Ditch Cars for Open— and Equal—Streets

Alison Sant

Originally published April 19, 2022 on usnews.com

In my neighborhood in San Francisco’s Mission District, you can walk down Valencia Street—literally, the middle of the street—on the weekend. People pour into former car lanes to eat dinner and sip cocktails at freshly laid tables. Shops selling vintage clothes, records, flowers and coffee burst out of their storefronts while street performances draw crowds no longer confined to the narrow sidewalk. Pedestrians meander along the entire roadway, runners bounce through the crowds, and bikes and scooters snake their way down the street.

On a recent Saturday evening, I paused and watched a 14-person Balkan brass band march out a beat that kept me, and a pack of my neighbors, bobbing as the sky turned dark to their wailing horns. Valencia Street used to be made car-free several times a year. Now, it is closed every weekend.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and shelter-in-place orders were issued, the trickling pace of cars quieted city streets and left room for people. Experiments were launched to close and slow streets, repurpose parking spaces and remove cars, allowing spaces for people to walk, bike, gather, shop and eat more safely outdoors. The changes to urban streets in San Francisco were matched by many other cities across the country, including Denver; Minneapolis; New York City; Oakland, California; and Washington, D.C.

This rapid conversion set a new bar for how streets can be used in cities across the country. People everywhere were reminded how much they love their city streets when they aren’t run off the roadways by cars. In San Francisco, the public space solutions developed in response to the emergency built upon the city’s history of tactical experiments and programs to reclaim the public right of way through parklets, plazas,

Sunday Streets and Shared Spaces. During the pandemic, they have been cheap and relatively simple to design and approve—and they are everywhere.

That is, almost everywhere. Although slow streets and shared spaces were enjoyed by many, these public spaces were not equally distributed. In many cases, their design was not informed by a thorough community-led process that recognizes that safety on streets is determined by race just as much as it is determined by infrastructure. While these pedestrian-oriented interventions have been wildly successful in many ways, there is evidence they have exacerbated growing spatial inequalities already widespread in cities across the country.

About a 10-minute bike ride from the Mission District, the Tenderloin neighborhood is a small section of downtown San Francisco with one of the city’s most diverse populations and its densest housing. It is home to plenty of families with young children and seniors, making it an ideal beneficiary of pedestrian-centric street design. But it differs from the Mission in one critical way: Many of its residents are poor. These inequities were made obvious by an explosion of homeless encampments on the sidewalks and intensifying open-air drug dealing and use during the pandemic. Despite intense need, there were few shared street experiments offering remedies.

While miles of streets were closed to cars in the early days of the pandemic, just one block (and several blocks of parking lanes) were closed in the Tenderloin. The entire neighborhood was highlighted yellow on the city’s Slow Streets plan, underscoring its status as an exception to that program. According to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the Tenderloin’s number of one-way streets was one reason the neighborhood was “not a good fit” for the Slow Streets initiative.

This disparity was not new to the people of the Tenderloin, who have been neglected for years. Although most households do not own cars, the neighborhood’s streets are designed for speed. Cars rush through the Tenderloin’s one-way roads to and from the freeways and downtown San Francisco, transforming neighborhood streets into high-injury corridors. While neighborhood activists have long carried signs demanding slower speeds, the severe effects of the pandemic have brought renewed attention to the Tenderloin that shows promise of change: In April 2021, it became the first neighborhood in the city with a widespread speed limit reduction to 20 miles per hour.

Still, it is undeniable that safer streets have been delayed far too long. And unfortunately, the Tenderloin is not an exception. For close to a century, we have made a consistent choice that the best use of our public rights of way should be to move and store cars. An estimated 46,000 motor vehicle deaths occurred nationally in 2021. And while other countries have seen such numbers substantially decline during the pandemic, numbers in the U.S. actually went up in 2020. Most often, the pedestrians injured or killed on America’s city streets are low-income, people of color, older adults and people with disabilities—many of whom exclusively rely on walking and public transit.

Cars not only kill; they also systematically disadvantage communities. The traffic they cause slows buses, and the space they take up limits room for pedestrians and cyclists. When we deny people mobility, we make it harder for them to do most anything. Lengthy travel times limit access to education, jobs, health care and other vital resources of the city. And unbearable commutes come at the expense of time—time with family, time for one’s well-being, time that is free. Dedicating streets to moving and storing cars is not just terrible land-use policy, it is a tool of inequity. Our streets must be used to the greatest benefit of people—all people.

Reclaiming city streets from cars also presents one of the greatest opportunities to mitigate global climate change. With transportation responsible for 29% of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. (mostly from passenger vehicles), much attention, policy and planning has emphasized electric vehicles as a solution to carbon emissions. There is no doubt that limiting emissions from cars must be part of climate action. However, cars—electric or not—still can kill people on city streets and deny a truly equitable transportation system. The only way to make sure that cars do not waste lives is to get out of them.

Streets were not always this way. Over a century ago, boulevards were shared spaces, used mainly by people walking, biking or riding transit, and occasionally by those driving cars. Bicycles were nearly as ubiquitous in cities across the United States as they are today in the best cycling cities in the world. New York City’s Park Avenue was once home to a park, while San Francisco’s Market Street acted as a gateway to the city with a multimodal mingling of streetcars, bikes, horse-drawn carriages, pedestrians and automobiles.

Today, we have a choice to make about how we use our public spaces in the future. And as we have seen during the COVID pandemic, we can do a lot with our streets when they are absent of cars.

The events of the last two years will certainly shape the design of cities in years to come. Many hope that the experiments that have remade our streets as public spaces will help to reduce carbon emissions, expand our transportation options and make spaces for people. They also have the potential to do more.

As the conversations about power, equity and climate reverberate around the country, the solution to these systemic problems must include streets. We have an opportunity to bend our future to a new set of priorities that demonstrates care for the most vulnerable, honors our connection to one another, cultivates equality, and ensures a healthy democracy and just society. Before the streets fully fill again with a tangle of traffic, the pollution of hours burned behind a wheel and the noise of inhumane choices, we have an opportunity. The decisions we make today can make our cities healthier and more humane.

The choice is right outside your front door.

© 2022 U.S. News & World Report, L.P. Used with permission.