in its characteristics or to find one solution to a problem involving huge numbers of independent variables and actors. “What heteroscedasticity tells us is that everything in cities is going to be a little bit complicated, a bit chaotic,” said Britton. “So the first thing you have to do is say, ‘Okay, I gotta be able to deal with chaos. There is no single answer to any problem in the city. The solution comes from a multiplicity of answers.’”
*

Cities should strive to embrace complexity, not just in transportation systems but in human experience, says Britton. He advises cities and corporations to abandon
old mobility
, a system rigidly organized entirely around one way of moving, and embrace
new mobility
, a future in which we would all be free to move in the greatest variety of ways.

“We all know old mobility,” Britton said. “It’s you sitting in your car, stuck in traffic. It’s you driving around for hours, searching for a parking spot. Old mobility is you devoting a fifth of your income to your car and a good chunk of your tax dollars to road improvements, even as the system performs worse every year. Old mobility is also the fifty-five-year-old maid with a bad leg, waiting in the rain for a bus that she can’t be certain will come. It’s your kids not being able to walk or bike to school. New mobility, on the other hand, is freedom distilled.”

Britton is one of those people whose ideas seem too theoretical, too pie-in-the-sky to matter, until suddenly they change the world. In 1994, for example, frustrated with planners’ myopic view of mobility, he proposed a modest experiment in which cities would simply abandon cars for a single day each year. It would be a way to break old patterns of thinking about streets. “A collective learning experience,” is how Britton framed the proposal. He’s the one who convinced Enrique Peñalosa to pull off the first big-city car-free day in Bogotá in 2000. Now more than a thousand cities have followed suit. As with the Ciclovía, each city that tries the experiment learns that streets can serve many more purposes than once imagined. People adjust. They find other ways to move. They surprise themselves.

But merely banning cars, Britton admits, is just as simplistic as depending on them entirely. His theory of freedom is better embodied in a proposal he made to the French Ministry of Environment in the early 1970s. At the time, moving by transit in Paris was a bureaucratic nightmare: you had to purchase as many as five different tickets simply to get across town. So few people took buses that Paris was considering abandoning the service. Britton suggested giving everyone in Paris a magic card that would automatically allow them passage on the Métro, trains, and buses. Just as proponents of Motordom once worked to reduce the friction of city roads that slowed cars down in the 1920s, Britton reasoned that by reducing friction and hassle, public transit would become a little more like driving.

Within a couple of years, Paris introduced the Carte d’Orange, a combination subway pass and identity card that gave its holder unlimited access to all of the city’s public transportation for a flat monthly rate. The system did not make rides much faster or cheaper, but it chipped away at the anxiety and effort associated with each transit trip. No more fumbling for change or waiting in line for surly ticket agents. Within a year, bus ridership jumped by 40 percent. Gradually the card underwent a series of dynamic upgrades, evolving by 2008 into the Navigo pass, a chip-embedded ID card. With a wave of your Navigo card over an electronic reader, you can ride any Métro, bus, airport shuttle, regional train, express train, or tram in the city.

“The system transforms the city by transforming our choices, and ultimately transforming each of us, the same way a disabled person’s life is transformed when they can wheel their chair onto a bus,” said Britton. Indeed, the Navigo pass has become a passport to the city, and a powerful distillation of the idea that everybody should be free to move across it. The unemployed get free access to all of Navigo’s shared modes. “If you are poor, you can travel right across the city; you can go way the hell out to the suburbs to look for a job. It’s all based on a philosophy of how to live—Freedom! Mobility for all!—and it has become part of our daily life now. That card is shaping the culture.”
*

Feeling Free in Transit

A small club of economists and psychologists devote themselves entirely to the study of how transit makes us feel and behave. They have found that the difficulty we associate with commuting on public transit can have as much to do with mental effort as physical effort. The less you have to think about your trip and the more in control you feel, the easier the journey. This explains part of the magic of the Paris Navigo card, but also its limitations. Although the smart card helps erase mental effort when jumping between modes of travel, it can only go so far in improving the experience of moving by transit, which depends on a matrix of predictability, comfort, and the perception of passing time.

In central Paris, riders need not worry about traffic delays. The Métro and commuter rail systems are woven tightly under the surface of the city, while shared transit has been gradually recolonizing road space. New trams run along grass medians planted down the middle of arterial roads, and a network of road lanes have been handed over to beautiful city buses, which they share with taxis and bicycles.

But speed alone cannot ease all of transit’s psychological burden. When you ride a bus or train, your travel time includes the minutes you spend doing nothing but waiting for your ride. Planners spend a lot of time debating the question of “headway elasticity”—or how frequently buses and trains need to come in order to draw the most passengers. The behavioral economics of headway elasticity are impossibly arcane, but the first principle to remember is that if you show up at a stop without checking transit schedules, you will have to wait, on average, half the interval time between buses before stepping on board. So if your bus comes only every twenty minutes, your half-hour journey to work will probably become a forty-minute journey.

But it will feel much longer than that.

Inaction has a warping effect on time: a minute spent waiting seems to pass much more slowly than a minute spent moving. So most transportation planners agree that a bus needs to show up at least every fifteen minutes on any route for people nearby to use it effortlessly—i.e., without feeling as though they need to plan ahead. Cities such as Paris solve the headway problem partly by virtue of density: on most routes, there are enough riders to support bus and train arrivals every few minutes. (This also helps explain the vicious cycle of crummy transit service out in suburbia. Dispersal makes frequent service just too costly to provide, but infrequent service sends potential riders back to their cars.)

Frequent service alone doesn’t erase the anxiety of waiting. Just as time decelerates while we are forced to wait, it slows to a crawl when we don’t know exactly how long we have to wait. Anyone who has ever stood at a bus stop in the rain or on a train platform, peering into the distance for headlights that refuse to appear, knows that the anxiety produced by delayed service has a very long tail. If your ride is delayed today, you cannot be sure if it will be on time tomorrow. You will carry a little more stress into every trip.

But simply getting more information about the journey can speed the clock back up again. Take the express bus station on Boulevard du Montparnasse, just a couple of blocks from Britton’s apartment. There’s a covered seating area, but also a prominent screen at the entrance, showing exactly when the next two express buses will arrive. This subtle change in infrastructure is a powerful psychological intervention. Just having access to real-time arrival data causes riders to feel calmer and more in control. After arrival countdown clocks were mounted in the London Underground, people told surveyors that the wait time felt shorter by a quarter. The clocks also make people feel safer traveling at night, partly by giving them more confidence in the system.

When New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority installed LED boards displaying train arrival times on some train platforms, the effect was fascinating. People at light board–equipped stations were less likely to lean precariously out over the track, peering down the tunnel. Everyone could make a logical decision whether to wait or head up to the street to walk or catch a cab—becoming, in effect, slightly more like the rational, informed actors that economists tell us we are.