By Kevin J. Krizek
The Boulder Chamber of Commerce recently hosted a quarterly lunch for roughly 60 people invested in transport safety. At the event, I experienced a profound sense of déjà vu, as I’ve attended similar gatherings around the U.S. for decades.
Among the participants including transport professionals, elected officials and citizens, there is a recurring theme: Advocate for improved conveniences for walkers, transit users and cyclists. A collective wisdom persists that if we allocate more resources to these ways of traveling, we’ll change people’s behavior.
Rarely do I hear talk about making matters more costly for car users. That’s a political taboo and has been for decades. But until the political will changes, the costs of past practices will continue to mount: more fatal crashes on our roads (~70 million global deaths since the invention of the car), more resource-intensive travel and widening disparities between who gets access to what.
Most transport discussions orbit around minor adjustments to an existing system. Incremental steps amount to temporary fixes or slight gains. They fail to address how the underlying issues of our transport system are more profound than many of us realize. Incrementalism allows politicians to maintain the status quo. It’s easier that way.
The sole city council member present at the Chamber lunch, Ryan Schuchard, emphasized the need to overhaul how we do transport planning and how Boulder can fundamentally reevaluate and redesign its transport ethos. Movement on this front was adopted at the recent city council retreat, providing a first step to accelerate change.
That’s good, because the core issue that we continue to sidestep is our collective acquiescence to making cars — and increasingly, larger and larger cars — convenient to use, even for short trips.
A needed conversation starts when we critically examine our relationship with cars — their size, their necessity and how our urban planning practices roll out the red carpet for them. Policy and corporate interests cater to this paradigm.
We’ll finally gain traction when we focus conversations on subsidies for parking and roads, the proliferation of oversized vehicles, a fascination with electric cars despite their mixed benefits and resistance to reducing car-centric infrastructure.
Modernize dialogue
For too long, politicians have balked at such measures due to short-term pushback, ignoring long-term benefits. We can challenge leaders to courageously pivot towards tangible, bold actions that do more with less.
It’s time to modernize transport dialogue. Let’s focus on accessibility and how easy it is to get what we want and need with other modes of travel. Put in place new rules into city code and make new policies to guide new practices for how we engineer traffic, manage parking and moderate travel. Take actions that allow for some car conveniences while greatly enhancing the conveniences of alternatives, including much smaller versions of cars. Reduce the subsidies given to cars, especially big cars. Recognize how parking and space on the roads is given away. Bring into view how city budgets fund different streets projects mostly to make driving easier, cheaper and faster.
Simultaneously, let’s make it safer and cheaper for residents to use other transportation options. Subsidize better and smarter forms of transport so that users of more sustainable modes pay substantially less.
High-impact, low-cost
It’s necessary and politically courageous to redirect funding and planning to remedy this disparity. Focus on high-impact, low-cost strategies that don’t rely heavily on construction.
Redesign street space for a robust network of compact mobility options, like bikes and mini-vehicles, to prevent the past seven decades’ mistakes.
Set immediate and three-year targets to reshape the community's understanding of how affordable and convenient it can be to use other ways for people to get what they want on a daily basis. Stop focusing on vehicle throughput and delay as performance indicators of our transport system.
Design for micro-mobility, including bikes, scooters, cargo-bikes and much smaller cars. Implement a Cambridge, Massachusetts-style ordinance to standardize road designs that, by default, allow for full implementation of a network that supports people of all ages and abilities, including much smaller vehicles. Prioritize safety and accessibility; stop focusing on vehicle throughput and delay. Rethink how we use parking lanes and streets for people instead of only vehicles; invite various uses rather than crowding them out. Celebrate shop pop-ups, in-street dining and more dynamic parking pricing. Make improvements faster and overcome backlash that is formed by old-school thinking.
Let’s empower our elected officials to scrap old-school rules based on old-school mentality. Help them build back better for micro-mobility, based on new thinking that incentives innovation. Existing codes built on existing mindsets lock us in.
Take, for example, CU Boulder’s plans for a parking garage next to its new hotel and conference center, and plans to “improve the efficiency” of a surface lot near Boulder High School to yield around 100 additional parking spaces.
Creating more parking so close to our community’s activity centers jeopardizes other ways to access nearby destinations. It runs counter to stated public goals of addressing climate change (e.g., embodied carbon). Parking lots and garages entrench the same thinking and squander opportunities to instill new cultures for how people access important areas of town.
Communities around the world have already reckoned with the high costs of automobility. The time is now for Boulder to leverage new pathways and stop repeating misses of the past.
Kevin J. Krizek is a professor of environmental design at CU Boulder and a former senior advisor in the Office of the Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment (U.S. Department of State). He is the author of Advanced Introduction to Urban Transport Planning, available online and in local bookstores.