Toward the end of last summer, a seven-year-old boy in my neighborhood developed an intense hacking cough and a bad case of asthma. He wasn't alone. New York City has the highest asthma rates in the nation, and over the last decade, the problem has grown significantly worse. Over 500,000 New Yorkers, about six percent of the population, is afflicted. The burden of this illness falls disproportionately on the young, the poor and minorities. More than 10 percent of the city's schoolchildren have asthma. In the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, surrounded by expressways and choked with commercial-truck traffic and bus depots, over one-third of the kids have it. These are some of the highest asthma rates in the world.
In an effort to figure out what exactly is making the city's kids so sick, New York University professor George Thurston has been conducting a study in which he attaches mobile air-pollution-sampling monitors to the backpacks of Bronx fifth-graders. For a month, the kids carry the monitors everywhere they go. Meanwhile, a stationary air-pollution monitor sits outside their school gathering baseline data. Though the final results have not yet been published, Thurston says that he is seeing a direct correlation between high-traffic days and asthma attacks. Particulate matter from diesel engines is the main culprit. "The worsening of the lung function was especially related to the particles that are associated with traffic," Thurston said. On high-traffic days, wheezing, coughing and other asthma symptoms increase significantly.
Ascent of the Euro
I had the opportunity to visit Rome last spring. The weather was unusually hot the day before I arrived and the government had declared it a "bad air day." When air quality reaches dangerous levels in New York City, the Environmental Protection Agency warns the elderly, children and people with heart and respiratory problems to stay indoors. The way they deal with bad air days in Rome really blew me away. They simply close the city's streets to automobiles. In fact, cities all across Europe do the same thing.
It's never easy for New York to suck it up and admit that it's got a problem, or that another city is doing something better. But when it comes to dealing with the problem of cars in the city, European cities are absolutely kicking New York's butt. There's a lot of innovation happening on the other side of the Atlantic; New York City should take note.
A couple of weeks ago, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, unveiled plans to make an entire three-square-mile zone of the Right Bank completely car-free by 2012. Elected in 2001, the openly gay, openly socialist mayor of Paris has multiplied bus lanes, eliminated parking spaces, widened sidewalks and converted a riverfront stretch of the Pompidou Expressway, Paris's answer to New York's FDR, into an artificial public beach complete with palm trees. Traffic in the city is down by more than 10 percent, and the economy is doing well. Though suburban commuters are pissed, 80 percent of the city's residents approve of Delanoe's car crackdown and want more.
If banning cars from sections of the city is simply too much for New Yorkers to swallow, London has another solution: Make money off of them. Since setting up its automated tolling system in 2003, London is generating £100 million a year ($190 million) off of motorists driving through the city's crowded central business district. Traffic congestion is down by 30 percent and new revenues are being pumped into improving mass transit, cycling and pedestrian facilities. Easily winning reelection in 2004, Mayor Ken Livingstone is a hero. This summer he aims to reduce traffic another five percent by increasing the fee from £5 ($9.50) to £8 ($15).
If London-style congestion pricing is simply unimaginable, you're going to have a hard time wrapping your mind around the woonerf, or "living streets" movement. A growing number of cities in Holland and Denmark are building "streets" completely free of traffic lights, signs, speed limits, paint stripes, sidewalks, bike lanes and any other form of boundary or control. Cars, pedestrians and bikes simply mingle. This forces motorists to slow down, make eye contact, and engage with other users of the road. Research is showing that woonerfs actually move cars through the city faster, reduce congestion, and completely eliminate traffic fatalities.
So who is going to stand up at their next community board meeting and demand a woonerf?
