And we could have a city that we really enjoy. We should use our streets in a smart way temporally. Trucks should be allowed to come in in the early morning and make all of those deliveries. Probably more restaurants outdoors with some capacity to do it almost 12 months a year through some heating, through some design solutions. So what should the streets of the future look like? Probably wider sidewalks. So we need to just have a more balanced approach. Just one year of congestion pricing will pay for all the money that they’ve spent on those roads. Put in the hardware that we know eventually will get approved and tell the Feds that if they threaten us with withholding federal funds or something like that, we’ll pay them back. We should move congestion pricing forward. And we could reduce the number of cars coming into the Central Business District. So in our densest areas, that’s something we should be looking at right now. What did we do then? We created occupancy restrictions to come into Manhattan. Or Superstorm Sandy, a number of tunnels were flooded. A number of lines were out of commission. Or after 9/11, there was fear of riding transit. We’ve encountered emergencies in the past, whether it was transit strikes when too many people came in by car.
So how can you solve that? Well, again, I’m a believer in history. And yet more people are afraid to use transit, and want to use cars during this time.
Play streets! So this ought to be a moment that we rethink and we figure out this conundrum of more people wanting to use the streets and bike or walk or dine. So right now, with the pandemic, we’re seeing city street space, which was totally for cars - either the storage or movement of cars, trucks, motor vehicles - can be used for sitting areas, for dining areas, for bikeways, for all sorts of other uses. So in cities, we have to begin to balance things.
How do we build on some of the street design improvements we’ve seen during the pandemic?
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