Hamilton Nolan, Everyone Into The Grinder:
Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.
See also Ranjan Roy’s The Sweetgreen-ification of Society and Tom Junod’s The Water-Park Scandal and Two Americas in the Raw: Are We a Nation of Line-Cutters, or Are We the Line? about the introduction of a cut-the-line pass at a waterpark:
It wouldn’t be so bad, if the line still moved. But it doesn’t. It stops, every time a group of people with Flash Passes cut to the front. You used to be able to go on, say, three or four rides an hour, even on the most crowded days. Now you go on one or two. After four hours at Whitewater the other day, my daughter and I had gone on five. And so it’s not just that some people can afford to pay for an enhanced experience. It’s that your experience - what you’ve paid full price for - has been devalued. The experience of the line becomes an infernal humiliation; and the experience of avoiding the line becomes the only way to enjoy the water park.
And this quote from the former mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa:
An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.
I ran across this quote while reading about what makes Tokyo work as a city:
A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.
It’s a great quote and the piece attributes it to the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, Gustavo Petro. But he never said it (even though the vast majority of the results on Google say he did). The original quote (from 2012) is from another former mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa, and it reads:
Una ciudad avanzada no es en la que los pobres pueden moverse en carro, sino una en la que incluso los ricos utilizan el transporte público.
That roughly translates in English to:
An advanced city is not one where the poor can get around by car, but one where even the rich use public transportation.
Peñalosa, who made public transportation a central issue during his two terms as mayor, provided his own English translation in a 2013 TEDTalk:
An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.
I’m not sure if Peñalosa ever actually said the exact quote at the top of the post. The misattribution to Petro seems to stem from a tweet that went viral in 2012, an episode that foreshadowed how easily pithy information spreads on social media but also how difficult it is to correct misinformation once it’s out there. I expect this post to do almost nothing to change that, but one must tilt at one’s windmills.
In the NY Times, architect and urban designer John Massengale discusses how four European cities (London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Copenhagen) addressed their urban traffic problems and how NYC might apply those lessons to fix its own traffic issues. Massengale shared what the Dutch learned in reconfiguring their streets:
1. When drivers slow down to 20 m.p.h. or below, they are less likely to hit people and much less likely to seriously injure or kill people if they do hit them.
2. The best way to slow cars down is to throw away all the techniques that traffic engineers developed to make traffic flow quickly.
3. When you throw out all the detritus of traffic engineering, it becomes much easier to make beautiful places where people want to walk. Bike riding becomes more pleasant and safer as well.
His four-step plan to fix traffic in Manhattan is equally simple in principle:
The next step is to adopt congestion pricing below 96th Street in Manhattan and then:
1. Decrease the number of Manhattan streets that function as transportation corridors primarily devoted to moving machines through the city.
2. Design and build Slow Zones where people actually drive slowly.
3. Make the transportation corridors that remain better urban places, with a better balance between city life and moving cars.
Seems to me a vital part of this is fixing, expanding, and subsidizing the subway system…get everyone using the subway. Better, more reliable, and cheaper public transportation = less demand for taxis and Lyfts. As Bogota mayor Enrique Peñalosa said, “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transport.”
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