Milan taught me a lesson that cities would do well to learn: mind the stiletto heels, the prams, children’s bicycles, walkers and the wheeled shopping carts. Think hard about how women of all stages of life get around, because once you’ve solved their needs as cyclists and pedestrians, you’ve greatly improved living conditions for everyone. You will have reduced traffic, opened handicapped access, increased public safety, improved general fitness and respiratory health, assisted child-rearing, augmented social inclusion, diminished urban blight, cleared and mitigated significant socioeconomic and gender inequalities. You will have also made streets more welcoming, lively, and beautiful, and made life more feasible and the city more productive.
This is the deal. When your pointy heel sticks into a sidewalk as sticky as tar, or risks dropping into an infinite number of grills, you take a car. When it isn’t safe for your child to walk or bicycle to elementary school or after-school activities, you take a car. When your toddler doesn’t have an easy spot to practice peddling or scooting from your front door, you take him to the safe spot by car. When you can’t roll your groceries home or push your children in a pram due to planters, parked motorcycles and other obstacles in your path, well, there’s the car. And when your walker, your wheelchair, or your stroller can’t get over curbs, potholes, or around obstacles – like parked cars – then you either take a car or walk in the middle of the street, where the asphalt is wide, hard, smooth and uncluttered enough to navigate. I have both witnessed and caused traffic jams this way. Sidewalks are crucial transport infrastructure – at least as important as streets.
Imagine a city where the sidewalks are wide, hard, smooth and uncluttered enough to navigate, with perfect transitions for crossing and safe corridors for riding bicycles – not just two-wheelers in single file, but cargo bicycles and adult tricycles, too. That is a city that extends freedom of movement to all of its people. It is a place where children can ride and walk safely to school and their activities, and acquire autonomy as they grow. It is a place that prolongs the dignity and independence of the elderly and the mobility impaired. It empowers beleaguered caretakers and homemakers to carry out their responsibilities without having to be constant chauffeurs and escorts for their charges and cargo. It buys time, health, and exercise for those who need it most and find it least accessible: those who do not have the time, money, freedom or capacity to go to the gym. It enables low income people to avoid logistical paralysis when they can not afford repairs, gasoline or a vehicle in the first place. It disarms transit unions of the power to freeze city traffic and economic activity through strikes. It also reduces the heavy tax on our respiratory health of breathing tailpipe emissions at street level.
Now consider the backbone of the economy, the people to which cities (and especially Milan) pay particular attention: adult workers, professionals, businesses – taxpayers, productivity, commerce. Workers and professionals will increasingly take up walking, cycling and public transport as it becomes easier, faster and more pleasant than driving and searching for parking. Businesses may well find traffic running smoother and faster. Imagine what clearing the road would do for delivery trucks and those who truly have no alternative to driving, and how it could increase parking capacity for street level businesses if their customers used cargo bikes or shopping trolleys instead of cars.
Here’s food for thought. Copenhagen has fewer than 4,000 parking places in its downtown. Milan has 70,000 legal parking places, not counting thousands of tolerated illegal parking places in its downtown. Yet Copenhagen’s population of two million people is greater than Milan’s population of 1.3 million. Which city has the greater reputation for pollution and traffic paralysis?
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