The Outdoor Citizen. John Judge
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of mobility infrastructure. Fixing existing infrastructure is multilayered. The twentieth-century trend toward motorization had profound positive implications on the development of cities; but for all the good that has come from Eisenhower-era interstate highways, they’ve also had negative consequences, such as surrounding cities in a way that cuts off access to waterfronts, parks, and natural spaces. State and county transportation authorities, major transportation companies, and city leaders should work together to reopen access to these areas and restore them using next-generation ecological design and modern engineering.
An Outdoor City’s design pays careful attention to its mobility plan. It maintains roads and highways and offers benefits to ride sharers who help decrease the number of vehicles on the road. It also encourages public transportation and other modes of transit that are more environmentally friendly than private cars. In an Outdoor City, there are transit centers that are municipal hubs, offering transportation to schools, stores, medical facilities, places of worship, office buildings, walking routes, and parks. These are essentially regional urban ecosystems, and can even house retail spaces and restaurants. A well-designed municipal hub grows a region’s economy, improves the quality of life of its residents, makes it more visitor friendly, and significantly lowers the city’s carbon footprint.
An example of a forward-thinking approach to municipal hubs is being used in the planning of one in and around Copenhagen, Denmark. The ten municipalities there are working with the Danish design firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) on a project called LOOP City, which would create a light rail system that extends around the entirety of Greater Copenhagen. The LOOP City light rail would have twenty-eight stops and provide the transportation infrastructure necessary for land outside the city to be more accessible and urbanization to be able to expand. BIG estimates that LOOP City will make enough land accessible that housing for 325,000 people and 280,000 workspaces can be built.13 According to BIG, “The infrastructure could become the base for a new sustainable ring of development around Copenhagen, and an artery of true urbanity pumping life into the heart of the suburbs.”14 They hope to have the light rail operational by 2024, and expect it to support the sustainable growth of the region for the next fifty years.
LOOP City is also planned to be cutting-edge in its green practices. In an article in eVolo magazine, Dennis Lynch wrote:
Perhaps more important to the overall growth of one of the world’s greenest cities is the opportunity the LOOP City concept provides for the implementation and integration of sustainable technologies that until now have not been employed on such a massive scale or in such close concert with one another. BIG incorporates into the LOOP City technologies from pneumatic waste collection pipe systems to integrated bike infrastructure to promote health and sustainability.15
In moving into a future of better transportation infrastructure, it’s also important to make sure the infrastructure can withstand extreme weather. With ever-increasing environmental threats, transportation infrastructure must be able to withstand all forms of potential natural disasters, and should offer spaces for people to be protected from the elements if need be. Alex Karner, an assistant professor in the School of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Tech, told me, “Creating refuges for commuters, such as heated bus shelters or cooling stations, will be crucial, as will shelters in areas with more spread-out populations.”
The Human-Powered Mobility Network
A human-powered mobility network refers to the infrastructure that supports human-powered transportation—activities such as walking, running, cycling, and skating. In an Outdoor City, a human-powered mobility network offers walking, running, and skating paths, bike lanes, and other locations for human-powered mobility.
A well-constructed human-powered mobility network is safe, well lit (ideally through solar power), and capable of withstanding extreme weather. In an Outdoor City, it is an attractive option to replace other modes of day-to-day transportation. People might choose to walk or bike to a destination to get sunshine and exercise, or because traditional transit is shut down, malfunctioning, or experiencing delays. They also might use it for first- and last-mile connections, so they don’t have to switch to another form of transportation. To encourage this, entrances to walking paths and bike lanes need to be near transit hubs, easily and safely accessible.
A human-powered mobility network supports exercise and recreation, and has multiple environmental benefits. The most obvious one is that human-powered transportation (walking, cycling, skating, skateboarding, riding a scooter, etc.) avoids the pollutants cars release. According to an article in Sciencing:
Car pollutants cause immediate and long-term effects on the environment. Car exhausts emit a wide range of gases and solid matter, causing global warming, acid rain, and harming the environment and human health. Engine noise and fuel spills also cause pollution. Cars, trucks and other forms of transportation are the single largest contributor to air pollution in the United States.16
In an article for World Watch magazine, Gary Gardner wrote about the CO₂ savings that can come from cycling instead of driving, writing: “A bicycle commuter who rides four miles to work, five days a week, avoids 2,000 miles of driving and (in the United States) about 2,000 pounds of CO₂ emissions, each year. This amounts to nearly a 5-percent reduction in the average American’s carbon footprint.”17
An estimated 80 to 90 percent of a car’s environmental impact results from its fuel consumption and emissions, which cause pollution and the greenhouse gases that are a leading cause of global warming.18 There are also less-talked-about environmental impacts from automobile manufacturing and disposal. According to a National Geographic article:
Automotive production leaves a giant footprint because materials like steel, rubber, glass, plastics, paints, and many more must be created before a new ride is ready to roll. Similarly, the end of a car’s life doesn’t mark the end of its environmental impact. Plastics, toxic battery acids, and other products may stay in the environment.19
Most human-powered mobility networks are limited only by small budgets or immutable transit policymakers who refuse to adequately support them. To reduce uncertainty in planning and funding, municipalities should require that any new real estate development or urban infrastructure project include funding to connect it with a human-powered mobility network.
Cities also need to guarantee that pedestrians, cyclists, and riders of “little vehicles”—skateboards, skates, scooters, hoverboards, and other forms that the future may bring—are kept safe while on the move. All too often, transportation lanes that should be differentiated overlap. Walkers and riders compete with cars, trucks, and buses for a slice of the road, and compete with one another—attempting to share a designated narrow and unforgiving space. In the United States in 2017, there were nearly six thousand pedestrians and 783 cyclists killed in crashes with motor vehicles.20 This marked a 31 percent increase since 2008. Safe, comprehensive strategies should be requirements of today’s cities, and are critical components of human-powered mobility networks.
Improvements for Pedestrians
Simple modifications, such as adding or improving crosswalks and sidewalks, can make cities more pedestrian friendly, but cities can also benefit from innovation. Vancouver, Canada, for example, is becoming one of the world’s most pedestrian-friendly cities. One of the steps it’s made toward this goal was its installation of two hundred detailed maps around the city. The maps provide direction and note the location of attractions, drinking fountains, and public bathrooms. Vancouver’s work to become more pedestrian-friendly will likely lower the number of cars on its roads, and thus the city’s carbon footprint. It has a stated mission to become the world’s greenest city by 2020.21
In the United States, an example of pedestrian-friendly innovation is New York City’s High Line. The High Line opened in 2009 and expanded in increments through 2018. Today it’s a 1.45-mile (twenty-two-block) elevated walking path made from an abandoned railway. It is exclusively for pedestrians, with bicycles, skateboards, skates, and scooters prohibited,22 and runs above street level along the west side of Manhattan. In 2015, the last year with publicly available data, 7.6 million people walked the High Line. More than 2.3 million of them were residents of New York City.23
The High Line