The Best Way for Small Cities to Support Car Traffic? Don't.

The Boston Globe recently covered an interview with the new mayor of Rome, Ignazio Marino, who, among other things, is trying to make the Eternal City less reliant on cars. This is no small feat. According to the article, Rome has "about 980 cars per 1,000 adults...versus 350 and 415 cars in London and Paris, respectively." And that number is down slightly. While he is taking a number of approaches, one in particular caught my eye, as it seems like it could be applicable to the smaller cities of the Northeast.

"[The mayor] decided to close the Via dei Fori Imperiali, a major thoroughfare with heavy traffic, to non-essential vehicles on weekdays, and created a pedestrian-only plaza on weekends. And he’s limiting traffic on Rome’s most noteworthy roundabout — the one at the Colosseum."

While the cities of the northeastern United States are obviously nowhere near as old as Rome, we are home to some of the oldest cities in the country. As such, our cities often have similar transportation concerns. After all, the technology that Roman streets were built to accommodate is more or less the same tech New England cities were built around; that is, horse, cart and foot traffic. Narrow roads and historic buildings do not make car-friendly infrastructure easy to develop.  In the past, this has been seen as a problem. Now, it should be seen as an opportunity.

The downtowns of several major southern New England cities (e.g. Providence, Worcester, Pawtucket, New Bedford) have all at one point or another been stuck in the quandary over how to force the square peg of the car culture into the round hole of historic preservation. And many of the compromises reached have had a lasting, and some would say, devastating impact. Providence, for instance, has found itself with a nearly a third of its historic buildings leveled for surface parking. Others, like Pawtucket, have seen their downtowns by-passed by new infrastructure entirely.

What makes Mayor Marino's approach so interesting, is that turns the prevailing 20th century assumption - that if you want people in your downtown, you must accommodate their cars - completely on its ear. If narrow streets are bad for cars, then why not exclude them from the equation entirely? Small city centers can begin to make a certain kind of sense when experienced on foot that is completely imperceptible behind the wheel. Pawtucket's city center is notorious for insane traffic patterns and horrible parking. Yet the narrow streets are perfectly suited for pedestrians and cyclists to take in the beautiful remnants of it's early 20th century architecture.

The lesson of this and similar approaches (think the closing of Broadway in NYC) is that we need to start developing our cities around people again, not their machines. We've spent so much time and energy building to suit the automobile, it's not even clear if we've given any thought to the people inside them. Approaches like this, while they are certainly not magic bullets, at least show that development is moving in a direction away from machines and back towards people. And that has to be a good thing.

SOURCE: Martine Powers, Boston Globe, http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/05/31/italian-mayor-not-that-one-declares-that-cars-are-longer-king/wVZWyoRGJUOHS6ceHg3rVK/story.html?utm_content=bufferdfe21&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=buffer