dogtown commons

The New York Times reported on Thursday that Chinese officials are expected to cut Beijing’s automobile traffic in half during the summer Olympic Games, as part of their strategy to reduce the pollution that pervades the city’s air. (A separate article describes plans by athletes and their coaches to cope with the pollution, including doing their preparatory training outside the area and possibly even wearing masks during competitions.) Beijing did a test of this anti-smog tactic last August, when cars with license plates ending in odd and even numbers were only allowed to be driven on alternating days. Traffic delays were dramatically reduced, but it is not clear that there was much short-term effect on pollution levels.

The Beijing plan got me daydreaming earlier today about what would happen if for some bizarre political or environmental reason, all motorized vehicles were suddenly removed from roadways forever. (Yes, I know this is an absurd fantasy, and no, I am not proposing this as a goal.) What would become of our urban geography, if all those millions of acres of pavement were suddenly available for carfree use?

(An empty Bay Bridge shown during the closure of labor day weekend 2007. Flickr photo by The Artist™ used under a creative commons license.)

One model for imagining new uses for old spaces is the conversion of abandoned rail lines. Nationwide rail-to-trail conversions like the Iron Horse trail in Contra Costa county are one example, but more exciting, at least to me, is the high line project in New York. The high line is an abandoned elevated rail line that snakes for well over a mile down the far West side of Manhattan, where it used to bring freight to and from the area’s warehouses and factories. It marches unperturbed over busy surface streets and passes right through several buildings as it makes its way through 25 or so blocks of the city.

(The high line shown passing through a former Nabisco factory — now the gourmet Chelsea Market complex — at West 16th Street and 10th Avenue. Flickr photo by Zantony used under a creative commons license.)

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After a woman was robbed at gunpoint while walking home on Wesley Ave. near MacArthur Blvd this past week, signs have been posted on telephone poles alerting residents to the incident and offering tips for staying safe. It’s great to see Oakland residents getting involved in neighborhood safety efforts, but one piece of advice really jumped out: “Always Stay In Home After Dark.” Always? No more going out to dinner or to a movie? No more going to the local bar to watch a Warriors game with friends?

More seriously, even granting that the safety tip was not meant to be taken so literally, I have very mixed feelings about this piece of advice. It’s understandable that people want to avoid face-to-face encounters with the muzzle of a gun, and far be it from me to tell people they should walk around desolate streets after dark on principle, but on the other hand, ceding Oakland’s public spaces to criminals after the sun sets (that means 4:50 pm today) doesn’t seem like a solution either.

As Becks at Living in the O was reminded recently on a trip to DC, and as has been discussed here before, neighborhoods feel much safer and more walkable not only when there are police visible, but also when other pedestrians are around. During many years of living in New York without a car, I never once — no matter how late at night, or what neighborhood I was in — felt as exposed as I feel walking around Oakland after dark, simply because there were always other people walking around too. Of course New York City is an extreme case, given its density, its comprehensive and efficient public transit system, and its low car-ownership, and as much as I might fantasize about it sometimes, it’s unrealistic to think that Oakland will ever be as amenable to a carless lifestyle as New York.

Oakland does have some neighborhoods, however, which are close to BART, restaurants, bars, movie theaters, grocery stores and other amenities. Many residents of downtown, Temescal, Rockridge, and the neighborhoods surrounding Lake Merritt are able to get around fine without cars, and many car-owners would also appreciate being able to walk to dinner and back without feeling that they were putting themselves at risk. Rather than telling people to hide inside their homes after dark, should we be encouraging people to gather together some friends and go out for an evening stroll instead?

A Village Voice article by longtime Giuliani reporter Wayne Barrett has been getting a lot of attention on some left-leaning blogs. The 1997 decision to place the city’s emergency command center in 7 World Trade Center is one thing Giuliani is criticized for in the article.

Fair enough; it was a bad idea at the time, and in hindsight 7 WTC was obviously a disastrous place to put the command post, since it took several hours for a replacement command post to be set up after twin tower attacks. The WTC had been bombed in 1993 and was considered one of the likeliest sites in the city for any future acts of terrorism. And the reports that Giuliani turned his “command center” into a luxury hideaway for trysts with his mistress (like his pal Bernie Kerik did after 9/11) shouldn’t be a big shock to anyone who lived in the city during his tenure as Mayor.

Some of the attention, however, has been on Giuliani’s insistence that the command center be within walking distance of City Hall. Here is one passage from the Barrett article:

Lou Anemone, the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the NYPD, wrote memos slamming the site. “I’ve never seen in my life ‘walking distance’ as some kind of a standard for crisis management,” Anemone said later. “But you don’t want to confuse Giuliani with the facts.” Anemone had done a detailed vulnerability study of the city for Giuliani, pinpointing terrorist targets. “In terms of targets, the WTC was number one,” he says. “I guess you had to be there in 1993 to know how strongly we felt it was the wrong place.”

Since Barrett, Mark Kleiman and others consider the “walking distance” explanation so silly, they reason that he must have wanted the command center near city hall so that he could use it as a vanity project and “love shack,” in Kleiman’s words. I’m not normally inclined to defend Giuliani about anything, but why is the “walking distance” excuse considered so obviously laughable? Emergencies are emergencies: you can’t count on roads being clear and passable, you can’t count on subways running, you can’t count on helicopters being able to take off, fly and land (never mind last week’s freak tornado, what about hurricanes or rocket-propelled grenades?) With the emergency command center several miles away and across a river at MetroTech in Brooklyn, as it is now and as some of Giuliani’s people recommended at the time, isn’t it just that much harder for the mayor and other top officials to get there in an emergency?

I was at home in upper Manhattan on the morning of 9/11, but got called in to work in midtown after the towers were hit. With subways and buses not running, and my bicycle getting a flat tire a block from my apartment, I ended up rollerblading the 80 or so blocks to work. People who lived in other boroughs didn’t even have that option, since the bridges and tunnels were closed to all incoming traffic and pedestrians (although with a good enough excuse, some people were able to talk their way past the police lines and squeeze their way past the exodus of people leaving Manhattan). Obviously the mayor has options that a regular citizen does not, but it doesn’t strike me as self-evidently absurd to want an emergency command center that the mayor (and the police commissioner, and the folks from Homeland Security, etc.) can reach quickly on foot if necessary. Is that just silly?