The Outdoor Citizen. John Judge
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similar infrastructure. In 2016, Friends of the High Line, the nonprofit that founded, funds, and maintains the High Line, launched the High Line Network to support and advise similar park projects in other cities. There are currently nineteen projects in the network, including Philadelphia’s Rail Park and Washington, DC’s 11th Street Bridge. Another city with an innovative pedestrian-only stretch is Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne’s 2.5-mile-long Tan Track loops around its Royal Botanical Gardens, and provides easy pedestrian access to shops and restaurants located within Melbourne’s central business district. Like the High Line, it is for pedestrians only and enjoyed by locals and tourists alike.
All cities should have their own pedestrian-only walkways, and there is room for great creativity here—whether selecting an unusual place for a walkway, such as an abandoned railway, which Chicago and Atlanta also did, or using new and developing technology to make something futuristic. In Amsterdam, the technology start-up MX3D used robots and 3-D printing to build the structure of a steel pedestrian bridge, which is set to cross one of Amsterdam’s oldest canals. The company’s description of the project states:
MX3D equips industrial multi-axis robots with 3D tools and develops the software to control them. This allows us to 3D print strong, complex and gracious structures out of sustainable material—from large bridges to small parts.24
As 3-D printing evolves, it can be used to create more pedestrian-friendly infrastructure from sustainable, repurposed materials. Outdoor Cities keep modern technology in mind, constantly considering how it can protect the environment and further people’s connection with the outdoors.
Improvements for Cyclists
Cycling is an excellent form of exercise, can be instrumental in pollution reduction, and is increasingly popular. From 2014 to 2017, the number of cyclists in the United States increased from forty-three million to forty-seven million, and from 2014 to 2018, the number of bike-sharing programs nearly doubled.25 The increase in the number of cyclists can be attributed to the rise in bike-share programs, which allow riders to commute by bike without having to own their own, and offer designated bike parking spaces.
The “bike-share boom”26 has been an international phenomenon. The first version of it was in Amsterdam in 1965, but was ultimately shut down after bikes were stolen and damaged. Thirty years later, in 1995, Copenhagen created a bike-share program, though it had the same problems. A year later, a system was invented at Portsmouth University in the United Kingdom to address the problem. Portsmouth’s system makes users swipe individualized magnetic stripe cards that allow the bikes to be tracked and their users to be known. In 1998, Rennes, France, became the first city with a citywide bike-share program. Shortly after, there was one in Lyon, France, and then they began to boom in big cities: Paris; Barcelona, Spain; Washington, DC; Montreal, Canada; Hangzhou, China; Mexico City, Mexico; Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and elsewhere.
As of May 2018, more than sixteen hundred bike-share programs are in operation worldwide, providing eighteen million bicycles for public use.27 In the United States, there are more than one hundred bike-share programs. A report from the National Association of City Transportation Officials states that there were thirty-five million bike-share trips in 2017, a 25 percent increase from the previous year.28 Many cyclists now rely on these platforms to get around.
Some cities have met the needs of cyclists better than others. Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Portland, Oregon, are considered some of the most bike-friendly cities in the world, meaning that biking is encouraged and city infrastructure was designed with cyclists’ safety in mind.29 In the United States, the League of American Bicyclists’ “Bike Friendly Communities” ratings gave high marks to Portland, Boulder (Colorado), Davis (California), Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago.30
Chicago Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein told me that Chicago has 248 miles of bike lanes. This encompasses protected lanes, buffered bike lanes, and marked share lanes, and Chicago hopes to raise this to 645 miles by 2020.31 Gabe said that the 2020 vision came about thanks to a partnership between Chicago’s Department of Transportation and citizen activists. In his words, “Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and the people who know each neighborhood best are those that bike, walk, and drive them on a daily basis.” Gabe said that the city of Chicago envisions a network of bike lanes and bike trails that will boost the quality of life of its citizens, and that the plan is based on three guiding strategies:
1 Provide a bicycle accommodation, a pick-up/drop-off rack, within a half-mile of every Chicago resident.
2 Provide a greater number of bikeways near residential areas.
3 Increase the amount of bicycling infrastructure where ridership is high, and establish infrastructure where ridership is lower, but has the potential to grow.
How cities care for bike-share programs can extend to other sharing programs we have today or those that are yet to be developed. The first scooter-sharing program launched in San Francisco in 2012, and today they can be found throughout the US. The world’s largest ones are in Berlin, Germany, Madrid, and Paris. A report from the National Association of City Transportation Officials noted that riders took 38.5 million trips on shared electric scooters in 2018, eclipsing the 36.5 million trips on shared, docked bicycles (three million trips were on dockless bicycles).32 Scooter-sharing programs are dockless and allow users to pick up and drop off a scooter at any safe place on a public street within the city’s service area. Like bikes, scooters release far fewer carbon emissions than automobiles.33 It’s unclear what ride-share programs will exist in the future, but we need to guarantee they’ll be safe and environmentally friendly.
Changing Parking Spaces into Green Spaces
If a human-powered mobility network leads to fewer cars being purchased, there won’t be a need for as many parking spaces as we currently have and the associated cost of their development and upkeep. The land used for parking spaces could instead be used for urban green spaces.
Most of the world’s established cities have been designed to support the flow of automobile traffic, and parking spaces take up massive amounts of land.34 There has never been a study comprehensively evaluating parking in America (and exposing shortages and surpluses); however, a May 2018 “Special Report” from the Research Institute for Housing America confirmed a thesis that Donald Shoup proposed in his book Parking and the City: that far too much space and far too many resources are devoted to parking spaces in American cities.35 36
The study looked at five American cities as case examples: New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle, Des Moines (Iowa), and Jackson (Wyoming). The number of parking spaces in each city was, respectively: 1.85 million, 2.2 million, 1.6 million, 1.6 million, and 100,119. The average number of parking spaces per household was .06 for New York City, 3.7 for Philadelphia, 5.2 for Seattle, 19.4 for Des Moines, and 27 for Jackson. The study also showed the financial cost of the upkeep of these spaces, measured as the cost of replacements, and the average cost per household, given the population size of each city: $20.1 billion in New York City ($6,750 per household), $17.5 billion in Philadelphia ($29,974 per household), $35.8 billion in Seattle ($117,677 per household), $6.4 billion in Des Moines ($77,165 per household), and $711 million in Jackson ($192,138 per household).37
With high-quality human-powered mobility networks, people could increasingly forgo using automobiles. Work to reduce the number of automobiles on the road is currently being led by cities through benefits given to ride-sharers, such as designated High-Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) highway lanes (also known as carpool lanes), which may allow faster commutes; ride-hailing taxes, which increase the cost of Ubers and Lyfts in high-congestion areas, and thus may cause more people to instead use human-powered transportation or public transportation; and “pay to drive” taxes, another form of taxes imposed on driving in high-congestion areas. In April 2019, New York City became the first American city to implement a “pay to drive” tax. It targets drivers entering Manhattan and driving into its busiest neighborhoods, with the goal of encouraging more people to use public transportation or carpool.
The number of cars purchased may also be reduced through the automated cars of the future. In Robot, Take the Wheel, author Jason Torchinsky theorizes that we are on a path toward a future filled