Trying new things and changing an unchangeable city
Today’s New York City — the way its famous streets and celebrated public spaces look and feel and work — was largely shaped by two unelected figures.
The first was “master builder” Robert Moses, head of various public authorities between the 1920s and the 1960s, who, among other things, famously built the city’s urban highway network. By determined design, he made New York a city for drivers, as famous for its congested streets and blaring-horn soundtrack as for its Broadway shows.
The second is Bloomberg-era transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who between 2007 and 2013 famously transformed those streets, pedestrianized many of them (including much of Broadway, including Times Square), built up a massive bike-lane network, launched the world’s most successful bike-share program and dedicated bus lanes and somehow managed to keep car traffic moving better than before.
Does Toronto have much to learn from their examples? We might. Especially interesting is SadikKhan, who details her experience in her new book Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, co-written with Seth Solomonow.
Moses’ techniques were first documented in Robert Caro’s 1974 biography The Power Broker, remarkable as a document of how a man never elected to anything managed to accumulate the authority to impose his will on mayors and governors and bend the city itself to suit his preferences. One of the most famous of those preferences was for highways over public transit. He made his legacy endure through the power of permanence in infrastructure.
For instance, Caro documents how Moses did not want to allow buses on his parkways. So he specifically designed the 204 bridges that pass over them to be too low for buses to get through. “He knew you could change the legislation. You can’t change a bridge after it’s up,” Sid Shapiro, Moses’ right-hand-man, told Caro, who concluded from the episode that “Robert Moses had condemned to monstrous traffic jams not merely the present generation of users of his parkways but generations to come.”
Our own lakefront highway, named after Metro Chairman Fredrick “Big Daddy” Gardiner, provides an example of how the permanence of road infrastructure shapes politics: virtually every debate at city hall about the highway’s future includes a parade of pro-Gardiner politicians conceding that if it didn’t exist already there’s no way they’d be in favour of building it today.
This Toronto example also shows how the apparent permanence of infrastructure also shapes the debates we have about new legislation because it actually shapes how we think about the city. Sadik-Khan encountered this at every turn when she was charged with implementing an ambitious plan to promote walking and cycling in New York to promote a better environment, better safety and better neighbourhoods.
“Despite New York City’s manifest traffic problems, New York drivers would not be so easily convinced that anything could be done — or even needed to be done — about it,” she writes at one point. “We’re not Amsterdam! We’re not Copenhagen!” she writes later of the response to cycling plans in New York and elsewhere. “We drive. Nobody bikes . . . It’s just not in our culture.” New Yorkers in 2007 lived in Robert Moses city, and they could not imagine it any different.
Given Moses’ use of permanence as a tool, it is fascinating and strangely fitting that Sadik-Khan’s key strategy for successfully reshaping the city he built was the opposite. Impermanence. “The revival of the city’s transportation network was accomplished without bulldozing a single neighbourhood or razing a single building,” she writes. “It was cheap — absurdly cheap . . . And it was fast, installed in days and weeks using almost do-it-yourself tactics: paint, planters, lights, signs, signals and surplus stone. Overnight, centuries-old roads turned into pedestrian oases atop space that had been there all along, hidden in plain sight.”
Rather than engage in long, drawnout political and community fights, they launched hundreds of “pilot projects” that temporarily implemented solutions, with obviously temporary materials, so people could see how they worked. And they did work, and people liked them quite a bit.
“Once you changed a space, its new configuration became obvious and unassailable, and people immediately abandoned whatever attachments they had to the way it used to be. The transformation of the street itself was the best example and catalyst for its approval,” she writes. This is how a city built over the course of many decades was — and can be — rebuilt as a different kind of place in a few short years. The expensive and now less-controversial work of making those changes permanent can then proceed at a leisurely pace.
It’s a lesson that Toronto city hall is already showing signs of inching toward adopting. But reading Streetfight, it becomes clear how much more potential lies in this simple strategy.
People here may think trying bold things — say, a bike lane on Bloor St. — without years of bitter argument is just “not in our culture.” SadikKhan’s inspiring lesson, demonstrated in the city Moses built, is that you can change a culture just by trying something new. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire