Cars or Pedestrians?

There's a weird thing in architecture and urban design (and, of course, other parts of society) where a lot of people hate cars.

I get it. I do. They're expensive, so many people cannot afford them. They're inefficient. They clog up the streets and create pollution. They're dangerous. They require huge amounts of infrastructure that is essentially single-use space. There are many reasons to want to reduce the number of cars on the road.

However, we can't deny that cars are a fact of our lifestyle now. They provide a freedom and flexibility that no public transportation has been able to match yet. I don't see any reason why we would say that cars aren't here to stay.

However, this does not mean that we shouldn't encourage people to find alternate means of transportation. Walking, biking, and public transport are all options that are "better" in many ways. This has been something we've considered over the past week or so while completing a design charrette on our sites.

I am very passionate about creating pleasant outdoor spaces. Is there anything better than being outside in a beautiful place, eating, drinking, playing, or enjoying good conversation? Especially when you don't have to find or pay for parking? Or hide all your valuables before you exit the car then spend all your time worrying that you didn't hide them well enough? With this in mind, my group came up with the idea to convert the alley on our site into a pedestrian pathway. It would lead past retail shops and restaurants to parks and patios. It would be shaded by structures in front of it and it would be well lit and beautiful and safe. I am a fan of this idea.

Our site spans two blocks, and when we presented our proposal, a few people brought up the idea of closing off the street between them to cars. This is something we had tossed around but didn't seriously consider. I personally am of the unpopular opinion that locking cars out of the site is a bad idea. I don't want to disrupt traffic patterns, though I am well aware that traffic patterns would evolve to handle the disruption if we did close off the street. But more than that, I want these two blocks to become the beginning of a movement that ripples across the urban fabric. As soon as we say they are for pedestrians only, or pedestrians and bikes only, we are forming an island in the middle of the city, isolating it from the blocks around it.

I mentioned in my previous post that I believe in working with existing conditions, not against them. I firmly believe that we can still enact powerful change this way. We don't have to choose between pedestrians or cars--we can have both. And I think that if we create beautiful and pleasant pedestrian-scaled spaces, we will see a reduction in car use on the site as a result. The difference is that it comes from providing a valuable alternative rather than by shutting the cars out.