A couple of people asked me to post the introduction talk I did at last week's Boerum Hill Association transportation panel discussion. So, here it is:

Traffic-clogged streets, horn honking, jammed subways, sluggish buses, sidewalks too narrow for strollers-pushing parents to pass each other, children unable to play outside in front of their own homes for fear of being hit by a car, dozens of hours and gallons of gas burned as we idle in traffic and circle the block looking for our parking spaces. No matter what block you live on or how you commute to work, chances are, if you spend a lot of time in or around Downtown Brooklyn, then you well know the negative impacts of traffic congestion.

A century ago many New Yorkers assumed that cholera epidemics, tenement fires and child labor were inevitable and unavoidable products of big-city living. Today, we tend to look at traffic congestion in a similar way. Many of us have come to assume that traffic is like the weather, the natural order of things, the way it has to be if you want to live in New York City.

This is not so. Cities around the world are solving the problem of urban traffic congestion. In doing so, these cities are improving their mobility, growing their economies, strengthening public health and quality of life, and, perhaps most important, they are preparing themselves for the serious environmental challenges of the coming decades.

Brooklyn is growing. I’m not going to go through the entire littany of development projects big and small that are currently underway. You see them with your own eyes and read about them in the local papers. I’ll leave you with just this one statistic: Downtown Brooklyn alone will gain 20,000 new residents over the next decade if all the housing currently being built is filled. And that doesn’t include the 7,300 units included in Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards plan.

Our corner of Brooklyn is blessed with some of the greatest neighborhoods in the entire world, without exaggeration. Brooklyn is no longer a place to escape from. It’s not just a pit-stop on the road to the suburbs. People want to live, work and raise their families here. This is a great thing. But as the pace of development in and around Downtown Brooklyn accelerates, how will our area’s overtaxed traffic and transportation infrastructure be effected? What can we do to ensure that our transportation systems remain functional, and that our neighborhoods continue to be great places to live?

These questions are not just a parochial concern. American-style automobile dependency and surburban sprawl, now being exported to place like China and India, is rapidly becoming one of the most destructive forces in the world today. On the local level this destructiveness ranges from the minor aggravation of horn honking to the more serious problem of New York City’s record-setting rates of childhood asthma. On the macro level, automobile dependency bears a significant share of responsibility for global climate change, fossil fuel depletion and resource wars in oil-producing regions of the world. These crises are not just happening to polar bears in the Arctic. And they are no longer viewed by scientists as problems for our grandchildren. From the increasing threat of a major, Northeastern hurricane to the grieving families of Iraq war dead, these global-level crises are here in New York City today.

I don’t say this to make you feel ashamed or defensive if you own a car. Rather, the point is this: New York City is one of the last places in America where you can live a full and complete life without having to take on the burden of automobile ownership. And yet so many of this city’s transportation and public space policies encourage and reward motorists while punishing bus riders, cyclists, pedestrians, and subway users. Even if you own a car, you should want that to change. Because your car is exponentially less useful the more other cars there are around it.

The good news is that there are a lot of really good ideas being implemented in cities all around the world that we can use here in New York to improve the efficiency, safety, mobility and all-around quality of our surface streets. The better news is that these very same ideas are helping global cities grow economically, create nicer public spaces, better transportation and higher quality of life. In the case of transportation and public space, doing the right thing by our community and our planet isn't even a sacrifice. So, what is New York City waiting for?

2:27 PM | Link |