Stateside: All Aboard the Moving Plaza!

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No, not a self portrait. This is the business end of the zero-emission fuel cell bus that was parked on the plaza outside Oakland City Hall this week. The occasion was a forum on community planning and transit oriented development.

The star speaker at the forum was absolutely the economist and former mayor of Bogota, Colombia, Enrique Penalosa. During his time as mayor, the city spent money that had originally been earmarked for yet more motorways on miles and miles of pedestrian walkways, cycle paths, parks and plazas instead. If you can’t provide your citizens with equality of income, he said, you should at least equalize people’s quality of life.

Saying that he was “almost impeached” for getting thousands of parked cars off the sidewalks so that people could walk there, Penalosa presented photo after photo showing how a hallmark of Third World countries is that the poor are considered so lowly that cars have more rights than they do.

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Enrique Penalosa: “The most sustainable human habitat is the one that’s best for human happiness.”

Wow! I thought it was a radical idea to oppose the Aro St bypass because all it did was cut 30 seconds off the travel time for people who didn’t even live in the neighborhood, but here is what Penalosa had to say about valuing people over traffic:

“A protected bicycle way is a symbol of democracy because it shows that a person with a $40 bicycle is equal to a person with a $4000 car.”

“How wide should a sidewalk be? As wide as you can make it.”

“Our children grow in the menace of being killed by cars.” Cities have been around for 5,000 years and cars for only 80 years, but when it comes to transit planning, “We just think [cars] were there always, like oceans.”

Speaking about the open spaces where people gather in the great cities of the world—sidewalk cafes, plazas, parks—he noted that studies have shown that the seats most frequented are the ones that allow people to watch other people, rather than those where people can sit and contemplate lakes or trees or other non-human natural objects.

Penalosa’s presentation led me to understand something new about why I like living in the US. It’s not just that there are more people here; it’s that every day when I go to work on the bus and BART I’m sitting in a moving plaza, where I can observe the life of other people going on around me.

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