‘Slow Streets’ Disrupted City Planning. What Comes Next?

When she first heard that “slow streets” might be coming to Durham, North Carolina, alarm bells went off for Aidil Ortiz. It was late May, and by that point, dozens of other world cities had restricted vehicle access to miles of residential streets. With Covid-19 placing a premium on safe outdoor space, the goal was to encourage socially distant walking, biking and play.

But Ortiz was familiar with how good intentions by city planners can miss the mark. As a program manager at the Durham social justice nonprofit SpiritHouse who also sits on the city’s pedestrian and bicycling commission, she’d seen how Durham officials failed to engage communities of color during the planning for the Durham Belt Line Trail, a project to turn an abandoned rail bed into a multi-use trail, in 2018. Concerned that the High Line-esque park could trigger gentrification and displacement, she helped press the city to adopt formal standards for gathering feedback from under-represented groups before transforming the infrastructure that outlined their lives.

Now, as the pandemic was surging, the city was contemplating a significant change set to affect some of the same communities, where Covid case rates were taking off and whose residents had complained for years about dangerous speeding.

“Sometimes people in marginalized communities are very caught off guard by what is seen as priority,” said Ortiz. ”I knew if slow streets were implemented without dialogue and consent and co-ownership, people would resent how it unfolded, and it’d become another example of how some people matter and others don’t.”

Therein lies the moral of an urban design story that defined 2020. Several cities around the world took advantage of traffic lulls during the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic to launch temporary car-free or traffic-restricted streets programs; some, like Paris’s celebrated “corona cycleways,” have become permanent. The embrace of non-motorized mobility has been widely cheered by safety advocates, environmentalists and foes of auto-centric planning. But in the U.S., slow streets initiatives have also drawn controversy, community resistance and comparisons with racist urban planning practices of earlier decades. They hit a sore spot in a uniquely sensitive moment: As a pandemic claimed Black and Brown lives at disproportionate rates, and outrage over police killings ignited global protests, slow streets became a flashpoint in the planning sphere’s broader reckoning over systemic racism.

As a result, ten months into the pandemic, some planners are rethinking their playbooks, and even the concept of what it means to do their job.

“I think there’s a tension between planners wanting to act fast, because their work is so critical to reduce fatalities and greenhouse gas emissions — the reasons for this work are so compelling and historic,” said Corinne Kisner, the executive director of the National Association of City Transportation Officials. “But the urgency to move fast is in conflict with the speed of trust, and the pace that actually allows for input from everyone who’s affected by these decisions.”

The mixed message of street closures

Nowhere was that tension truer than in Oakland, California, which was one of the earliest adopters of the slow streets concept. In April, the city announced a plan to restrict car traffic on 74 miles of residential corridors, much of it all at once. The project attracted coverage in the New York Times, the Guardian, Washington Post and other national news outlets. Lauded for its speedy implementation and streets-for-the-people messaging, it became an international model looked to by other cities as they searched for rapid transportation-based pandemic response. “This is an opportunity to remember that these are our streets, not just streets for cars,” Warren Logan, the director of mobility policy and interagency relations in the Oakland mayor’s office, told Bloomberg CityLab shortly after the launch of Oakland Slow Streets.

But not all Oaklanders shared this enthusiasm. A few weeks into the project, a survey revealed that, while affluent, white and non-disabled residents were overwhelmingly proponents of the program, people of color, people with lower incomes, and people with disabilities reported much lower levels of awareness, use and support. Local nonprofits criticized the city for its lack of community outreach and for not focusing instead on more urgent pandemic-related issues. Some felt that the street closures themselves sent a mixed message.

“The signs didn’t really indicate the parameters of the program or its purpose: closed to whom? Closed for what?” said John Jones III, the director of community and political engagement at Just Cities, a social justice nonprofit. He lives on a block that has been partly closed to vehicles, and says he hasn’t seen more than a handful of people jogging or biking on it since April. “It was confusing even to people who lived on these streets. And it conflicted with the idea that we’re supposed to stay in the house. Why close a park but allow people to exercise in the street?”

The rapid implementation of Slow Streets also appeared to ignore the long legacy of distrust towards the city felt by many Oaklanders of color. The city had neglected to talk to residents along the affected streets ahead of time, and follow-up online surveys mostly reached wealthier, whiter people. It initially failed to catch the fact that, on certain corridors, residents didn’t even feel safe crossing a major artery to get to the grocery store, a problem that predated the pandemic — and that Slow Streets did little to solve.

by Laura Bliss, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Bryan Miller, Front Runner Productions