Liberal Landscape

I spent some time on Miami Beach Walk this week for the first time in a couple of years. It was interesting to see that the replacement of the old wooden boardwalk sections with pavers that I mentioned in an earlier post has now been completed.

I was especially delighted by the new signs forbidding motor vehicles on the path (see above). One could quibble with the English (what are “electric rides”?; the editor in me wants to substitute “vehicles” for “rides”). But the meaning of the signs is clear, and they appear to have been somewhat effective. In the course of a six-mile walk, I saw only three or four violators.

I know my thoughts on this subject will seem crabby to some, but it’s my sense that it’s quite dangerous to allow personal mobility devices with electric motors to be used in spaces that are supposed to be exclusively for people moving under their own power. Scooter and e-bicycle riders typically move at a higher speed than all but the fastest traditional cyclists, and riders of motorized unicycles and even many scooters can’t stop quickly. It’s also aesthetically distasteful when motorized vehicles enter pedestrian/bicycling spaces—especially crowded ones like Miami Beach Walk. When you’re in one of the few places in an American city where motor vehicles are banned, who wants to have to dodge scooters? They just degrade the environment. From my perhaps eccentric point-of-view, it would be wonderful if all the world’s recreational paths installed signs like those on Miami Beach Walk—and enforced them.

Note added 23 December 2022. I found myself on Miami Beach Walk this week and was, well, amused to discover that the authorities have been adding new signs with language that’s perhaps a bit less snappy than on the old signs but a little more likely to please a fussy editor. The prohibition on using non-human-powered transport modes is currently phrased: “No motorized means of transportation.”

Unfortunately, there seemed to be more violators than there were ten months ago. Scooter and e-bike riders were using the Walk with impunity, typically riding as fast as their vehicles would let them and endangering and annoying pedestrians and traditional cyclists. I acknowledge that my concern about this issue will seem uncalled-for to many.

I visited the new Underline trail when I was in Miami last week.

The Underline is supposed to replace and to be a big improvement over the M-Path, the simple trail that was created under or next to the southern branch of Metrorail when the train line was built in the early 1980s. The plan is that the new trail will separate pedestrians and cyclists and be surrounded by high-quality recreational spaces. It’s being paid for by both government agencies and private funds.

Only the first four-tenths of a mile (700 m) of the Underline trail has been completed. This segment lies entirely in Brickell, a high-density, generally upscale residential and commercial area just south of Miami’s traditional downtown. Brickell has a surprisingly large number of pedestrians on just about all of its sidewalks, and the trail here seems in some ways like a continuation of the surrounding bustling neighborhood. It’s often full of people, although I believe it’s reasonable to hypothesize that probably most users of the Underline’s initial segment are barely aware that they’re on a recreational trail.

One of the characteristics of the trail in Brickell is that the rail line is raised quite a bit above the street level in order not to impede boat traffic on the Miami River.

The enormous Metrorail columns provide plenty of room for huge distance markers and identifying and directional texts. Markers showing southbound distances, however, are aspirational. The finished Underline Trail ends just south of the point shown in the photograph below. Note that one of the dogwalkers in this photo is on the bicycle path. When I was there, no one seemed to be paying any attention at all to the distinction between walking and cycling paths.

South of Southwest 13th Street, the old M-Path has been left in place for approximately six-tenths of a mile (1 km). It runs under the tracks for a short distance and then alongside them. There is no separation of pedestrians and cyclists, but there really doesn’t need to be, since there are few users.

Between the first two stations south of Brickell—Vizcaya and Coconut Grove—the old M-Path is closed and is being turned into a continuation of the Underline (phase 2). An alternate route on local streets through low-density, more or less middle-class neighborhoods has been marked, but I saw very few people using it.

South of Coconut Grove, the old M-Path has for the moment been left in place. It continues to the end of the Metrorail line at downtown Dadeland (at the Dadeland South station), a distance of about six miles (10 km).

I walked this path when I was in Miami. It’s probably fair to say that, in its current state, the M-Path is not a very enticing trail. The trains overhead, despite being supported by concrete columns, are noisy, and (far worse) users are almost always right next (or very close) to South Dixie Highway (U.S. 1), a major arterial (with Ponce de Leon, another heavily-trafficked road, on the other side of the train line for much of the way).

There are numerous street crossings. In some cases, pedestrians and cyclists are aided only by a crosswalk; in others, there’s a traffic light to help, but users must sometimes wait a couple of minutes for a walk light to appear.

Since Miami-area drivers can’t be trusted to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks or when they’re making a turn, none of the street crossings seems very safe, except for the one where Snapper Creek Expressway joins the South Dixie Highway, where a bright red bridge has been installed.

The trail for the most part passes through what might be called an ordinary American suburban arterial commercial landscape. Automobile-oriented businesses and occasional residential structures line the parallel streets. Near certain stations, the trail consists of a narrow corridor through linear parking lots. The overhead Metrorail line is the trail’s chief distinguishing feature. There are also some new, tall apartment buildings in several places that are sometimes considered to be TOD projects.

For the moment, the M-Path seems to attract very few users. I saw perhaps five or six people during the couple of hours I was on the trail.

This remaining segment of the M-Path is supposed to be transformed into a continuation of the Underline trail in phase 3. It’s a little hard to see how the trail could be improved enough to make it a really attractive place, but perhaps I’m wrong. The literature on the Underline has alluring images of large groups of people walking, cycling, sitting, or playing in the midst of native vegetation, but of course no one has plans to get rid of the Metrorail tracks or the South Dixie Highway or all the level crossings.

Still, recreational trails in many car-oriented parts of the United States (for example, Dallas) attract a surprisingly large number of users. The city of Miami really has no other long-distance hiking/running/biking trail. The fact that the short paths near the junction of the Miami River and Biscayne Bay get quite a lot of use suggests that there is a market for a facility like the Underline. But the trails near downtown don’t border highways; they don’t have level street crossings; and they provide stunning views of Miami’s impressive new skyscrapers and of traffic on its busy waterways.

The views from most of the right-of-way of the projected Underline are of an ordinary American carscape. The designers of the phases 2 and 3 of the Underline have a difficult assignment.

Map revised 23 February 2022.

I made two short trips to Paris this fall.

I particularly wanted to take a look at some of the changes in Paris introduced by the administration of Mayor Anne Hidalgo, which, since 2014, has garnered a huge amount of publicity for its moves to reduce the role of the automobile in the city.

I ended up being quite impressed, although I was constantly aware that most of the recent developments in Paris are part of a long-term trend. Paris has been trying to tame the automobile since at least the 1980s.

The arguments favoring this effort are essentially the same in Paris as they are in the Western world’s other major cities. Automobiles cause vast amounts of air and noise pollution (there have been some periods when Paris has had the world’s worst air) and are responsible for a substantial number of deaths and injuries (there were more than 250 automobile-related deaths and 18,000 automobile-related injuries between January and November of 2021 in Île-de-France). Accommodating the automobile requires a huge amount of urban space (roughly 50% of the surface area of Paris), while in fact trips by automobile account for only a small percentage of all urban trips (approximately 13% in Paris, where 60% of all urban journeys are made on foot).¹ Most of the inhabitants of the majority of the largest Western cities (including Paris) do not even own an automobile. It makes no sense for urban planning to continue to focus above all on obliging automobile drivers. The end result of continuing this approach would be the destruction of the traditional city (and hardly anyone since Le Corbusier back in the 1920s has wanted to destroy the old city of Paris).

In this post I share observations not just from my most recent trips to Paris but from my many other visits there over the years. I also refer to some of the materials I’ve read. I acknowledge that a short essay by an occasional visitor on a huge and complicated place like Paris can only scratch the surface.

Recent developments fall, roughly, into three categories: [1] facilities for cyclists; [2] facilities for pedestrians; and [3] restrictions on driving.

[1] Facilities for cyclists. The Hidalgo administration has been boasting—accurately—of the facilities it’s built for cyclists. There are now said to be 1000 km of bicycle paths of one sort or another in Paris. They are, in fact, quite impressive.

Many of Paris’s new bicycle lanes are fully protected. Protected lanes between parking spaces and main roads are particularly common along some of the boulevards that were created in the 19th century under the direction of Baron Haussmann.

Where parking lanes are absent, protected lanes are typically much more modest, but there are usually still barriers of one sort or another between cyclists and automobile traffic.

On narrower streets, bicycle lanes have often been painted on sidewalks, or indicated by a different kind of pavement (in a style that’s common in the German-speaking countries):

There are also numerous contraflow lanes on narrow one-way streets.

And in one case—the Rue de Rivoli—half the roadway has been given over to bicycle traffic, and, for most of the day, private cars are no longer allowed on the lanes that are still open to automobiles.

Many of the city’s protected bicycle paths are shown on the map above.

But I wonder whether newspaper stories haven’t to some degree overstated the Hidalgo regime’s contribution to Paris’s bicycle facilities.

Paris has, in fact, been trying to improve its bicycling infrastructure for several decades. I am pretty sure that I saw my first painted bicycle lane on the Rue de Rivoli in 1969. During the 1990s, the city set up several bus-and-bicycle lanes; they turned out (predictably) to work awkwardly—buses and bicycles move at different speeds and have different stop-and-go patterns—but they were an attempt to make more room for bicycles. Early in the 21st century, Paris also began to set up protected lanes for bicycles.² I took this photo from what was then called the Promenade plantée in 2004.

An important component of bicycle infrastructure in Paris has been its bike-share system. Paris was probably the first really large city to set up such a service, the Vélib’ system in 2007. The Hidalgo administration’s contribution to Vélib’ has chiefly been allowing competition, and this change has caused a great many problems. The system is now run by a different company than it was originally and goes by a new name, Vélib’ Métropole, but it’s still functioning more or less as it has for fourteen years.

Let me add that, in general, I suspect that the role of the bicycle in contemporary Paris has sometimes been exaggerated. My sense in the course of my recent trips was that the city’s bicycle lanes are not particularly crowded. When I was taking photos of them, I often had to wait a long time for a cyclist to show up. Paris’s bicycle lanes may be a bit less crowded than New York’s. Despite some newspaper stories suggesting that the city was on its way to being “Copenhagenized,” cyclists in Paris, unlike those in Copenhagen or Amsterdam, usually make up only a small percentage of those moving on its streets.³ A story in the New York Times⁴ suggested that the tendency of French cyclists not to obey traffic lights has made Paris a dangerous place for pedestrians. It was a great story, but I’m not sure that it was particularly accurate. I walked approximately 200 km on my trips to Paris this fall, crossing hundreds of streets with bicycle lanes, and I was never in any way threatened by a lawless cyclist. The New York Times story’s source was perhaps a driver annoyed by some of the new restrictions on driving (of which more below). I don’t doubt, however, that cyclists in Paris (like those elsewhere in the world) pay less attention to traffic lights than they should.

It’s pretty clear that, even if Paris’s adoption of the bicycle can be exaggerated, the city has many more cyclists than it did a few years ago. It’s said that the number of cyclists in Paris rose 79% between 2019 and 2021. There are now supposed to be a million bicycle rides a day in Paris. Some of the rise is presumably due to the fact that Covid-19 has discouraged people from using public transit, but surely part of it is also due to the very real improvements in the city’s bicycle infrastructure.

[2] Facilities for pedestrians. The Hidalgo administration has also done a great deal to increase the space allotted to pedestrians in Central Paris. It’s eliminated traffic lanes and enlarged sidewalk space in several key locations, for example around the Place de la Nation. When I was there, the new pedestrian space hadn’t been raised above street level, but bollards had been installed so that cars couldn’t enter.

The Hidalgo administration has also established the Promenade sportive végétale Nation-Stalingrad.

This is a pedestrian path now approximately 4 km long through the linear middle-of-the-street park that was constructed in eastern Paris when Métro line 2 (underground here) was built in 1903. It runs from a block north of the Place de la Nation almost to the Jaurès Métro station (despite its name, it doesn’t quite get to the Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad). The park had not been well-maintained, and barriers in many places made walking along its full length difficult. Under the Hidalgo administration, the park was renovated, traffic lights for pedestrians were added when they were lacking, some athletic equipment was installed, and signage was added.

The areas along the path include high bourgeois districts, the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and much more modest, predominantly Maghrebi areas like Belleville; it takes users on a real tour of northeastern Paris’s social geography. And, while it can’t be claimed that this park is new, it has certainly been revitalized.

The Hidalgo administration has also presided over what might be termed the recategorization of central Paris’s splendid pedestrian and bicycling paths along the Seine that replaced two one-way freeways, one on each bank. I believe this transformation is one of the few instances in Europe where a freeway was turned into pedestrian space.

These paths originated in what turned out to be exceptionally popular Sunday closings of the freeways in the 1990s (long before Hidalgo became mayor). The approximately 4-km right-bank segment, once labeled Paris-Plage (even though swimming in the Seine, a bad idea, has never been allowed), was established when Bernard Delanoë was mayor in 2007. The original Paris-Plage was joined by an additional 2.5-km segment on the left bank of the Seine called the Promenade des Berges de la Seine in 2013, also while Bernard Delanoë was mayor. The two segments were joined administratively (although not geographically) and made permanent in 2017 under the name Parc Rives-de-Seine.

Somewhat confusingly, the Parc Rives-de-Seine, together with an improved path along the Bassin de la Villette in northeast Paris, are now collectively known as Paris-Plages (plural).

There has also been a less formal and still incomplete pedestrianization of the roads along the Canal St-Martin in northeastern Paris. The above-ground portions of this canal⁵ were bordered to a considerable extent by low-key industrial and warehousing facilities and very modest housing as late as the 1980s. The area became increasingly fashionable as it was gradually gentrified, and the banks were more or less cleaned up late in the 20th century.

The Hidalgo administration has encouraged a continuation of this process, making many of the streets along the canal zones of “pedestrian priority” (and closing them completely on some Sundays) so that the area has become an excellent pedestrian corridor.

There have also been some systematic street closings throughout the city. The Champs-Élysées, for example, has been closed to motorized traffic on the first Sunday of each month as well as on other occasions. (The photo at the beginning of this post was taken on the day of a road race that started on the Champs-Élysées.) There are also many street closings for weekend markets, many of which go back some decades.

Paris has constructed many other large-scale pedestrian facilities over the years, particularly since the 1990s. The extensive pedestrianization around the Centre Pompidou and the Forum des Halles has been in place for something like thirty years.

The Coulée verte René-Dumont, a 4.7-km rail trail for pedestrians between a spot just east of the Bastille Opéra through to the Bois de Vincennes, has been open for the most part nearly as long. It was established in the late 1980s, although it wasn’t fully open until the next decade. Originally called the Promenade plantée, the western half of this corridor (the Viaduc des Arts) runs high above street level.

The eastern portion runs in a culvert.

The western half of the Coulée verte appears to have been the model for the High Line in New York (and therefore of the 606 Trail in Chicago).⁶

The Hidalgo administration’s most widely-noted goal has been to turn Paris into a “fifteen-minute city” (ville du quart d’heure), in which a fifteen-minute walk or bike ride would provide access to essential services in all parts of the city. This is a wonderfully succinct way to describe a dense, pedestrian-oriented place, but, well, I’ve known Paris fairly well since the late 1960s, and it’s been a little hard for me to believe that Paris hasn’t come close to being a fifteen-minute city for all this time. For as long as I’ve been visiting the city (but probably much longer), there have been grocery stores every few blocks in nearly every residential district in the city, and schools and clinics are widely distributed too. Paris has been a dense place for several centuries and one of the best places in the world for urban walking, and it’s, of course, the city where flânerie was first identified as a distinct activity. I acknowledge that, by keeping the fifteen-minute city concept an important goal, the Hidalgo administration may have been helping to assure that rare gaps are filled. But it was continuing a pedestrian-first policy that goes back for many decades.

[3] Limitations on traffic. The Hidalgo administration has taken several additional steps to reduce the role of the automobile in the city, some of which aren’t in any obvious way based on the work of earlier administrations. For example, as of August 30, 2021, it imposed a speed limit of 30 kph in most of the city (the Boulevard périphérique and several major arterials are exempted). This seems like an important step to all those of us who’ve wondered why drivers were allowed to go so fast on the Haussmann-era boulevards. I was under the impression in walking around Paris this fall that most drivers were obeying the new speed limits (although, since average driving speed in Paris is said to be approximately 12 kph, the speed limit may not make a huge amount of difference). The speed limit is apparently popular with most Parisians.⁷

There are also plans to ban vehicles with diesel engines from the center of Paris from 2022 onwards, and to ban vehicles with gasoline engines from 2030.

The Hidalgo administration has also tried to tame scooters by limiting their speed in many places to 10 kph on November 15, 2021 (but, as in many other cities in recent years, scooters are allowed on bicycle paths, something that strikes me as rather unfortunate). And it’s also tried to limit street parking.

Statistical evidence⁸ supports the notion that automobile use in Paris has declined considerably, even before the Covid-19 Pandemic caused it to plunge still further. This is a real victory in the many-decades-long battle against automobile dominance in large Western cities.

[4] Beyond the city of Paris. Virtually all the steps described above concern the city of Paris alone and not the city’s suburbs. Paris these days has a population of something like 2.2 million. The Paris metropolitan area has a population of between ten and thirteen million depending on where its boundary is put. (Just as is true of American urban areas, the Paris region’s limits are impossible to define with certainty.) What’s clear is that, however you define the Paris area’s limits, the great majority of its population lives in the city’s suburbs.

Even more than is the case with American urban areas, Paris’s suburbs are often considered to be the place where the region’s major problems lie. Some of these are familiar ecological problems. Even though Paris’s suburbs are generally denser and have better public transportation than American suburbs, there are still enormous areas that can only be accessed efficiently by automobile. These days, no one thinks that this is a good idea. There is also the issue that a large proportion of the region’s poorer and/or immigrant population lives in the suburbs, sometimes in modest older housing and sometimes in one of the housing projects (HLMs, habitations à loyer modéré) that were built between the 1950s and 1980s. Zones with large populations of immigrants often have problems that are comparable to those in American ghettos (although there are fewer guns and murders). There is a feeling that the inhabitants of these areas are alienated in part because they find it difficult to participate fully in the modern economy. There are many reasons for this. One of them, it is often said, is that they don’t find it easy to move freely around the region.

But middle-class inhabitants of the suburbs have transportation problems too. Car dependence for many is as complete as it is for the majority of the inhabitants of American cities. Traffic jams and the need to travel vast distances make moving around Paris’s suburbs a tiresome and inefficient activity.

These problems have led to hugely ambitious plans to change the character of Paris’s suburban areas. These are subsumed under the label “Grand Paris” (“greater Paris”). Grand Paris, the subject of many books and a huge amount of short-form writing as well, involves many things, but perhaps the most important are attempts [1] to create stronger, less automobile-oriented nodes in selected parts of the Paris suburbs and [2] to join the nodes with a series of exceptionally fast, automatic Métro lines.⁹ The longest of these is a circumferential line two to seven kilometers beyond Paris’s city limits.¹⁰ Two semi-circumferential lines further out are also planned as are a branch line to Charles de Gaulle Airport and extensions of several existing Métro lines out to meet the Grand Paris Express.

The ambitious goal is not only to improve public transportation between Paris’s sprawling suburban areas and to improve life for the suburbs’ inhabitants but also to reduce the role of the automobile in the Paris region. Because the project more or less by definition lies entirely outside the city of Paris, the office of the mayor of Paris has had little to do with it.

Most of the work of creating Grand Paris lies in the future, but it’s the very near future. The nodes have been chosen, and construction of some of the new Métro lines has begun. And, as a kind of preview of what’s to come, the suburbs have been the scene of a massive infusion of tram lines over (roughly) the last twenty years, some of which are circumferential and some of which take passengers from Métro termini further into the suburbs. The only tram lines entirely in the city of Paris—lines 3a and 3b–follow the Boulevards des Maréchaux, a series of non-freeway arterials that run for the most part just inside the city limits.

Just about all aspects of Grand Paris have been the source of debate, and plans have changed a bewildering number of times. The number of government agencies that have been involved in the project is huge, and the cost of constructing everything that’s planned is enormous.

Cynics should remember that Paris has a history dating back several centuries of coming close to finishing its grand projects. Think, for example, of Baron Haussmann’s activities in the 19th century. The RER is another, near-contemporary example of a complex project that has mostly actually been built. Its key component is a group of fantastically expensive deep tunnels under the center of Paris that join suburban railroad lines. One of these tunnels (the RER A line) traverses nearly the entire city, east to west. The RER was planned in the 1960s, and its first line opened in stages between 1969 and 1977. That is to say, it was begun during a period sometimes characterized in French planning history as an era of “tout automobile,” when urban development in France chiefly involved figuring out ways to accommodate the automobile. The RER was developed despite the emphasis elsewhere in France on planning for cars, and it’s continued to grow—slowly!—in the decades since. The Grand Paris Express is in many ways a continuation of the same large-scale planning process out into the suburbs.

Whether the Grand Paris Express will accomplish its goal of reducing automobile usage remains to be seen. It’s pretty easy to be cynical. There really aren’t many (or perhaps any) cases where an automobile-oriented area has been transformed into one that’s genuinely pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly and significantly less automobile-dependent. But Paris may be in a better position to move in this direction than anyplace else in the world.

Here are four census-tract-level maps showing the “modal split” of journeys to work by workers 16 and over during the 2015/2019 period in the central parts of the New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco areas. All these maps use the same symbols, have a nominal scale of 1:100,000, and, if printed at 300 dpi, would occupy the same percentage of a 17 x 17 inch sheet of paper. (They will appear on a smaller scale on most computer screens unless you zoom in.) The maps use pie charts placed at tract center points to show modal split.

These maps are based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS).¹ The results of this survey for larger areas are probably quite reliable, but, at the census-tract level, the margins of error can be substantial, especially for smaller numbers. The narrower slivers on the pie charts, in other words, are less likely to be accurate than the thicker slivers. For most places, this means that the data on journeys to work by bicycle are less reliable than the data on journeys to work by car or (depending on the area) transit.

The numbers used to make the maps come from answers to the census question: “How did this person usually get to work last week?” Respondents were not allowed to check more than one box. It’s not clear how someone who biked to work on Monday, walked on Tuesday, took a bus on Wednesday, carpooled on Thursday, and drove him- or herself on Friday would have been most likely to answer the question.² Hopefully, things balance out. There really is no other national data set at the tract level that gives any kind of consistent information on choice of travel mode. And I don’t know of any national data at all on non-work trips.

Census tracts (for those unfamiliar with the term) are small, supposedly homogeneous areas devised by the Census Bureau. Certain large cities were first divided into census tracts early in the 20th century, and the entire country was “tracted” in 2000. The United States is now divided into nearly 74,000 census tracts. The average census tract has a population of something like 4,500, but in fact, if only because tract boundaries are changed reluctantly, census-tract population varies enormously, from zero to many tens of thousands in a few cases. For the 2015/2019 ACS, the middle 80% of the tracts varied in population from 2041 up to 7344. This seems like a big range, but it’s still possible to say that census tracts almost all have populations on the same order of magnitude. They most definitely do not, however, occupy the same amount of physical space. Census tracts in the denser regions of cities (for example, in much of Manhattan) are tiny; those in parts of Alaska are bigger than some states. The proximity of the pie charts on the maps below is a rough indicator of population density. There is a substantial cartographic problem here. The Lower East Side and the central Bronx, for example, end up being so crowded that it’s hard to tell what’s going on, while the San Gabriel Mountains and Berkeley Hills, at the other extreme, are so empty that it seems as though valuable map space is being wasted. The New York map, in other words, would be easier to read if the nominal scale had been something like 1:75,000; the other maps would mostly have looked better with nominal scales of approximately 1:150,000. Another problem I faced was choosing what to include. I went back and forth an embarrassing number of times trying to decide whether to include tract boundaries. The problem is that they disappear completely in much of the New York map, while they’re all too visible in the least populated areas.

The maps are clickable and downloadable, but the files are large, so that redrawing the maps can take a little while. Zooming in makes many of the details clearer; it also reveals minor faults in the data.

The message of the maps is the unsurprising one that large parts of New York and much smaller areas in Chicago and San Francisco have fundamentally different travel habits than does most of the rest of the United States. Transit use and walking are common modes for the journey to work, and automobile use is rare. This is true at all income levels.³

Another message of the maps is that walking is a more frequent way of getting to work than many would think. It’s most common around central business districts (even in Los Angeles) and near major residential universities, like Columbia, the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, and even UCLA and USC. Bicycling to work occurs on a large scale around certain big universities too.

The maps also demonstrate that Los Angeles, despite its enormous investment in rail transit, remains quite different in its travel habits from large parts of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Except in the dense, socially complicated but (on the whole) relatively impoverished neighborhoods west of downtown, transit users in most of Los Angeles are uncommon, even along rail lines. Because the Los Angeles area has such a large number of people, the total number of transit riders is substantial, but they are a minority in most places. The same thing, of course, is true in suburban areas in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, although suburban rail lines in all these cities do attract quite a number of users. I acknowledge that none of this will surprise anyone.

The 2015/2019 ACS is the latest to be released by the Census Bureau, but it already feels like historical data. Because of the Pandemic, many people have been working at home, at least part of the time, and transit use remains depressed everywhere. Bicycling advocates claim that there has been a huge rise in urban cycling and cite some scattered data to support their belief. They may be right, but an increase from, say, 2% to 4% doesn’t change the big picture very much.

No one knows whether the changes that have occurred during the Pandemic will last. We will have to wait until something like 2026 for the Census Bureau to produce ACS data for the Pandemic and post-Pandemic period.

Over the last thirty or so years, most of the urban areas of the Mountain West and Sunbelt have been taking some tentative steps to mitigate the less attractive aspects of their dependence on automobiles. They’ve built hiking and biking trails; they’ve encouraged and even subsidized downtown redevelopment; they’ve worked to create walkable neighborhoods; and they’ve added rail transit lines. The statistics suggest that none has succeeded to any great extent. The percentage of people using automobiles to commute to work has barely budged, and most downtowns are still not very healthy. But some urban areas have done better than others. It’s arguable that, among big cities, Denver has come a little closer to succeeding than its competitors.

Denver is in many ways typical of urban places in the country’s Mountain States and South. It’s big and it’s been growing quickly. The urban area has a population of something like three million, up approximately 15% from ten years earlier, and it sprawls enormously. While the boundaries of urban areas in the United States are always vague, continuous settlement in the Denver area runs at least sixty miles (100 km) north-south along the Front Range and at least thirty miles (50 km) east-west, from high up in the Rockies to far out in the Great Plains. Most travel in this huge region is by automobile. Very little of the Denver area would be considered “walkable” by any measure. And there’s a tremendous pollution problem.

As it happens, I’ve been in Denver at least every few years since the 1980s, and I went through a period in the early 1990s when I was there several times a year. I feel I know at least the central city moderately well and have a good sense of how the place has changed. I recently spent a few days in Denver and made an effort to take a close look at some of the ways that the Denver area has changed since I started visiting regularly.

From the perhaps peculiar point-of-view of this blog, Denver’s greatest claim to fame may be that it has such a complete network of off-street recreational paths. There are at least 250 miles (400 km) of such paths in the Denver area, and the major components of the system intersect with each other in a complicated enough way as to constitute a kind of network.

Most of the basic trail network dates from at least the 1980s. I say “at least” because the parks through which most of the trails run date back much further, in some cases to something like the 1890s (and perhaps beyond). These parks were established as Denverites discovered that the smallish streams flowing through the city out of the nearby Rockies could flood during spring thaws and after summer thunderstorms. Areas along the streams were gradually turned into parkland, and the streams themselves were tamed to some degree. Numerous dams were built, and, in some cases, streambeds were made less irregular and acquired concrete walls.

Paths through the linear parks along the streams naturally followed, sometimes as a result of work by government agencies, sometimes just because people liked to walk in the parks and eventually eroded pathways. In the 1980s, as more and more people took up bicycling, running, and walking, governments turned these paths into formal “bicycle trails,” and that’s what they’re still usually called, although they’re used by plenty of pedestrians. Since the 1980s these paths have slowly been improved in many small ways. They’ve mostly been paved. They’ve acquired stripes and mileage markers.

Gaps have been filled in. New side trails have been added. Bicycle and pedestrian traffic has been separated on the lower mile or so of Cherry Creek Trail, where there are paths on both sides of the creek.

And Cherry Creek Trail now ends at Confluence Park, which was built in part to celebrate the new millennium. Confluence Park incorporates the cleaned-up junction of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River and, with neighboring Commons Park, it provides impressive views of Denver’s renovated inner city.

I certainly wouldn’t claim that Denver’s bicycle trails are perfect. Because the trails follow streams that settlers avoided, they don’t always go where people might have found them most useful (but the two main trails, along Cherry Creek and the South Platte River, do both pass along the edge of downtown). Another problem: In a few places, busy freeways, also built away from settlements, abut the trails.

In addition, on pleasant weekend afternoons there can be so many cyclists that it’s hard to walk on the trails. Also, in at least one place a couple of miles from downtown, where the Denver Country Club insisted on controlling the banks of Cherry Creek, the Cherry Creek Trail is forced to divert onto a narrow sidewalk segment along a busy arterial. Of course, the sheer crowdedness of this narrow and unappealing segment is a sign of the trails’ success in attracting users.

Other cities have been building recreational paths too, but Denver, thanks to its geography, established them earlier than most cities, and it still has more of them for its size than just about any other U.S. urban area with the likely exception of Washington. Its competitors in the Mountain West and Sunbelt are far behind. Atlanta has struggled for decades to build its single long recreational trail, the Beltway. Dallas is only now trying to connect its scattered trails. Houston is just beginning to construct paths along its bayous. Austin’s excellent trail network is minute compared to Denver’s. New Orleans has had a hard time connecting its riverside levees near its central business district. And Phoenix has done little to join its dispersed trails, although it does have plans to do so.

Denver’s comparative success in building bicycle trails has increased the number of bicycle commuters only a little according to the Census Bureau’s 2015/2019 statistics on commuting to work by those aged 16 and over.¹ Only 2.2% of the city of Denver’s commuters got to work by bicycle while the comparable figure for the Denver-Aurora urban area was 0.9%. Several American cities (mostly but not all college towns) did better.² But, with the exception of New Orleans, most big Sunbelt and Mountain West cities and urban areas did much worse. Here are some city and urban area figures: Atlanta 1.1% and 0.2%; Dallas 0.2% and 0.1%; Houston 0.4% and 0.2%; New Orleans 3.1% and 1.4%; Phoenix 0.6% and 0.8%.

Denver has also been more successful than its competitors at reviving its downtown. In the early 1980s, Denver’s CBD, stretching something like 2 km (1.3 miles) between Union Station and the State Capitol, had all the usual problems of American downtowns. Its department stores were on their last legs. The inhabitants of close-in neighborhoods tended to be poor. There was a sense that downtown Denver wasn’t quite safe. It’s possible that the establishment of the 16th Street Mall in 1982 was a key catalyst for change. The sidewalks and the roadway along 16th Street were paved with ornamental tile. A system of free mall buses was instituted, and these buses have been the only vehicles allowed along most of 16th Street for virtually all the time since then. Even during the Pandemic, they’ve been running every couple of minutes. There may be no more frequent bus service in the United States.

There were periods as retailers closed and parking lots spread along 16th Street when the Mall seemed threatened, but restaurants have always done an adequate business. The addition of a nearby baseball stadium (1995) and several performance venues helped enormously. These days, despite the continued scarcity of office workers and tourists because of the Pandemic, downtown Denver is certainly the liveliest big-city downtown between Chicago and San Francisco.

A factor in the success of downtown Denver is that inner-city Denver has come to be seen as an attractive place to live. Capitol Hill, the neighborhood just to the south and east of the State Capitol, began to gentrify as early as the 1950s. In the 1980s it was a congenial, vaguely bohemian place, and, actually, it still is despite continued slow gentrification.

The next neighborhood out, Cheesman Park, east of Capitol Hill, seems actually to have never had any problems at all; it’s always been a prosperous place, and, with its apartment buildings (including a few high rises) a surprisingly urban one.

Although automobile ownership in these neighborhoods is high and the sidewalks are not exactly crowded, Capitol Hill and Cheesman Park are some of the only residential neighborhoods in the Mountain West and Sunbelt where I’ve had a considerable amount of company as I walked about.

A little more startling: the once rather gritty northern half of downtown Denver has also become a prestigious residential area, “LoDo” (or, more formally, Lower Downtown). A few old warehouses and industrial buildings were converted into hotels in the 1980s, some others (generally a bit later) into apartment buildings. New apartment buildings (some very tall) have been added to the mix in the years since. And, at the north end of 16th Street, three elegant pedestrian bridges over active railroad tracks, the South Platte River, and Interstate 25 stimulated the creation of additional housing in the early 21st century, partly built from scratch and partly as a result of renovations.

The formerly grim areas north of Union Station and between the South Platte and I-25 are now high-prestige, walkable residential areas. These areas are not only walkable; unlike some theoretically “walkable” areas in American cities, they actually have quite a few pedestrians. In how many other places in North America has a clever (and modestly priced) city planning project created a successful new urban place?

Gentrification has not been limited to the neighborhoods mentioned above. It’s also spread into Five Points and North Capitol Hill, where, I acknowledge, there has probably been a certain amount of slow displacement. It’s a little hard to see how this could have been avoided. Much further out, Central Park, a very large neighborhood that’s been built where the old Stapleton Airport was, has theoretically been planned on the basis of “new urbanist” principles, although it looks to me to consist almost entirely of single-family homes on wide streets, and its sidewalks are pretty empty. At least it does have sidewalks (a great deal of outer and suburban Denver doesn’t).

Most of Denver’s competitors have also tried to encourage the construction of housing in and near their central business districts, and some have had some success. Austin now has the tallest residential buildings west of the Mississippi; Atlanta’s downtown and Midtown have numerous new or newish middle-class apartment buildings too; and Dallas has tried to turn its downtown and several nearby neighborhoods into walkable places. But—and I acknowledge that this isn’t the only criterion that should be applied—none of these other cities has managed to create places that attract anything like as many pedestrians as Denver’s LoDo. And, with the spectacular exception of many parts of New Orleans, no other older gentrified neighborhood in the Mountain States or South has retained as much late 19th- and early 20th-century housing as Denver’s Capitol Hill.

Denver has also added more than its share of rail transit, and it’s done so with the help of locally raised taxes under the FasTracks program. Starting in 1994, it opened several light-rail lines. Electrified suburban rail lines were added starting in 2016; the line to the airport, which operates every fifteen minutes during the day, arguably provides better service than any suburban railroad in North America. The rail lines reach out along eight corridors from downtown; there’s also a line through central Aurora that avoids downtown completely.

The light-rail lines were mostly built in places where they were relatively cheap to build—along rail or freeway rights-of-way—and it’s arguable that, as a consequence, they don’t go where they would have been most useful (the inner city lost out most dramatically), but, as elsewhere in the United States, funding to build the lines was not very generous.  Denver’s lines did get built, and a couple of light-rail extensions and an additional railroad line or two are planned.

Like new rail lines elsewhere in the Mountain States and Sunbelt, Denver’s lines have not attracted as many riders as their builders had expected, but at least Denver has done a little better than most of its competitors. Pre-Pandemic, Denver’s light-rail lines had somewhat under 100,000 riders a day, its suburban lines just under 30,000, in other words, approximately as many light-rail riders as Dallas’s much longer system and far more suburban-rail riders than in Dallas. According to the Census Bureau, 4.4% of the Denver-Aurora urbanized area’s workers 16 and over took public transit to work in the 2015/2019 period. The comparable figure for the city of Denver was 7.6%. These numbers would seem pretty pitiful for any European urban area, and even for American cities in the Northeast and on the West Coast, but they’re actually high for the Mountain West and Sunbelt. Comparable figures for Dallas, for example, were 1.3 and 3.5; for Houston 2.0 and 3.8; for New Orleans 3.3 and 6.8; and for Phoenix 1.8 and 2.9 (but the city of Atlanta, with its heavy-rail lines, beat the city Denver; its figures were 2.8 and 10.0).

It’s impossible to be sure of why Denver has become a slightly less automobile-oriented place than its competitors, but it seems worthwhile to speculate. Size could have something to do with it. Denver is smaller (and perhaps more manageable?) than Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix, but it’s larger than Albuquerque, Austin, New Orleans, and Salt Lake. Denver also has the advantage of having been a reasonably big place earlier than most of its competitors (exception: New Orleans).³ Thus, it had a great many more preservable late 19th-/early 20th-century buildings in neighborhoods around downtown than its competitors. This probably helped make gentrification both easier and more gentle (Dallas’ attempt to build walkable neighborhoods involved bulldozing some of the old ones). In addition, Denver’s network of watercourses provided a relatively easy opportunity to build recreational trails. The fact that Denver rarely gets extraordinarily hot and/or humid in the summer may be an advantage too (but it can also get bitterly cold in the winter). Denver has on the whole probably attracted a larger proportion of highly educated, younger people than most of its competitors (but surely not more than Austin). These immigrants may have pushed governments to make positive decisions about building, for example, recreational paths and public transportation; governments in, say, the Houston or Phoenix regions have probably faced much less pressure in this area. Something else that has made Denver different is that Colorado’s government, unlike the state governments in most other Mountain West and Sunbelt states, has often been in the hands of Democrats, who have generally been more likely than Republicans to vote to contribute to non-automotive infrastructure projects.

Denver, like other urban areas of the Mountain West and Sunbelt, remains for the most part a sprawling, automobile-oriented, and energy-inefficient place. But it really has managed in some small ways to reduce some of the more disagreeable aspects of automobile dependence. As a result, you could probably live a little more comfortably without a car (or with very little car-use) in central Denver than in the central parts of, say, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, or Phoenix. This isn’t, I acknowledge. saying much.

A map of the United States by census tract suggests that–except in a few remote and nearly roadless parts of Alaska–few households are carfree:

In fact, a closer look reveals a different story. In 351 (out of 74,002) tracts, 75 or more percent of occupied households were carfree according to the 2015/2019 American Community Survey.¹  Of these, only four were in Alaska. 312 were in New York, distributed as follows: Manhattan (New York County): 163; the Bronx: 68; Brooklyn (Kings County): 74; Queens: 6; and Staten Island (Richmond County): 1. Other U.S. cities had only a scattering of tracts where carfree levels were as high: San Francisco: 11; Boston: 3; Baltimore: 3; Philadelphia: 3; Washington: 1; Chicago: 1; Los Angeles: 1. High carfree levels in New York (and elsewhere as well) are highly correlated with density.² Here’s a map:

Other older cities in the United States all do have substantial areas where carfree levels are extraordinarily high by American standards, but none of these areas is quite as free of automobiles as large parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. There were 1309 tracts that were more than 50% but less than 75% carfree in 2015/2019. They were widely scattered across the United States. Several of the tracts were in Indian reservations; a few were in pockets of poverty in the South or contained substantial Amish settlements; and a smaller number were in Alaska (where tracts are huge). But most were in large cities. Here’s a list, except for New York essentially by county (cities are not indicated in the data):

New York: 785 [well over half the total!]
Cook County, Ill. (Chicago): 65
Philadelphia: 55
Washington, D.C.: 44
Suffolk County, Mass. (mostly Boston): 37
Baltimore (city): 27
Wayne County, Mich. (mostly Detroit): 19
San Francisco: 18
Cuyahoga County, Ohio (mostly Cleveland): 16
Allegheny County, Pa. (mostly Pittsburgh): 16
Hudson County, N.J. (mostly Jersey City and Hoboken): 16
Essex County, N.J. (mostly Newark): 15
San Juan, P.R.: 14
New Orleans: 9
Los Angeles County, Calif. (mostly Los Angeles): 9
Hamilton County, Ohio (mostly Cincinnati): 9
King County, Wash. (mostly Seattle): 8
Onondaga County, N.Y. (mostly Syracuse): 8
Westchester County, N.Y.: 7
Alameda County, Calif. (mostly Oakland):  3
Saint Louis (city): 2

Here are maps of parts of a few large cities, again showing the distribution of carfree households, on the same nominal scale and with the same class intervals as on the map of New York above.³ Note that, just as in New York, density seems to be the major factor in determining the geography of these areas:

There were a great many more tracts—4304—in the third category identified on the maps, those in which between 25 and 50% of households had no vehicle available. In 2015/2019 such tracts made up approximately 5.8% of American census tracts. Like the tracts where more than half the households were carfree, they were disproportionately located in America’s denser large cities.⁴ But even many smaller and less dense cities—including most cities of the Sunbelt—had such tracts.⁵ Since most U.S. cities (unlike, say, New York) do not have much in the way of dense, high-prestige neighborhoods, the majority of relatively carfree tracts in smaller cities and in those of the Sunbelt are located in less well-off areas, but population density still appears to be a critical factor in determining their geography. Dense, high-prestige areas like Oakland in Pittsburgh, the Central West End in Saint Louis, South Beach in Miami Beach, and the French Quarter in New Orleans are nearly as carfree as nearby less privileged neighborhoods.⁶

It almost goes without saying that an obvious explanation for the inability of the United States government to do anything much to change car dependence is the country’s high level of car ownership. There are, however, several million households in large cities in which a choice has been made not to acquire an automobile. New York has many more such households than any other urban area. It’s the one large place in the United States where only a minority of households have a vehicle available.

Note added 15 October 2021. I inserted the second paragraph from the end (including footnotes 4, 5, and 6) in response to some questions posed by a couple of readers. 

I’ve reported in previous blog posts (here and here) on Chicago’s “shared streets” (which are comparable to what are called “slow streets” in most other cities). These are streets open only to local motor-vehicle traffic and intended chiefly for pedestrian and bicycle use. Slow streets (under any name) are one of the innovations of the Pandemic; they came into being as a result of a perceived need for socially-distanced recreational space. On the basis of what I’ve seen in Chicago, I’ve been pretty skeptical about slow streets. Many drivers have been failing to heed the signs directing them to drive slowly. Perhaps as a result (or because of force of habit) few pedestrians have been using Chicago’s shared streets. There may have been a slight reduction in traffic on these streets, and cyclists using them have been taking advantage of the implicit permission on one-way shared streets to travel in the wrong direction (something a lot of cyclists do anyway), but it’s been a little hard to see the point otherwise. Shared streets seemed to be one more well-meaning but somewhat futile attempt to tame automobiles.

I recently visited three of what are called “open streets” in New York and was struck by how much more successful—by how much more used—they (and especially one of them) seemed to be than Chicago’s shared streets.

In this blog post, I report my observations of and some hypotheses about the differences between New York’s and Chicago’s slow streets. I hope someone somewhere is working on a more deeply researched scholarly study.

The streets I visited in New York were Avenue B between East 6th Street and East 14th Street on the Lower East Side (or maybe East Village, in any case Manhattan); Berry Street between North 12th Street and Broadway in Williamsburg (Brooklyn); and 34th Avenue between 69th Street and Junction Boulevard in Jackson Heights (Queens). Note that these are three out of what, at the height of the Pandemic, were hundreds of open streets in New York.

The three open streets are rather different from each other.

It wasn’t even clear from the 14th Street end that the Avenue B open street was still functioning (although it’s supposed to be), since the traffic barrier wasn’t there, and several trucks were parked for unloading on this block. This northernmost block of Avenue B was very much like Leland Avenue in Chicago: the fact that it was supposed to be an open street was being more or less ignored by at least some drivers, and there weren’t any pedestrians in the street. (The fact that it was a weekday morning when I was there may have been a factor.)

There were barriers on the other cross-streets, from 13th Street south; there was less traffic; and there were a few pedestrians and cyclists in the roadway.

Berry Avenue in Williamsburg (probably a much more lightly used street pre-Pandemic) was doing better. Although some of the barriers here too were missing, there was little traffic, and there were several people walking or cycling on the street.

34th Avenue in Jackson Heights was a different kind of place altogether. All the barriers here were firmly in place and installed in locations that would make any driver think twice about entering the street in a car.

And (more important) many more people were walking—and relaxing and playing—on 34th Avenue.

One block was more or less permanently closed and had been turned into supervised playspace.

A couple of street vendors were sure enough that they’d get some business that they set up at cross-streets.

A few people felt so confident that they would not be bothered by cars that they were sitting in the median of 34th Avenue with their legs dangling in the street.

And, in fact, there were virtually no cars moving on 34th Avenue (although there were some scooters and motorcycles). The couple of cars I saw weren’t there to go through: they were parking.

I’m hardly the first person to be impressed by the 34th Avenue open street. It’s been held up widely as a model and gotten an enormous amount of positive publicity. Figuring out why it’s worked so well seems worthwhile.

One hypothesis: There has been much more community involvement in the maintenance of some open streets than others, and this involvement has been as strong on 34th Avenue as anywhere. One reason why community members had to become involved was that New York’s open streets in most cases have been operative only between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. (Chicago’s shared streets have been in force 24/7). The fact that the New York open streets have been only part-time has meant that someone has had to put out the barriers every morning and remove them every evening. At first, this task fell to New York’s Department of Transportation, which has a great many other duties. In some cases (including on 34th Avenue), volunteers started maintaining the barriers and eventually acquired a role as vocal supporters of the street as well. In New York, some of the open streets where no members of the community became involved in maintenance have ceased to exist as the Pandemic has receded.¹ Chicago’s shared streets, in contrast, have required only modest maintenance, and, in so far as I know, there has been little formal community involvement in their establishment and upkeep, which (like many things in Chicago) have been left to the local aldermen.

There’s another likely reason for the relative success of New York’s open streets. The New York neighborhoods being considered here are fundamentally different from the Chicago neighborhoods where shared streets have been put. New York’s are all denser—and have lower levels of automobile ownership. New York inner-city neighborhoods, by American standards, are spectacularly high-density and carfree. The table below gives figures for the census tracts that enclose part of or border on the three New York open streets I’m considering in this post and the Leland Avenue shared street in Chicago, as currently constituted.²

Street	Avenue B	Berry Street	34th Avenue	Leland Avenue
Neighborhood	Lower East Side	Williamsburg	Jackson Heights	Lincoln Square and Uptown
Length	.64 km	1.89 km	2.02 km	2.53 km
Tracts	4 3	6 4	10 5	5 6
Population	25,094	24,530	63,240	17,617
Dens/sq. km.	37,715	18,661	33,615	7,860
Dens./sq. mile	97,682	48,332	87,063	20,357
% households carfree	82%	65%	54%	36%
Per capita income	55,935	81,877	31,215	46,952
Persons/ household	1.82	2.10	2.64	1.98

Because car owners are a minority in high-density New York, the interests of carfree households count for a great deal more than they do elsewhere in urban North America. Perhaps as a result, New York has done more than other large American cities to reduce the role of the automobile in urban movement. These days, there are more than a thousand miles of bike lanes on the streets of New York (including protected lanes in many cases); some streets (Broadway in part of Manhattan, for example) have been put on a stringent “diet”; thousands of restaurants have voluntarily given up their parking lanes to build outdoor eating sheds; and traffic lights increasingly give pedestrians several seconds to start crossing streets before automobiles are allowed through. New York’s large-scale open-streets program, which appears to be supported by the majority of the population, is one more manifestation of this pattern. Open streets have been a success in part because there were a great many people living nearby who did a lot of walking or bicycling every day and found the streets useful and attractive. As a result, car drivers stayed away. This encouraged more pedestrians and cyclists to use the streets. In other words, a positive cumulative causation process made the streets the bustling places that many of them are today.

Chicago (and numerous other American cities) have, like New York, moved to reduce automobile usage in recent years but generally in a much more half-hearted way. Chicago, for example, has set up a bike-share program and built some bike lanes (including a small number of protected lanes), and, of course, it’s started a small shared-streets program, but it hasn’t done much besides that to reduce the role of automobiles in the city. There are certainly many people in Chicago who are unhappy about this, but politicians, as always, listen to those who are most numerous and shout loudest. Chicago has hundreds of thousands of carfree households (including many in well-off areas), but the majority of households in Chicago do include a car, and car owners know how to shout.⁷ One shared street in Chicago—Dickens Avenue—was abandoned, because local car-owners hated it and said so. Chicago hasn’t been able to prevent drivers from going too fast on its other shared streets, because drivers are used to doing what they want. As a result, none of the city’s shared streets is used very intensively, a fact that makes fast driving on these streets all the more likely. Because of the relatively low density of Chicago’s neighborhoods (and the lower density of carfree households), there just aren’t enough people around who could fight back. A truly effective slow-street program would perhaps require disciplining automobile use much more completely than is now politically possible in Chicago. The city’s car-ownership levels may just be too high for this to happen.

There are some other plausible (and to some extent interrelated) hypotheses that could be used to explain the particular success of the 34th Avenue open street. Jackson Heights is the only one of the neighborhoods considered here that could be labeled “working-class,” although, as in many New York neighborhoods—thanks to rent control and very high housing costs for newcomers—its inhabitants have a wide range of incomes. Its household size is also larger than that of the other neighborhoods, and it has a higher proportion of children. In addition, it’s further from a major park. For all these reasons, there may simply be more need for open space in Jackson Heights than in the other neighborhoods. The crowds you see using 34th Avenue had no other place to go.

What will happen to the slow streets is not yet clear. The Pandemic seems to be receding, and the CDC has declared that social-distancing outdoors is not as important as was once believed. It may be that the need for slow streets is fading away. But New York’s government has decided to continue to maintain some open streets in one form or another, and, in fact, the 34th Avenue open street has recently been made permanent by the City Council, although the details remain to be determined (some have proposed turning the street into a linear park). The future of shared streets in Chicago is unclear. It’s probably significant that only a few of the shared streets established in 2020 were revived in 2021.

There are some (admittedly rather obvious) lessons to be drawn here. One is that slow streets can be more meaningful than they have been in Chicago. Another is that community organizations and organizers really can effect change. There is also the very basic fact that reducing the role of automobiles in cities is a lot more likely to be successful in a city where only a minority of the population owns one.

I was having camera problems on my July 2021 trip to New York and illustrated the original version of this post with iPhone photos. In August 2021 I replaced some of these with photos made with a repaired camera on another trip to New York.

I made a brief trip in early July to Reykjavík. If you don’t count a couple of stops at Keflavík Airport many years ago, this was my first visit to Iceland.

Reykjavík is a smallish city in a country with few people. According to Statistics Iceland, Reykjavík’s population in 2021 was 132,252, and its urban area had only 232,280 people. Small as this number is, it amounts to approximately two-thirds of Iceland’s population. The city was actually much smaller not that long ago. In 1940, for example, Reykjavík had only 38,196 inhabitants. The great bulk of its growth has occurred since World War II, a period during which Iceland not only became much more urban; it also became much more prosperous. Most sources put Iceland among the world’s dozen wealthiest countries per capita (because of the high cost of living, its rank by PPP is lower).

As you might expect of a prosperous city whose growth has mostly been fairly recent and that faces few spatial restraints on outward growth, Reykjavík is a spread-out, car-oriented place. Except in a central city core of perhaps a couple of square kilometers, just about everything in Reykjavík has been constructed to fit the automobile. Buildings in much of the city tend with some exceptions to be not too close to other buildings, and there is plentiful parking throughout most of the urban area.

But Reykjavík is a Scandinavian city, and it’s the kind of place where educated people are very aware of all the problems associated with automobile dependence and are perfectly willing to try mitigating these when it’s practical to do so. And, while I was at first disappointed at how quickly Reykjavík’s charming, pedestrian-oriented city center gives way to car country no matter which way you walk, I ended up being impressed by the things Reykjavík has done to, well, take some of the rough edges off automobility.

An obvious example is a modest amount of pedestrianization in the central city. Automobiles are not allowed on two main central-city shopping streets—Laugavegur and Skólavörðustígur—from late morning until late evening. Some shorter street segments in the central city have also been closed to traffic.

Even away from these main streets, the entire central city is highly walkable. There are sidewalks everywhere, buildings are varied and mostly small, and drivers can be counted on to defer to pedestrians.

Another step has been the creation and maintenance of a reasonable bus system. The national government agreed to undertake a ten-year experiment in 2012 to build a bus system whose goal was the doubling of the use of public transport in Reykjavík. Since then, it’s been possible to get pretty close to most places in the Reykjavík area on new, well-maintained buses. Headways on weekdays are a consistent ten or fifteen minutes on most city routes. The fares (490 ISK, around $3.98) are steep, but most things in Iceland at the current exchange rate are expensive by world standards, and pass users pay much less per ride than the standard one-way fares. The experiment hasn’t doubled public-transit use, but it’s increased it substantially. More than 17,000 people use buses regularly. But many more people use cars, and automobile use per capita has gone up nearly as much as bus use. Most buses were running pretty empty when I was in Reykjavík. According to Statistics Iceland, fewer than 20% of the population uses public transport in Iceland’s densely populated areas (i.e., Reykjavík). Given the fact that only a minority of the population ever gets on a bus, that the system exists at all and is apparently funded adequately is significant.

Complementing the bus system, the government has also undertaken the creation of an elaborate network of hiking and bicycling trails (göngu- og hjólastígar) over the last twenty or so years.

These trails look more coherent on official maps than they feel on the ground. They’re not signed in a consistent way, and what counts as a hiking or biking trail varies enormously.

In the inner city, the “trails” can be simply a lane in the sidewalk for bicycles. (Sidewalks for pedestrians are nearly universal in the inner city and are not noted on the map.)

In the more suburban parts of Reykjavík, many of the trails follow major roads and often have separate lanes for bicycles and pedestrians. Some of these paths are quite wide.

I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure that cyclists (and, to a lesser extent, runners) are likely to be less bothered when they have to stick close to major highways than are walking pedestrians, but I did see quite a few pedestrians walking on paths along busy suburban highways.

In some places, the paths manage to get away from highways and can be quite bucolic. There are numerous internet pages describing substantial trips that can be made along Reykjavík’s göngu- og hjólastígar.

The government appears to have taken the creation of these trails quite seriously. One manifestation of this has been a major effort to deal with one of the obvious difficulties of running hiking and cycling oaths through a car-oriented city. There are numerous tunnels and bridges under or over major highways.

One problem for me anyway is that personal mobility devices—chiefly scooters but also (occasionally) e-bicycles, motorized skateboards, and electric unicycles—are permitted on the “hiking/bicycling” trails (see the photo taken on Hverfisgata above). The same thing occurs, of course, in many other places in the world. This strikes me as aesthetically and symbolically unfortunate. There are also some dangers when pedestrians and cyclists must share a path with faster vehicles that have poor braking systems.

I couldn’t help but notice that none of the paths I walked on was particularly busy. This may be due chiefly to the fact that Reykjavík doesn’t have all that many people, but the city’s major roadways can be quite crowded. Traffic jams aren’t common but they happen. Even though the government encourages use of the hiking/biking trails, I suspect that only a small segment of the population uses them regularly. Reykjavík is not Copenhagen.

I’ve only done superficial research on just how the hiking and cycling paths came to be. It’s clear that they’ve been created over many years and that the government agencies that have built them have made some effort to solicit comments from potential users (click here, for example, to see how this has worked). They’ve also tried to assure that the paths would meet certain standards (click here to see a document with guidelines). These web pages (which I read with the help of Google Translate) present a rather attractive picture of how government and citizens of a small polity can, working together, come up with reasonable, useful, and cost-effective infrastructure.

There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that Reykjavík’s bus system and hiking and biking trails have done much to cut into the high level of automobile use in the city, but they have certainly provided alternatives for those who wanted or needed them.