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This is the War on Cars.
I'm Doug Gordon.
Something we've noted on the podcast before is that if you look at the cities doing the
most to reclaim public streets from the automobile and give it to people, they often have one
thing in common, and that's strong female leadership.
There's Mayor An Hidalgo in Paris and former Mayor Val Plent in Montreal, just to name two.
Urban Mobility experts Melissa and Chris Bruntlett have a new book that highlights this phenomenon.
It's called Women Changing Cities, Global Stories of Urban Transformation, and it's
out now from Reba Press.
You might remember the Bruntlett's from episode 77 of the War on Cars, which ran
back in 2021.
That's about their book, Curbing Traffic.
They are also the authors of another book, Building the Cycling City, The Dutch Blueprint
for Urban Vitality.
What you're about to hear is a preview of a bonus episode.
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So to help you to understand how we came to the stories and how we developed the
content for the book, I want you all to come back to us to the moment in recent
history when everything changed, and I'm sorry if this brings back some feelings
of anxiety for you, but for us, there we go, COVID-19 was really this crisis as a
turning point for a lot of cities around the world.
As they recognize, we can't keep going with the way we're going.
We have to find new ways of using our public spaces to provide that space for
physically distanced enjoyment outdoors to make sure people can still move.
We know that public transportation won't be used as much, and we can't have
everyone automatically go into cars for a lot of the reasons that Doug and Sarah
outlined in their books. And so we're watching as this is happening from our
home in Delft and starting to see some really compelling, yeah, changes that
are happening in places that maybe we didn't expect, but rapidly took hold
around the world in terms of what can be done.
And this is the thing, right? It was for the cities that wanted to seize the
opportunity. This was a really low-risk, high-reward opportunity to challenge the
way that we use space in the city and the way that we move around the city. And so
as Melissa said, when we're sitting behind our laptops stuck working from
home, we started to see these sparks of optimism in various cities. And the
first example, one a city that's very near and dear to our hearts in Montreal,
that first summer of the global pandemic, they pedestrianized 11 arterial
commercial streets through the city permanently. I mean for the season, but
it wasn't just for a few hours or a Sunday afternoon. This was seven days a week
from May to September, engaging with the local business community, not
necessarily commercializing this space, working with local artists and of
course the businesses to create terraces and turn these corridors into a
public space. It was really remarkable to actually be able to visit there two
years later and see these spaces for ourselves.
The other very obvious example for a lot of people, if those of you in the room
have not heard what's happening in Paris, I don't know what you've been doing
for the last seven years, but you know, fair enough. But Paris has grown
leaps and bounds through the pandemic, through the leadership of Anne Hidalgo
and her team to recognize that Parisians needed space. They needed
to move around in a different way. They had to respond rapidly because
Paris's streets can't get any wider than they already are. So how do we do that?
We do it with pop-up bike lanes. We see how people can move differently to
give them another option. The Velib, no, yeah, Velib. Oh my God, I always get
pixie and Velib confused. I'm sorry. Anyways, but the Velib was already
quite successful, so now we need to give people that space to be able to
move comfortably at a time when we need to also make sure that we're physically
distancing. At the same time, the sweet revolution starts where they start
realizing children need access to school, to safe environments to not only
arrive but depart from school. And so we see since 2020 until now, 200
realizations of completely pedestrianized school streets to give kids back
that safe space to move around their city comfortably, give parents the
comfort to allow their children to do that a little bit sooner than they were
before, but also creating these wonderful community assets that are beautiful
green spaces. And if you could see the before of this, it is a car canyon.
There is parking on both sides, two lanes of traffic and no humans. And now
it's a beautiful, wonderful space in the city. And then you have
Brussels, yeah, a city that is the capital of Europe. It is still
admittedly very car choked, but we saw these seeds of optimism that took
shape during the pandemic. It was a traffic circulation plan that was
initiated, inspired by their neighbors in Ghent, which Doug and Sarah
highlight in their book, a recirculation and a removal of the
through traffic in the city, the pedestrianization of some of the
central shopping streets and a 30 kilometer an hour limit that really,
yeah, saved a lot of lives and, yeah, has changed at least put that
city on the right step towards reducing the dominance of the car on their
streets.
Still staying in Europe, sorry. But once again, yeah, Barcelona is another
one of those cities that has done a lot of amazing work with their public
spaces. Most notably is the super blocks program, which unfortunately
has been stalled due to new leadership, but becomes this wonderful
legacy that hopefully in the years to come, they can keep building on.
But really is this idea of we've got these massive squares in the middle
of our residential neighborhoods. We have people living in small
Mediterranean apartments that need to be outdoors. This is their social
space. How do we give that back? And what we've been able to experience
going to Barcelona and seeing these is these beautiful squares where you
have people of all ages, all genders, all abilities outside enjoying
public space at all times of year to really, it's not just about
moving through spaces when we make space for fewer cars, but it's
also about giving that quality of enjoyment and staying back to
people in Barcelona. In addition to this, you also have the beachy
bus, which we know there's some excellent examples of that happening
here in the US, but growing leaps and bounds. So you have the
government providing these wonderful tactical urbanism squares and
you have the social activism fighting alongside to create more
space for kids as well.
And then you have Sydney in the southern Australasian portion of the
world, a city that had only accomplished 15 kilometers of
protected bike infrastructure in the 10 years preceding the
pandemic was able to build 150 kilometers in one year's time. So
again, as we said, a low risk, high reward opportunity to
provide in this case an alternative to the public
transport system with a fear of contagion on the buses, trams and
trains to provide people with an alternative so that everybody
wouldn't jump in their cars on top of existing traffic and
create this kind of Carmageddon situation.
So those are the stories that we're hearing a lot there in a
lot of our media that we were consuming a lot of what was
being consumed both in North America and in Europe. But we
were also starting to hear some lesser known stories of
change that were happening, in part because the work that
Chris and I have been able to do has broadened beyond North
America and Europe and we were starting to see other amazing
things happening in places that we wouldn't think would happen.
And the first is that me or you that does the first one.
Delhi is mine. Yeah, all right. So the first one.
And for those of you who have had an opportunity to visit
Delhi, it's really actually quite obvious how male dominated the
public spaces in the public transport are and these lead to
real feelings of unsafety and discomfort in the female
population and it really impacts the way that they move
through the city and the even the choices that they make in
terms of where to live and where to go to school and where to
work. And so in response to that, we see a mobile
application that was initiated by an entrepreneur called
Safety Pin, which attempts to crowdsource where these
dark spots where these feelings of unsafety are
happening and has collected hundreds of thousands of data
points that have been provided to the municipality to try to
address these places of unsafety in a more systemic way.
The app has now spread all across India and into Latin
America and is having a tremendous impact in changing
the conversation about who gets to use public space and who
gets to feel comfortable in that public space.
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