In the story “Welcome to Our Carless Future,” published on ARCHITECT’s website on July 29, 2020, Aaron Betsky fails to grasp primary elements of what our firm—Practice for Architecture and Urbanism—proposed in tandem with the New York Times Op-Ed page, despite the fact that these elements could have been found easily had he done the most basic research.
Given the pedestrianizing transformations Mayor Anne Hidalgo is making in Paris and that former New York City Department of Transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan has already made across multiple boroughs in New York, not to mention the recent transformation of Manhattan’s 14th Street as a busway (for the elite?), calling our proposal a “fairy tale” is not only factually unsubstantiated, it is highly irresponsible given that serious and similar discussions are being advanced by sustainability and equity advocates all over the world.
As for the idea that our proposal would serve only Manhattan and therefore the wealthy, it is important to first consider (and research) that the residents of Manhattan are composed of far more than the high-priced condo owners that Mr. Betsky so predictably calls out. Hell’s Kitchen, Chinatown, Harlem, and many other Manhattan neighborhoods house hundreds of thousands of low-income residents in rent-stabilized apartments and public housing—residents who would benefit mightily from our proposal. Many of these residents are disabled and depend on buses and Access-a-Ride, both mass transit systems that are continuously delayed by the SUVs of the wealthy; our proposal would create equity for Manhattan’s poor.
Moreover, the idea that the proposal would only benefit Manhattan reveals sad ignorance about the outsize impacts that private vehicle commutation to central business districts have on their surrounding metropolitan regions, particularly the lower-income neighborhoods through which this commuter traffic shuttles. Farhad Manjoo, in his heavily fact-checked piece for the Times, writes that based on Buro Happold's analysis our proposal would significantly improve both commute times and air quality across the boroughs and regions that Mr. Betsky purports to care about. Not only does a PAU graphic (adapted by the Times) clearly indicate this, so do Manjoo's quotes:
“The plan wouldn’t improve just Manhattan. A ban on private cars on the island would ripple across the Hudson, altering transportation and livability across the wider metropolitan region …The public health effects would ripple across the region, too. The most polluted air in New York hangs over the Bronx and Queens, in communities largely populated by immigrants and people of color. New York City has some of the dirtiest air in the nation, estimated to cause 3,000 premature deaths annually. Among other ailments, long-term exposure to polluted air is thought to increase the deadliness of Covid-19. Much of the unhealthy air is caused by traffic sitting idle on the roads leading to Manhattan. Buro Happold estimates that PAU’s plan would lead to a 50 percent reduction in toxic air pollution in Manhattan, and a 20 percent reduction in the other boroughs.”
It's easy to critique big ideas—particularly when you clearly haven't fully read them—but we hope others in the architecture community don't let these kinds of pot-shots hold back the kind of big ideas we need as we try to rebuild and reimagine a better world.
A previous version of this story misspelled Janette Sadik-Khan's name. The error has been corrected.
