Broadway, New York City

Yes, you can have traffic jams without cities, but you cannot have cities without traffic jams. 

1962

As illustrated in this throwaway piece from New York Times, that doesn’t stop politicians from decrying them and wishing they would go away:

Speaking of traffic-taming measures for Broadway around Times Square and Herald Square, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Thursday, “The traffic is so terrible and people are getting pushed out into the streets — the sidewalks can’t handle it.”

Traffic’s not a recent urban phenomenon:

This is news?

Joel H. Ross would not think so. His New York guidebook had this to say about Broadway: “The gonglike, tornadolike, oceanic, unceasing roar and tumult of this bustling street, make it less inviting than it otherwise would be to promenaders.”

The book, “What I Saw in New-York,” was published in 1851.

Nor was Mr. Ross alone.  A hundred and fifty years ago, the newspapers were editorializing in a Whitman-esque fashion:

You’ll grow old waiting for New York’s streets to clear

As early as the 1840’s, newspapers were bemoaning how crowded and noisy the streets were and how slow and tangled the traffic.  In 1842 Walt Whitman wrote in an editorial, “What can New York – noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, stormy, turbulent New York – have to do with silence?”  By the 1850’s fifteen thousand vehicles a day were counted passing St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway at the foot of City Hall Park.  Of all modern New York’s most salient characteristics, the only one already in full flower in the mid-nineteenth century was the city’s energy and drive. 

John Steele Gordon, The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street, page 35

Broadway traffic, 1860

Cities are dense, therefore they are vertical.  Cities are vertical, therefore they are technological and capital-intensive (we saw this, among other places, in the Roman aqueducts and water infrastructure).  There is always a balance between private spaces – homes, retail, offices, shops – and public spaces – parks, sidewalks, roads, and other ways. 

Mumbai, Santa Cruz neighborhood, late at night: still a hive of activity

Among cities I’ve been to, the worst traffic jams – expect to spend two hours from door to door – were in Mumbai, and the most absurd are in Nairobi (where I was recently), because half the traffic from equatorial Africa flows through three roundabouts in Nairobi’s downtown, on its way from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean through to Kampala, Uganda and thence into Congo or Sudan or Zambia.

Mumbai: driving through a section of Dharavi at three miles an hour

Although this is pure speculation, I have a hunch that traffic is actually worst in cities that have just completed a rapid urbanization – like Mumbai and Nairobi today, and Manhattan 150 years ago:

Fifteen years later [1865 – Ed.], despairing that vehicles and pedestrians could ever safely mingle at Broadway’s busiest intersection at the time — Fulton Street in front of St. Paul’s Chapel — Alderman Charles E. Loew proposed an elaborate iron bridge over the thoroughfare.

“The ladies ascended in numbers and appeared to be delighted with the bridge and from the immunity it afforded them from the dangers of a passage across the street,” The New-York Times reported when the Loew Bridge opened in April 1867.

The Loew Bridge in 1868. It opened in 1867 at the busy intersection of Broadway and Fulton Street and lasted about a year.

Unfortunately, the bridge obscured the storefront of an important business, Knox the Hatter.

Bargains galore if you can reach my store!

Not for the last time, when commercial and public interests collided on Broadway, commerce prevailed.  The Loew Bridge was dismantled a year later.

I think the boldfaced sentence is false causality, but in any case, the skybridge went the way of the dodo.

Where skybridges survive: Minneapolis, not for traffic, for winter

Since then, no real cure has been found for Broadway traffic, only palliation.

Throughout history, we find the rich and powerful complaining about traffic.  In 1661, Sam Pepys groused in his diary about spending an hour and a half crossing London.

Capable young man in a hurry: Samuel Pepys

Sixteen hundred years earlier, as noted by Eric A. Morris of UCLA’s Institute for Transportation Studies, Julius Caesar banned all wheeled traffic in the daylight hours:

Friends, Romans, countrymen – lend me your cars

To end the scourge of traffic congestion, Julius Caesar banned most carts from the streets of Rome during daylight hours. It didn’t work — traffic jams just shifted to dusk. Two thousand years later, we have put a man on the moon and developed garments infinitely more practical than the toga, but we seem little nearer to solving the congestion problem.

Unfortunately for those of us in a hurry, just as slums are economically rational, so too are traffic jams, in two ways:

1.  Municipal budgeting.  Private spaces are revenue producing, in demand, and readily created incrementally; public spaces are capital-consuming and to be done properly require a strong and courageous municipal government.  For an example of massive failure of nerve, see how the mayor and city utterly botched the reinvention and reinhabitation of New New Orleans.

2. People’s earning power and choice.  Give people secure tenure and a minimum acceptable structure (the embryo house) and they will improve it, bit by bit, incrementally.  By contrast, they don’t spend money on public infrastructure, partly because they can’t (what they can afford goes into their private spaces first), partly because infrastructure involves network hookups and formalization – which some informal homeowners would prefer to defer.  That’s why slums may be defined, in municipal terms, as places where private investment has outrun public infrastructure.

If there’s one image I have of peri-urban Africa, it’s of people walking.  In Los Angeles, no one walks; in Africa, many people walk, most of them black and poor.  (When Nancy and I were in Johannesburg some years back, she who likes exercise would often walk from our hotel or B&B to her destination, often the world-class zoo.  She used to comment that the only people she ever saw walking were black, and that many of them would warn her to be careful.)

Nairobi: four miles to work, four miles home: 90 minutes each way

Transportation and affordable housing are deeply interconnected.

“How long is your commute?”

There goes 25% of my budget, and 20% of my waking day.

Isn’t that always the question you ask a new acquaintance after discovering where he or she lives? 

At some instinctive level, we all know that house prices and commute times are reverse-correlated: the price of a short commute is a high home price, and the cost of a low home price is a long commute.  

Our lives normally shuttle between home and work as the twin poles of our daily existence, so we should have little surprise that our financial profile can be defined by these two poles, and the commuting bridge between them:

The need to commute cheaply also governs how we configure cities.  Aside from affluent cities with good public transportation – think Manhattan and its subways/ buses – the most common approach to putting low-cost labor in walking proximity to low-wage jobs is the slum that abuts the high-rise condo, of which the best example I know is Paraisopolis in Sao Paulo.

Aerial view of Paraisopolis

Lapping at the shores of affluence: Paraisopolis

Looking into each other’s yards and balconies: Paraisopolis

One sees these slums in Sao Paulo, Cairo, Nairobi, Mumbai – everywhere there’s a booming city, not only are there traffic jams (mainly of affluent people stuck in their cars), there are also tides of humanity walking, bicycling, or auto-rickshaw-ing from place to place, bustling about doing the business of their lives.

Scooter and sidecar: Ahmedabad, India

Poor urban dwellers have always walked to work – traffic jams are an affliction of the rich, and throughout history it is the rich and powerful who complain about traffic.

Back to Eric Morris:

If you live in a city, particularly a large one, you probably need little convincing that traffic congestion is frustrating and wasteful. According to the Texas Transportation Institute, the average American urban traveler lost 38 hours, nearly one full work week, to congestion in 2005. And congestion is getting worse, not better; urban travelers in 1982 were delayed only 14 hours that year.

Americans want action, but unfortunately there aren’t too many great ideas about what that action might be. As Anthony Downs’s excellent book Still Stuck in Traffic: Coping With Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion chronicles, most of the proposed solutions are too difficult to implement, won’t work, or both.

Fortunately, there is one remedy which is both doable and largely guaranteed to succeed. In the space of a year or two we could have you zipping along the 405 or the LIE at the height of rush hour at a comfortable 55 miles per hour.

There’s just one small problem with this silver bullet for congestion: many people seem to prefer the werewolf. Despite its merits, this policy, which is known as “congestion pricing,” “value pricing,” or “variable tolling,” is not an easy political sell.

It’s also regressive.  Congestion pricing keeps the poor off the fast streets so the middle class and rich can get where they’re going more quickly.  The poor, therefore, respond in the classical fashion – by packing more of themselves into any given space. 

Out in the bush, pickup trucks serve as taxis

If you’ve been anywhere in Africa you’ve seen taxis, which are usually Toyota or Mitsubishi white minivans stuffed to the gunwales with passengers.  The taxis run regular routes at irregular times

Taxi rank, Johannesburg: no vehicle leaves with a single seat empty

Ultimately, there’s no free lunch; instead of paying with money, you pay with the effort and time needed to acquire the good. Think of Soviet shoppers spending their lives in endless queues to purchase artificially low-priced but exceedingly scarce goods. Then think of Americans who can fulfill nearly any consumerist fantasy quickly but at a monetary cost. Free but congested roads have left us shivering on the streets of Moscow.

To consider it another way, delay is an externality imposed by drivers on their peers. By driving onto a busy road and contributing to congestion, drivers slow the speeds of others — but they never have to pay for it, at least not directly. In the end, of course, everybody pays, because as we impose congestion on others, others impose it on us. This degenerates into a game that nobody can win.

Crowding is intrinsic to lowering the costs

As Yogi Berra once aptly put it, “Nobody goes there no more, it’s too crowded,” and that is the stable state for cities – traffic jams are intrinsic, because there will always be somebody with a lower cost-per-minute than somebody else, so the equilibrium will be found at that point.

It gets late early there, too

Mayor Bloomberg, like the oft-cited King Canute, is trying to hold back the tide of humanity and commerce:

The latest attempt, a pilot program announced on Thursday by Mr. Bloomberg and Janette Sadik-Khan, commissioner of the Department of Transportation, would close Broadway to vehicular traffic from 47th to 42nd Street and from 35th to 33rd Street.

Yeah, that’ll work

Effectively displacing the traffic jams to all the streets that border the pedestrian zone.  That may be good if you want people to walk around Times Square (42nd Street) and Herald Square (34th Street) but not so good if you’re in a cab going from Downtown to Midtown.

It’s always sunny and clean in CAD-CAM city

 “Broadway’s character has evolved over the years, and that’s not what needs changing — it’s the traffic,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said on Sunday. “Instead of going against the grain of the city’s grid, Broadway will work with it.”

Time will tell. It could be that Broadway’s rural roots, three centuries old, render it too wild even for the Bloomberg administration to tame.

It has nothing to do with Broadway’s rural roots, and everything to do with the congestion inherent in cities.

Nary an angled street in sight

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