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Two months of lockdown seem to have changed our lives: everything we did before, what we considered normal, now seems part of a distant past, which, as the media insists on repeating, isn’t coming back; as though we didn’t know that humanity has always shown itself able to adapt to change, which is why we’ve been able to colonize the planet.
We know that the day will soon come when we will be told we can all go back to work as before, even if this won’t be the case and we will be forced to wear masks, and overnight we will return to gridlocked streets, polluted air, rush and stress. In short, a normality that, in the case of cities, revolves around the needs of cars.
Think about it: in terms of modal share, data from 2012 shows that in Madrid 42% of road traffic is public transport and 29% private vehicles (with an average occupation of between 1.1 and 1.35 people respectively), with another 29% made up of pedestrians or cyclists. And yet, in terms of space distribution, cars take up around 80% of the space between traffic and parking, while public transport is responsible for the remaining 20%, as shown in Karl Jilg’s illustrations.
The origins of this imbalance dates to the re-planning of cities in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the mistaken belief that traffic problems could be solved by building more roads. In practice, this investment in more space for private vehicle incentivized their use, meaning our cities were designed for cars, not people, creating hostile environments, with high levels of pollution, and killing those forced to breathe their air. The consequences of this use linked to rigid working hours are called traffic jams, and to pretend that they are “a sign of a city’s identity” is gross stupidity and arrogance.
As our cities now undergo a partial lifting of lockdown, we are seeing them as never before. The air is so clean that the pollution sensors report their measures as errors, our streets are virtually empty of cars, people walk in the road as part of social distancing, and the authorities have been flooded with requests for pedestrianization of large areas… Cities should definitely not return to normal after the pandemic, or at least not without asking their inhabitants what they want. The coronavirus has provided us with a laboratory for how to create a more sustainable future for our cities, and if one thing is clear, it is that people want more space on their streets at the expense of cars: now has never been a better time to implement change.
The coronavirus has given us an invaluable lesson in curing the congestion in our cities: with more people willing to work from home and with countries incorporating this right into their labor legislation, 2020 should be the year when cities everywhere decide to pedestrianize more and more areas, close central areas to cars, reduce the number of lanes on roads, eliminating parking spaces and free us from having to spend hours poisoning ourselves in our cars.
Cars make life more expensive and less healthy for all city-dwellers, whether they own one or not. The pandemic is a great opportunity to consider redesigning our cities: for a while after lockdown is lifted, car-owners will prefer to use their vehicles to move around as a means of social distancing, meaning our recently empty cities will once again be gridlocked, noisy and polluted.
Only governments with the vision and ambition to change things will take advantage of this window of opportunity. The rest of us will probably soon be back to business as usual: traffic jams, relegated to narrow sidewalks, dodging cars, noise, and filthy air. And so on, until the next scare comes along.
