I’ve come and I don’t think this article is very satisfying, perhaps because it focuses on transportation rather than work/living density. I really like densely populated areas; the Sydney area where I live briefly is the most densely populated postcode in Australia. They are full of energy, always changing, and always interesting. I think that a certain level of garbage, or, as this article says, filth and other signs of gritty urban reality, such as the homeless, as part of life in a big city, collective “we” should be better Handle but not very.

Even with active policing and very good lighting, the dense areas of the city will be somewhat untidy. Admittedly, Singapore is a counterexample, but locals are sometimes regulated and monitored so that they throw furniture out of the windows.

I found the opening conceit very nervous. The pollution in London 300 years ago was caused by open sewers and horse poo. My father was born in Brooklyn in 1927, but his childhood was spent on Long Island (Summer spent with the extended family in Maine) hated New York City because among other reasons, when he visited it in his childhood , It exudes the smell of horse dung. By then, the car had not completely taken over.

Jane Jacobs is right. As she said in her speech on East Harlem, this makes her a forefront of urban planning theorists: “Respect-in the deepest sense-the key to chaotic zones, which have their own Strange wisdom has not yet been included in our concept of urban order.”

Author: Brian Ladd, historian and “Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Car Age“And, recently,”The streets of Europe: shaping the sights, sounds and smells of its big cities. ”Originally published on dark

About 300 years ago, when Londoners attacked the dirty streets of the city and suggested ways to make them cleaner, the philosopher Bernard Mandeville did the opposite.he debate Dirty streets are a welcome sign of prosperity—”a necessary evil that is inseparable from the happiness of London.” He wrote that once people “start to think about it, what offends them is the massive traffic and traffic in this powerful city.” The result of affluence,” he wrote, “if they have any concerns about their well-being, they will almost never want to see its streets less dirty.”

Today, can we say the same about efforts to eliminate street traffic congestion?

In many ways, traffic is like the filth of 18th-century London to today’s society.We gritted our teeth in traffic jams, we Measure and rank Congestion in the city, we call for solutions. Our driving ideals are reflected in car advertisements, in which one car completely owns a city street when taxiing to a charming destination. But if the destination is so attractive, aren’t there many other people and cars on the road? We forget that traffic is a sign of success.

Since the 1950s, efforts to eliminate traffic congestion have inevitably been linked to urban decline. De-industrialization, urban renewal, and highway construction eliminated large inner cities in places such as Kansas City, Syracuse, and Miami—usually targeting African-American communities—and changed driving through these places a few decades ago. Easy. What makes things easier is the consequent reduction in commercial activity, which makes the city full of empty storefronts and office buildings. The streets that were once full of people interacting with people were replaced by people in fast-moving steel boxes. Facts have proved that a city born for fast driving is actually a city born for other things.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the latest signs indicate that congestion-free streets are not all they claim. In the spring of 2020, closures and isolations have almost eliminated traffic congestion in many cities. Due to the reduced traffic volume, the few drivers who continue on the road drive faster and commute more smoothly. But the cost of improving commuting is high. They are part of a vicious circle in which the fear of social interactions triggered by business closures and pandemics leaves streets empty, which in turn makes it harder for dying economies to recover.

To make matters worse, streets without congestion are dangerous: Although the amount of driving has decreased, preliminary estimates 38,000 people died in cars In the United States, the estimated number of deaths in 2020 is the highest since 2007. Early studies have shown that empty streets trigger speeding and other reckless driving behaviors, and the results are fatal.

Even if we think that eliminating traffic congestion is worthwhile, the usual solutions—building and widening roads—are unlikely to work. A recognized phenomenon”Induce traffic“It means that new and wider roads usually fill up again soon. In other words, more roads means more driving, which is the opposite of what we urgently need to achieve our climate goals.

However, the United States spends huge sums of money to build new roads and add new lanes to existing roads every year.The 1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill recently passed by Congress will provide state transportation departments with an additional billions of dollars Some additional conditions, And most of these states are still committed to funding major highway expansions, such as Louisiana’s plan to build I-49 Inner City Connector In Shreveport, Texas plans to expand I-45 in Houston and I-35 in Austin, and Colorado plans to expand I-70 and I-270 near Denver.

Expressways and one-way boulevards are not destinations. The places where people want to go are likely to be blocked by traffic, either because business is booming, or because they are the kind of lively streets that make people linger. These things complement each other: People like to live and work near bustling streets and sidewalks, rather than in desolate places.Although Mandeville could not provide any figures to support his claim that filth is a measure of success, but Study in 2018 It is found that “there is a positive correlation between traffic congestion and GDP per capita and between traffic congestion and employment growth.” Pedestrians also feel safer, in fact, safer because cars move slowly. In order to truly solve the congestion problem, we need to stop driving to places where people gather. But in that case, there would be no such place.

Mandeville actually doesn’t like dirty streets, just like we like traffic jams. He denigrated respectable opinions in order to put forward a serious point. Business and industry will inevitably bring some kind of pollution, whether it is the feces of London in 1714, butcher’s blood and untreated sewage, or the noise, chemicals and plastic fragments we deal with today. If the price of a clean city is the complete elimination of commercial and human activities, then the price of cleanliness is too high.

Just as cleanliness must be balanced with commerce, we must measure free-flow traffic goals and other priorities. Transportation is a problem of economics and psychology, not just an engineering problem. Instead of investing resources on new and wider roads in order to speed up the commute, we should build places where people want to slow down and get off their cars-places that are worth waiting in traffic to get there.

Some cities are accepting this vision and working to make communities more suitable for walking and cycling. They may get a small amount of help from the new infrastructure plan, which provides $5 billion to help make streets safer, and another $1 billion to advance plans to demolish some existing highways that should not have been built. The plan’s unprecedented $39 billion investment in public transportation will also help, but this is still only a small part of the $110 billion new funding that will be used for highways (in addition to the $260 billion that continues to fund current highway projects) Outside).

We can do more. We can create spaces such as streets that are temporarily adapted to outdoor dining and play after the Covid attack. All the people and activities make these streets dirty and slower. Is it that bad?