If it hasn’t already sparked some metaphorical fires, I suspect these efforts to change how our cities operate will ignite quite a few:
D.C. lawmakers are drafting legislation to make it easier for shutdown-battered restaurants to space out their tables by putting them on public roads, parking spaces and sidewalks at least for months, and to give neighborhoods a way to close streets to traffic to make walking and biking safer. A mayoral advisory group made similar recommendations Thursday.
The pandemic “has been terrible. But there are certain byproducts that, if we take advantage of them, will let us be more of an open city, more of a city that’s usable by all sorts of people, cafes and cyclists,” D.C. Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3) said. “It’s an opportunity to stop doing things in the old polluting and unhealthful ways.” [WaPo]
The resurrected Minnehaha.
Why a flashpoint?
First, many, many people think they should be able to drive their cars anywhere. It’s a lack of a sense of history, really; just a few generations ago, car ownership was extremely limited, roads were far less available, and mass transportation was the best option for most transit. For example, streetcars out of Minneapolis had a connection to the town of Excelsior on Lake Minnetonka for use as a commuting option, and the docks at Excelsior connected to a collection of six Express Boats, which collected commuters from the lake shore for transport to and from Excelsior. On weekends, Big Island Park, located on an island in Lake Minnetonka, functioned as a weekend destination, although it was a financial failure. (See the Steamboat Minnehaha website for more information.)
Second, the tendency of American middle-class and upper-middle-class society to spread out, to have enormous lawns, four car garages, and big (but often character-less, as my Arts Editor often observes), big houses out in the exurbs, as outer-ring suburbs are called, often necessitates the use of cars to get to work – or mass transit, which is a little off-putting for those of us who see the coronavirus as something more than the flu. Indeed, Lloyd Alter on Treehugger expresses some concern that Covid-19 will lead to greater pollution:
… but things do have to change; we don’t have a choice, and we don’t have time. As cities come out of lockdown, more people are choosing to drive than ever before. According to Bloomberg News, “As lockdowns ease and parts of the world reopen for business, driving has emerged as the socially distant transportation mode of choice.” In Wuhan, China, private car use doubled compared to before the lockdown. “It’s a phenomenon that may begin to reverse the dramatic reductions in air pollution the world’s busiest cities have seen in recent months as travel and industrial operations ground to a halt.”
Alter fails to mention one of the lessons of the current pandemic, when it comes to work, is that there are a lot of jobs which can be performed from home. I’m one of the fortunate people whose job remains intact, and I haven’t been into the office since some time in March. The effects on commerce of this phenomenon will be difficult to predict, but easy to understand post-facto. Factors include negative impacts on the commercial construction industry, positive on fuel consumption, car-related air pollution, and road damage (although, as to the latter, the trucking industry does a lot of the damage to the roads, and I don’t see that terribly affected in the long run), and others not occurring to me.
Finally, the very fact that cities are taking this action will be a flashpoint for the culture wars. Whether organic (that is, earnest views expressed by Americans) or artificial (arguments induced by agents of foreign governments), there will be, I think, a lot of screaming by people who will see this as an infringement on their “rights” – after all, cars are a big investment! And it’s so American to drive cars! If that sounds incoherent, well, it is. We’ve seen a great deal of irrationality in the frantic protests against public health emergency declarations, placing their own individual rights above the right of everyone to have a good shot at public health. Given what little I know of social behavior during the deadly influenza pandemic of 1917-1918, this is actually not unusual. I’m hoping we won’t see the same tragic results of those demands as was seen 100 years ago – but I’m not putting any money on it. I sadly expect to see more spikes in infections and death counts / day as people who think “we have to be together” find out, again, that this is how the infection spreads.
So I’m looking wearily forward to this as a near-future cultural battleground between those folks desiring change, and those who fear change. And I’m wondering if the rational fear of public transit will continue into irrationality after a vaccine and / or cure for Covid-19 is found.
