Christopher Tassava, who creates the impressive Northfield blog “Blowing and Drifting,” directed me to this interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times, “The City that Never Walks,” by Robert Sullivan. Sullivan is disappointed that New York City is becoming more dependent on autos for transportation, a trend that is counter to what is happening in many cities.

Here are some choice excerpts:

We have lost our golden pedestrian touch in New York mostly because we still think about traffic as though it were 1950, and we needed Robert Moses to plow a few giant freeways through town to get the cars moving again. But the fact is that more roads equal more traffic.

London now charges drivers a fee to enter the core business area, but here such initiatives are branded as anti-car, and thus anti-personal freedom: a congestion fee, critics say, is a tax on the middle-class car commuter. But as matters now stand, the pedestrian is taxed every day: by delays and emissions, by asthma rates that are (in the Bronx) as much as four times the national average. Though we think of it as a luxury, the car taxes us, and with it we tax others.

And yet, here in New York, we even have the debate over bicycle traffic backwards. We focus on drivers’ complaints about the bicycle commuter who races through red lights, rather than on the concerns of the mother biking her child around organic-food delivery trucks that idle in bike-only lanes….

New Yorkers always find good reasons to drive. Public transportation is dirty, time-consuming, a hassle, unsafe. Walking takes too long. The children will be late for school. But choosing the car is no longer safe — for your children who already don’t get enough exercise, for anyone’s lungs or for the future of New York as a livable place. There are even such things as secondhand driving effects: studies show that people who live on high-traffic streets tend to stay inside.

The simple and elegant cure for the loss of New York’s inner pedestrian is to open up car-clogged streets and public spaces….

“Roads no longer merely lead to places; they are places,” wrote John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the landscape historian. We’ve already lost a lot of New York to traffic. If New Yorkers don’t get out of their cars soon, the city’s future residents won’t have a reason to.

Some important things to keep in mind here, notably: cars come with extra costs that aren’t so easily seen, such as pollution and health problems due to physical inactivity, and other that are, such as lost time due to traffic congestion. Mr. Sullivan does well to remind us that the car is not the “safe” option that so many believe it to be.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 11:19 am and is filed under Biking/Walking, Other Places.