Congestion Tolls? Nah. There’s a Case for Turning City Streets to Parks

All congestion tolls do is set aside another chunk of our city centers to the rich. Bezos and Musk (good name for a fragrance) can easily afford whatever the cost, but that hardly makes neighborhoods more livable. (Disclosure: I am a retired landscape architect, so salt and pepper that as you wish)

Even so, let’s suppose

Suppose every other east-west street in Manhattan was closed to vehicles other than trash removal and emergency vehicles (sorry, no Amazon please). An east-moving electric bus would run down the center and, two blocks over, a west-bound would operate, so you would never be more than two blocks from public transit. That center paved area, along with its electric bus, would be available to pedestrians, bicycles, wheelchairs and roller skates. A community instead of a traffic jam.

What a thought.

Suppose the same was done for north-south routes and, again, never further than two blocks from slick public transport. Trees would frame either side of the formerly treeless street and allowances be made for sidewalk cafes and other local businesses such as beauty (barber) shops, florists, mini-markets and flower pots.

What we once, in days of yore, called a neighborhood. Right here in the city. How cool is that?

Quiet would prevail. In European cities, birds have returned to Madrid and Barcelona and can actually be heard. Conversations are held as well, without the din of traffic. In case you are nostalgic for din, it can be had one street over in either direction.

Real estate values follow quiet and birdsong

That’s a given—location, location, location and all those truisms.

Sorry if you own or rent on a still trafficked street, but then life always hands out ups-and-downs, usually not in fair ratios. Lie back for a moment and conjure up a New York City with a swath of green down 3^rd, 5^th and 7^th avenue. Brings tears to a glass eye.

Cross streets would weave a further luxurious green fabric across the city. Taxis would all but disappear as a cross-hatch of public transport served 1.6 million Manhattan citizens. Who knows, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens might follow suit. Staten Island could ferry its way to a more luscious lower Manhattan.

China is pretty  much leading the way these days in green cities, but it’s a command economy so things move more quickly there. It has its own real estate disaster at the moment, but take a look at what’s going on in city planning worldwide.

Perhaps a bit biased, I admit, but congestion tolls are a disaster waiting to happen

They’re popping up in Europe, where I live, but they’ll solve nothing but to toss another advantage to the rich and they already have an embarrassing jump on the rest of us in nearly all categories. Aside from that, billionaire wealth is metastasizing like a cancer in what was once millionaire society and so we can expect more and more of the worthless and financially lazy children of the rich and famous to buy their way into our already deadlocked city centers.

Prague, where I have enjoyed the finest public transit system in all of Europe these past thirty years is now showing the early symptoms of automobile madness. In a city which once knew better, Russians driving Bentleys are now a common sight. A portent of things to come, no doubt, but a swerve in the wrong direction, if Bentleys can be said to swerve.

Even Czechs, as their wealth increases, are now seen behind the wheel of an occasional BMW, if not a Mercedes here and there. All of which proves, at least to me, that it’s not a national fault, but one of excess wealth. The world, it seems, is absolutely drowning in money as the common man struggles to keep his grip on a decent income.

The very least we can do is give him or her a tree-lined street to live on with first class public transport. God knows it’s little enough to ask, not to be wealth taxed out of our own city centers.

But it’s coming, mark my words.