{"id":7189,"date":"2010-05-25T10:32:38","date_gmt":"2010-05-25T16:32:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.sustainablog.org\/?p=7189"},"modified":"2010-05-25T10:32:38","modified_gmt":"2010-05-25T16:32:38","slug":"urban-environment-parking-lots-parks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sustainablog.org\/articles\/urban-environment-parking-lots-parks\/","title":{"rendered":"Parking Lots to Parks: Designing Livable Cities"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>By Lester R. Brown<\/strong><\/p>\n As I was being driven through Tel Aviv from my hotel to a conference center in 1998, I could not help but note the overwhelming presence of cars and parking lots. It was obvious that Tel Aviv, expanding from a small settlement a half-century ago to a city of some 3 million today, had evolved during the automobile era. It occurred to me that the ratio of parks to parking lots may be the best indicator of the livability of a city<\/a>\u2014an indication of whether the city is designed for people or for cars.<\/p>\n Tel Aviv is not the world\u2019s only fast-growing city. Urbanization is the second dominant demographic trend of our time, after population growth itself. In 1900, some 150 million people lived in cities. By 2000, it was 2.8 billion people, a 19-fold increase. Now more than half of us live in cities\u2014making humans, for the first time, an urban species.<\/p>\n The world\u2019s cities are facing unprecedented challenges. In Mexico City, Tehran, Kolkata, Bangkok, Beijing, and hundreds of other cities, the air is no longer safe to breathe<\/a>. In some cities the air is so polluted that breathing is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Respiratory illnesses are rampant. In many places, the number of hours commuters spend sitting in traffic-congested streets and highways climbs higher each year, raising frustration levels.<\/p>\n In response to these conditions, we are seeing the emergence of a new urbanism<\/a>, a planning philosophy that environmentalist Francesca Lyman says \u201cseeks to revive the traditional city planning of an era when cities were designed around human beings instead of automobiles.\u201d One of the most remarkable modern urban transformations has occurred in Bogot\u00e1, Colombia, where Enrique Pe\u00f1alosa served as mayor for three years. When he took office in 1998 he did not ask how life could be improved for the 30 percent who owned cars, but for the 70 percent\u2014the majority\u2014who did not.<\/p>\n Pe\u00f1alosa realized that a city with a pleasant environment for children and the elderly would work for everyone. In just a few years, he transformed the quality of urban life. Under his leadership, the city created or renovated 1,200 parks, introduced a highly successful bus-based rapid transit system, built hundreds of kilometers of bicycle paths and pedestrian streets, reduced rush hour traffic by 40 percent, planted 100,000 trees, and involved local citizens directly in the improvement of their neighborhoods. In doing this, he created a sense of civic pride among the city\u2019s 8 million residents, making the streets of Bogot\u00e1 in this strife-torn country safer than those in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n In espousing this new urban philosophy, Pe\u00f1alosa is not alone. Jaime Lerner, when he was mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, pioneered the design and adoption of an alternative transportation system that is inexpensive and commuter-friendly. Since 1974 Curitiba\u2019s transportation system has been totally restructured. Although 60 percent of the people own cars, busing, biking, and walking account for 80 percent of all trips in the city.<\/p>\n When 95 percent of a city\u2019s workers depend on cars for commuting, as in Atlanta, Georgia, the city is in trouble. By contrast, in Amsterdam 35 percent of all residents bike or walk to work, while one fourth use public transit and 40 percent drive. In Paris, fewer than half of commuters rely on cars, and even this share is shrinking thanks to the efforts of Mayor Bertrand Delano\u00eb. Even though these European cities are older, often with narrow streets, they have far less congestion than Atlanta.<\/p>\n One way to combat congestion is to eliminate the subsidies, often indirect, that many employers provide for parking. In his book The High Cost of Free Parking<\/em>, Donald Shoup estimates that off-street parking subsidies in the United States are worth at least $127 billion a year, obviously encouraging people to drive. What societies should be striving for is not parking subsidies, but parking fees, reflecting the costs of congestion and the deteriorating quality of life as cars and parking lots take over.<\/p>\n Scores of cities are simply declaring car-free areas, among them New York, Stockholm, Vienna, and Rome. Paris enjoys a total ban on cars along stretches of the Seine River on Sundays and holidays and is looking to permanently ban cars along 1.2 miles of the Seine\u2019s left bank by 2012.<\/p>\nAn urban environment built for people… not cars<\/h3>\n
Approaches to creating healthy,\u00a0livable\u00a0cities<\/h3>\n