The Pandemic Shows What Cars Have Done to Cities

Moments of crisis, which disrupt habit and invite reflection, can provide heightened insight into the problems of everyday life precrisis. Whichever underlying conditions the pandemic has exposed in our health-care or political system, the lockdown has shown us just how much room American cities devote to cars. When relatively few drivers ply an enormous street network, while pedestrians nervously avoid one another on the sidewalks, they are showing in vivid relief the spatial mismatch that exists in urban centers from coast to coast—but especially in New York.     

That mismatch is easy to overlook when you live with it every day. If you went to any Manhattan intersection during peak hours before the pandemic, you would find throngs of pedestrians—spilling into the street, vying with one another like salmon swimming against a current. Meanwhile, the streets, despite being jammed with traffic, would hold a comparatively small number of actual people, who no doubt also felt crowded in, despite being at a comfortable remove from anyone else. Vehicular congestion is the inevitable result of a system where road space is essentially given away—and drivers, not surprisingly, line up to take advantage of the bargain. They pay with their time.

Why should the system that is moving so many more people be given so much less room? In normal circumstances, the spatial asymmetry is explained away, either through engineering standards that demand drivers be granted wide expanses of pavement or through vague mumblings about the “urban vitality” that occurs when lots of pedestrians share tight quarters.

The status quo became untenable when a pandemic required six feet of social distancing between people—a distance wider than many cities’ sidewalks. In Canada recently, two performance artists with a group called the Toronto Public Space Committee drew attention to this problem by building what they called the “social-distancing machine.” It was a brilliant provocation. They used a large circle of plastic—like a hula hoop with a two-meter radius—to create a skeletal outline of government-mandated air rights around the person wearing it. One of the artists suspended it from straps on his shoulders and then tried to walk through the city, keeping everything and everyone else at a safe distance. In a video released by the group, the hoop-wearer is barely able to navigate Toronto’s obstacle-laden sidewalks, much less share those sidewalks with others.

Nathan Thornburgh: The rich fled New York. Don’t be like them.

The social-distancing machine was actually inspired by an earlier device, the so-called Gehzeug, or “walkmobile,” created by Hermann Knoflacher, an Austrian civil engineer, in the 1970s. Knoflacher’s idea was to construct a wood-frame outline of a car that a pedestrian could wear to show how much extra space someone driving alone would consume. A cheeky, visually effective cri de coeur on behalf of cyclists and pedestrians, the Gehzeug was created at a time when even cities such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen—now renowned for their bicycle traffic—were turning their streetscape over to the car.