Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (44 page)

That did the trick. Humiliated, the school district finally backed down and legalized the journey. Now there’s a bike rack at the school, and sometimes Adam rides with a posse of seven or eight friends.

The Kaddo Marinos have launched a wider campaign to force Saratoga Springs to start building sidewalks and safer routes near schools. It will be a long fight: even though the district now has a safe-routes-to-schools committee, the last big infrastructure investment at Maple Avenue school was a renovation of the school’s vast parking lot to ease car congestion. But by insisting on their right to move as they pleased, the Kaddo Marinos have begun to force their city to reconsider what roads are for.

Anger and Action

Another morning, this one on Clinton Street in Brooklyn, just before Christmas in 2001: for what seemed like the hundredth time, Aaron Naparstek, an interactive media producer, was awoken at the crack of dawn by the honking of car horns. The morning racket had driven him crazy for months. Naparstek knew that drivers weren’t honking because they were worried about hitting someone. They were honking because they were backed up at the light at Clinton and Pacific, not moving at all. He could hear their anger in the way they let their horns wail. Not
toot, toot
, but
maaaaaaaaaa! maaaaaaaaaa!
It didn’t help that most American car horns are built for highway travel: they are designed to be heard far ahead of fast-moving vehicles.

That sense of aggression seeped into Naparstek’s psyche. Some days he would wake up even before the horns started blowing, and he would lie in bed, anticipating that first honk. And when it came, it was like a punch in the chest.

“My chest would tighten, my heart rate would go up. It felt like someone was about to fucking attack me—you know, do violence to me,” he told me. “And finally it was like, someone needs to pay for this.”

On that winter morning, one impatient driver laid his hand to his horn and did not remove it. The blast continued as Naparstek strode to the window of his third-floor brownstone apartment and identified the offending honker stuck near the intersection in a faded blue sedan. He swore that if the guy was still wailing on the horn in the time it took him to stroll to his refrigerator, grab a carton of eggs, and stroll back to his window, the guy was going to get it.

The honk went on.

The first egg was a direct hit, and deeply satisfying. After three or four more, the driver leaped out of his vehicle, spotted Naparstek, and started screaming. The stoplight cycled. The cars backed up even farther down Clinton. The guy kept yelling, and Naparstek probably yelled back. Among other threats, the driver promised to return that night, break into Naparstek’s apartment, and kill him. By the time the guy returned to his car, every driver on the street seemed to be honking, and Naparstek was a trembling mess.

After a few days of wondering when the stranger would show up with a bat, Naparstek realized that he needed to find a more constructive response to the dysfunction of New York traffic and his own anger. He tried a Zen approach. He started writing haiku about honking horns, taping them to lampposts in the neighborhood. They looked like this:

When the light turns green

like a leaf on a spring wind

the horn blows quickly.

It felt good. After a few weeks Naparstek noticed that his public haiku were joined by others. After a few more weeks the haiku writers and readers began meeting to talk about their frustrations. They started attending local community-policing meetings together, where they demanded that the police start ticketing the honkers. Amazingly, the police did just that. But the honking would always return after a day or so.

“Finally,” said Naparstek, “I realized I needed to step back, try some empathy, understand that these drivers are in pain down there, and help them solve the problem that was leading them to such rage.”

He took to sitting in his window with a pencil and pad of paper in order to document the geography of honking. A predictable dynamic revealed itself. First, traffic would back up on Atlantic Avenue, a feeder road for the Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, a block away. If the light at Clinton and Atlantic was green but there was no way out of the intersection, the first driver would rightfully stay put. But lacking a clear sight line to anything but that green light, the drivers behind that first car would lay on their horns.

It was clear that the problem could not be fixed by creating more road space. There was no space left to distribute. It didn’t lie in moving cars more quickly through intersections. Physics wouldn’t allow it. Naparstek studied traffic engineering reports. He befriended transportation planners. He showed up at community meetings and buttonholed anyone who knew anything about congestion management.

He finally found his answer at the intersection between the economics of impatience and the arcane art of light-signal programming. The city had timed the signals along many blocks of Clinton Street in order to create a “green wave” that drivers could theoretically cruise without stopping, all the way to Atlantic. In practice, that system created a bottleneck of cars at Atlantic that backed up well past Naparstek’s intersection at Clinton and Pacific. But he deduced that if the green-light cycles along Clinton could instead be “feathered,” or staggered in duration, then drivers would be held back a little bit longer at other intersections and experience less of a bottleneck once they got to Atlantic. Drivers’ pain would be rationed and relieved in increments along the route, easing their feeling of entrapment at the end.

Naparstek proposed the idea to the Department of Transportation. He bugged the bureaucrats for months until they finally made that change. It was a little miracle. The honking had died down to an occasional toot on the morning I sat on the brownstone step on the corner of Clinton and Pacific.

By then Naparstek and his fiancée had moved to a quieter street, but he had been convinced that the entire city needed a new approach to streets. He had also been emboldened by the notion that anyone who cared enough could change the way the city worked. He fought to get cars out of nearby Prospect Park and Grand Army Plaza. He joined Transportation Alternatives, a six-thousand-member network of livable street activists. He convinced Mark Gorton (who had made a fortune from his algorithm-based hedge funds and the file-sharing website LimeWire) to help him launch
Streetsblog
and
Streetfilms
, a Web-based campaign calling for safer, fairer, saner, and healthier streets.

These days, when pundits around the world discuss the massive changes that began occurring on the streets of New York City in 2007, they invariably credit the city’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, or his Department of Transportation chief, Janette Sadik-Khan. In truth, credit should also go to citizen activists like Naparstek.

In a campaign they launched in 2005, Naparstek and his activist friends started organizing, letter writing, shouting, blogging, networking, and educating convinced citizens and policy makers throughout the five boroughs to make the case not only that the city needed to change, but that it was capable of changing. It was the activists who raised the money to fly in Jan Gehl for streetscape studies and pep talks with policy makers. It was they who coordinated pedal-powered summits between Enrique Peñalosa, local politicians, and bike-loving celebrities such as David Byrne. It was Naparstek himself whose media campaign vilified the city’s old guard transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall, until she retired, creating an empty desk space that would be filled by a member of the livable streets tribe. (Sadik-Khan had been a board member of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing auto dependency in the region. A slew of her new advisers, planners, and technical staff had roots with Transportation Alternatives, Project for Public Spaces, or one of Naparstek’s community groups in Brooklyn.
*
)

It was the livable streets activists who ran the barricades at Sadik-Khan’s Ciclovía-like Summer Streets. And when the bike lane backlash came, it was they who packed school gyms and community board meetings to defend the streets renaissance. Some of them gave time. Some of them gave brainpower. Some of them gave cash. (Gorton contributed more than $2 million to the campaign between 2005 and 2008.) But it was people, lots of people, who changed New York City, not any one mayor, administrator, or superstar.

In 2010 Naparstek spent an hour sitting with me on the stoop of his old brownstone, watching the cars idle at the intersection of Clinton and Pacific. The guy was still up for a fight: the battle over bike lanes on the edge of Prospect Park was just heating up. But he remained calm as a driver started laying on the horn at the intersection. He chuckled and said, “A few years ago I wouldn’t have been able to stand this.” Maybe it was because he was older. Maybe just knowing that he could do something about the problem gave Naparstek peace of mind (after all, such a sense of empowerment is a key ingredient of that ideal state of challenged thriving). But one thing was clear. His egg-throwing days were over.

Painting the Town

One last story, this one from just above the muddy waters of the Willamette River, in an inner suburb of Portland, Oregon. This one matters most.

If you had driven through Sellwood in the late 1980s, you might have noticed a tall young man with an unruly shock of black hair sullenly mowing the lawn in front of a farm-style house on Southeast Ninth Avenue. That would be Mark Lakeman. He had lived there most of his life, and he was desperately unhappy. His malaise matched that of his neighborhood. With its modest lots and treelined streets, Sellwood approximated the streetcar suburb sweet spot, yet it was the kind of place where you could walk the sidewalks and never meet anyone. Most people drove when they had to go anywhere. The streets were empty of children and, not coincidentally, full of cars cutting through on their way downtown from distant suburbs. Lakeman couldn’t extinguish his feelings of disconnection. Trained as an architect and steeped in the culture of design, he had a hunch that something was broken in the shape of his neighborhood, but he couldn’t put a finger on what it was.

When he was twenty-seven, Lakeman quit his corporate architectural job and went searching for the solution to his unhappiness. The quest was personal, but it was also architectural. You might say he was searching for what the architect-philosopher Christopher Alexander once called “the quality without a name,” a sense of aliveness in the city, and in himself.

Lakeman took a plane across the Atlantic. He visited the ruins of meeting places built by his Celtic ancestors, circles of stone now sinking into the heather of England’s Lake District. He studied the daily rhythm of light and human activity in the piazzas of the Tuscan hill towns, and he was as moved by them as Jan Gehl had been thirty years before. Finally, after three continents and years of searching, he ventured into the lowland rain forests near Mexico’s frontier with Guatemala. The region is home to the Lacandon, a people whose ancestors resisted the Spanish conquest and who still live beyond the reach of modern urban planners.

Lakeman found the quality he was looking for in an unpaved village called Naja. It was hardly a romantic scene. The villagers cooked on earthen hearths and built their huts from rough-hewn mahogany. Lakeman was moved by the richness of their lives and the way it was reflected in the form of their settlement. The place was constantly being redesigned for reasons of pragmatism or imagination. The Lacondon would meet at the merging dirt pathways between their homes and gardens, and those intersections would gradually flatten and widen into gathering spaces. When they gathered, they would gather in circles. As conversations merged, circles would merge and grow. Those shapes reflected the intimate political and social dynamic in the village. Everyone participated on this earthen agora. There was no separation between children and adults.

Over months, Lakeman befriended the village leader, Chan K’in Viejo, an ancient man with a deeply crevassed face, two wives, and twenty-one children. In the smoky shadows of the leader’s hut Lakeman admitted that it was not until he entered Naja that he was able to extinguish his feelings of disconnection. This was the first time he had seen a community of people actually behaving like a community: gathering, talking, and helping one another every day. It would have been nice to stay, he said. The old man told him to go home and fix his own village.

The Hegemony of the Grid

When he returned to Portland, Lakeman recognized what might have been the heart of his village, buried under asphalt right there at the intersection of Southeast Sherrett Street and Ninth Avenue. “Why didn’t people in Sellwood know each other’s names or talk to each other or meet each other?” Lakeman recalled later. “Why didn’t they behave like villagers? I realized that part of the answer was in design.” In that straight, empty street grid he saw a kind of institutionalized, village-killing prison—the opposite of Naja’s convivial circles.

Lakeman’s reaction to the street grid might seem melodramatic, but history supports his framing. The orthogonal road grid that defined Sellwood—and most North American cities—really is a hand-me-down from empires who used streets as tools of aggression. The Assyrians used the grid design for garrisons and detention camps in conquered regions. So did the Romans. The rectilinear lines of their garrison towns, and eventually their basilicas, ran right over the circular gathering spaces of Lakeman’s ancestors in northern England. Thomas Jefferson convinced his fellow Founding Fathers of the American republic to adopt the Roman grid barely four years after their victory against the British Empire. The national Land Ordinance of 1785 set the grid as the approved form for all settlements west of the Ohio River. It was part of the tool kit of colonization and nation building. The grid was the fastest, simplest way to divide land so that it could be commodified. Rectangular units were easy to survey, buy, sell, and tax. They made it easier to provide services. The grid was a spectacular success as an economic tool, but it created some seriously unbalanced cities. The Land Ordinance of 1785 did not have provisions for parks or open space. Its cities comprised private lots and public roads, as though the city existed purely for commerce rather than for the people that commerce was thought to enrich. In town after town, planners subdivided, overlooked, or avoided public parks and plazas. Cities that wanted parks actually had to buy the land from private holders.