How Cars Stole Our Public Space: The (not so) Radical Solution for Our Streets

Video provided by Netherlands Nationaal Archief, displayed as part of their exhibition 'Op de Kaart'. English subtitles added to original. Connect with Nationaal Archief:
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TRANSCRIPT: "We all once thought that the city and society are like a kind of machine that must function properly, a pipeline to get people from A to B as quickly as possible. Because that is what is useful for the machine. But when we came up with that concept a hundred years ago we didn't realize that that system is constantly strengthening and that it has to get bigger and bigger and bigger. But bigger always comes at the cost of something. I'm a professor of Urban Mobility Futures at the University of Amsterdam at the Faculty of Social Sciences, so I actually look at mobility interventions and mobility innovation from a very social-scientific perspective. We see that the logic of mobility systems actually fits very well with the logic of highway systems. But our public space in urban areas is also subsumed by this same logic, right up to our front door. The same logic to let people easily get from A to B is literally solidified here, in the space between our buildings, from plinth to plinth. In fact, we've now given our entire public space away to a logic that allows all those individuals to get from A to B with ease and comfort. We assume that each family home owns about two private cars. With this, you have 25 to 30 square meters per home in public space which is made available to park your private car, free of charge! Adding it all up, you can have a sense of how many tens or hundreds of square meters of public space we need for that system to function. And that is one of the hidden costs of the mobility system, because we all pay for that together. One of the things that happened is that a radical monopoly has arisen around the car in traffic engineers' thinking. The only way free that monopoly is to think about it differently together, with each other, about a crucial question: Wouldn’t you like to give the car a less dominant place? The traffic experts say that if you build a school, you should add a kiss 'n ride. That's a place where parents can drop off their children by car. We have closed that kiss 'n ride to car traffic and opened it up to the children. By doing so, we were able to give space to plant cherry trees, fruit trees and provide much more green. This means more shade for the children, but also more space for the neighborhood. We also have more meeting places and picnic tables. You think that you take such a kiss 'n ride for granted, but the moment you question it, you get all that space in return. For me, the ideal world is one where we constantly ask ourselves, "What we want to do with our public space?" A world where all residents in their streets realize once again that the street in front of their house belongs to them. In the end, we may end up with the conclusion that our neighbors still find it important to park their private cars in public space. They still can, but at least we're now talking about it. It is no longer something we take for granted, but that is something we choose very consciously. I think that when we actually have that conversation, many people will make a different choice than the default given to them. But we never ask that question. Asking that question is the first step to radically rethinking our streets."
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[@johnhell65]

We also need to reclaim the huge amount of public space used by cars in movement. And no, electric cars are not an alternative, they are still part of a car-centric mobility vision. We need to change our mobility paradigm and switch to soft mobility. Owning a car must be dissociated from being seen as having a higher social status. Could forbidding car advertisement help to brake this link ?

[@jobbe-wijnen]

That likely isn't enough. The (political) meaning and influence of car culture is huge, see for example Car Cultures, edited by Daniel Miller (2001). Also, centralised advertisement is more and more a side track. Cultures around the status of car ownership of 'supercars' is partially maintained by kids doing car spotting and then posting this online on Instagram, just as one example. Also, if you make cars scarcer, they will also become a more privileged possession, which again will enhance their status. The transformation needs to be far more profound.

[@steveprice9737]

Our town is extremely hostile towards active travel. Dangerous roads, non functional cycling infrastructure and pretty much zero support for walking. The council are planning to improve matters in the town but you can bet your last penny that they'll eventually abandon the active travel bits due to external pressure from a hostile press and internal pressure from the car supporting council leadership. It is just a way of getting some cash to tidy up the town. It's frustrating and pretty typical of British towns currently. Even Birmingham which recently got praised for improvements to cycling infrastructure is coming in for angry criticism from those who use it.

[@spikedpsycho2383]

Wrong. when the Interstate was conceived it BYPASSED cities all together. the transportation engineers who planned the Interstate Highway System originally called for it to by-pass cities. The federal government would fund interstate roads, but if the cities wanted freeways (most of which would not cross state lines), they would have to fund them themselves. The cities and their urban planners strongly opposed this, and Congress approved the Interstate Highway System in 1956 only after the Bureau of Public Roads addd 3,000 miles of urban interstates. No doubt many of those freeways could have been located in places where they would have minimal impact on neighborhoods. It was urban planners, not the highway engineers or the highways themselves, that placed those highways down the middle of poor neighborhoods with the goal of slum clearance. Since much of the neighborhood was abandoned and few owners were willing to input funds to revamp or refurbish in dying neighborhoods.City governments lobbied heavily for urban freeways and even testified to Congress, as shown here. The American Municipal Association (today known as the National League of Cities) lobbied heavily for urban freeways and represented 12,000 municipalities in 44 States when testifying to Congress. The AMA was an organization of city governments, which included urban planners.