Thursday Plenary Session
Urban Growth and Environment
Enrique Peñalosa, Visiting Scholar, New York University, USA ; former Mayor, City of Bogotá, Columbia
A different and better way of living
It is not possible to talk about a transport model, without knowing what kind of city we want. Do we have in mind something like Houston, or rather like Amsterdam or Zurich?
Yet in order to know what kind of city we want, we have first to know how we want to live, because a city is only a means to a way of life.
Distance implies energy consumption. The best way to save energy in transport is to have short trips from home to work, to shops, to recreation.
The most powerful policy to help the poor is one that restricts
OUR URBAN GOALS: QUALITY OF LIFE, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY. It is fascinating that policies to achieve those 3 objectives ARE PRACTICALLY THE SAME POLICIES.
- We want to restrict car use to make a more walkable, more humane city, safer for children and friendlier to old people, less noisy, a city with a better quality of life.
- We want to restrict car use in order free resources from car infrastructure. In developing countries investments in road infrastructure primarily to aid private cars mobility is very regressive.
- We want to restrict car use in order to have more environmentally sustainable, less energy consuming cities.
As children feared wolves in the Middle Ages, our children grow in terror of cars.
For 5.000 years of cities' existence, all streets were exclusively pedestrian. A child could walk blocks away from home without fear. Cars are a very recent urban phenomena. They kill people, hundreds of thousands every year. Cars damaging effects to the urban environment go far beyond air pollution.
When cars appeared we should have left have the streets in the urban network as pedestrian streets only. In developing country cities which are only being created, it is still easy to create cities with very extensive pedestrian-only networks, which would change radically the way of life in modern cities.
Can each of you imagine how much your quality of life would improve if you had access to a 20 kilometer tree-lined pedestrian-and-bicycle street less than 3 or 4 blocks from your home? There you could walk, jog, ride a bicycle, push a baby-carriage, sit and watch people or read the paper, without the noise or danger of cars. This costs very little in a city to be created...it is only a matter of having a different vision.
Transport is different from all other challenges facing developing cities: It is the only one that gets worse as societies become richer.
It is also a peculiar challenge because solving it is not a matter of money; it takes changes in our way of life.
From a purely democratic and technical perspective, a solution for urban transport is very obvious. There is only one possible solution: public transport. The question is: How do we get people who can have a car to use public transport?
It is rarely out of raised consciousness that people use public transport. In every city in the world where a majority of people use public transport, they do so because there is some sort of restriction to private car use: traffic jams, scarce parking, low velocity, expensive tolls, etc.
Low-cost, high-frequency public transport requires compact cities.
In developing country cities almost always less than half of homes own cars. Yet even when they are a small minority, car owners hold practically all political power in society.
A solution to the transport issue is not technical, but political: Is our goal to alleviate upper income citizens traffic jams? Or is it rather to mobilize everybody efficiently? The answer seems obvious, yet in most cases what is done is the contrary.
A JICA transport study for Bogota, my 7 million inhabitant city, proposed 7 elevated highways and stated that it was not possible to reduce car use. Instead we restricted car use and created a top quality bus-based mass transit system modeled on Curitiba's we called TransMilenio.
With exclusive use of a few lanes in main arteries, TransMilenio articulated buses are boarded at stations. When a bus arrives at the station, its 4 doors and the station doors open simultaneously, as with rail-people-movers at some airports. As passengers have already paid, and the station surface and the bus surface are at the same level, a hundred can get off and a hundred can board the bus in seconds. TransMilenio stations and buses are easily accessible to wheel chairs.
TransMilenio moves 1.4 million passengers every day. New corridors are being built. Financed through a surcharge tax on gasoline and national government support, TransMilenio is to continue expanding until 85% of Bogota's population be within 500 meters of a TransMilenio main corridor.
The share of private car for trips went down from 17% in 1998 to 13% today.
In order to restrict car use we put in place a measure which gets 40 percent of cars off the streets during peak hours every weekday, based on license plate numbers.
Through a referendum voted by the people, we instituted a car-free day, every first Thursday every February. No cars except taxis circulate that day. Our 7 million inhabitant city works fine like that. Our car free day is an exercise to learn a different way of living, an exercise in Sustainability and social integration.
We restricted parking getting tens of thousands of cars off the sidewalks where they used to park and built quality sidewalks. This also symbolized social justice, a new respect for the pedestrian, for the citizen who doesn't own a car.
And of course we decided not to build any elevated highways. With those funds instead we build formidable schools, parks, libraries.
Where one of those highways was supposed to run according to the Japanese study, we built a 35 kilometer greenway through the city, used daily by tens of thousands of cyclists. We also built a quality 23 kilometer pedestrian-and-bicycle street through some of the city's poorest neighborhoods.
We started a well protected bicycle-path network in 1999, which now is more than 350 kilometers long. A bikeway is important because it protects bicyclists. It is even more important because it is a symbol showing that a citizen on a $ 30 bicycle is equally important as one on a $ 30,000 car.
The new status of cyclists and their protection has led to an enormous increase in bicycle use: From 0.2% of the population in 1998, to more than 4% today, about 300,000 people cycle every day to work.