It’s this thinking differently that defines what we call soft infrastructure, a necessary step before creating hard infrastructure. It involves looking at the lines on the mental maps in our heads, and sometimes rearranging them. When that happens, old things can be used in new ways that are transformative.
Some of the most significant developments in how we get around have come from simply rethinking how familiar things can be used, or how their support systems can be structured. They include the development of what has come to be known as bus rapid transit, public bike sharing, low-cost inter-city bus service, pay-per-mile road pricing and public plazas in streets. The public sector has taken the lead in most of these initiatives, but private companies have been involved as well. What they have in common is a certain nimbleness, a readiness to rethink the usual game plans. Advanced technology and government money are often used, but neither has been crucial. What comes first is better conceptual thinking.
When a Bus Becomes a Subway
In the 1970s, Jaime Lerner, the mayor of the medium-sized city of Curitiba in Brazil, and an architect and planner by training, envied the benefits a subway could provide a city. The heavy-rail trains in tunnels underground could carry people quickly from one place to another, without interference from traffic, and with rapid boarding and exiting. But his city could not afford a subway.
Then Lerner had a thought: Why not have a subway above ground, on the street, with tires on a road rather than wheels on rails? Why not have a high-speed bus? Thus was born what came to be called bus rapid transit or BRT, which approaches the benefits of a subway at a fraction of the price. Buses with multiple doors run on special lanes cleared of traffic, and pick up passengers at pre-loaded, pre-paid “tubes,” so they can board quickly. Since its inception in Curitiba in the mid 1970s, it has been refined, improved and continues to this day.
Bicycle Sharing
The modern bicycle, two wheels powered by thighs connected to pedals and a chain, has been around 125 years. But in the past decade, cities have found a new way to use it: public bike sharing plans.
While various cities had experimented with public bicycles, including La Rochelle in France in the 1970s, it was Paris that catapulted public bike sharing into the growing popularity it enjoys today. Mayor Bertrand Delanoë launched Paris’ Vélib’ plan for public bike sharing in 2007, which established many of the accepted components of bicycle sharing plans. It has stations where bikes are available, a limited free checkout period and private operation of the program — with support gained through advertising. A private company does the actual work of providing, storing and repairing bicycles, repaid in large part through advertising revenues.
Currently, more than 100,000 Parisians and tourists ride one of the more than 20,000 beige bicycles each day. It has transformed the city. It’s common to see French men and women promenading in their best clothes on the bikes. Fashion writers have noted that riding the free bicycles has become another way to engage in the French mode of displaying oneself and one’s style. By transforming life so thoroughly in a world city, and by the clear acceptance the plan gained, public bicycle sharing earned credibility.
Like many examples of thinking differently, Delanoë began with a unique philosophy. He had the controversial idea that a city could succeed economically by making itself a nicer place to live, with less attention to things like tax breaks for companies or conventional economic development. Delanoë did innovative things like turn freeways into beaches in the summer months — another example of soft infrastructure.
Since its success in Paris, bicycle sharing has spread to scores of cities large and small, including London, Barcelona, Montreal, Denver, Chicago and most recently New York City. It is becoming an accepted part of city life. And it began not with a new technology or big investment of capital, but with thinking differently. It is transforming how cities are used, and how people relate to the street.
Roberta Gratz, author of The Living City and The Battle for Gotham, says that there has been a general trend in recent years by young people toward less car-oriented lifestyles. They are gravitating toward walking, bicycling and another old-fashioned technology: streetcars.
“Piece by small piece, cities are recreating the streetcar systems they were once built around, including Los Angeles, but traded in for the deceptive hope of the car,” says Gratz. “The recent and rapidly growing bicycle culture is accelerating this trend as more and more city dwellers, often escapees from auto dependency, advocate for alternatives to car dependency.
Complete Streets, Shared Spaces and Public Plazas
In New York City, cyclists can stop and sit in plazas with tables and chairs that have sprouted in what were once city streets. In an urban setting where streets are contested ground, and where the pace of change can be glacier, these enhancements have come quickly, essentially in the last five and half years.
It is no coincidence that this happened at the same time in 2007 when Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed Janette Sadik-Khan to be the transportation commissioner in his second term. Sadik-Khan, a lawyer and an experienced transportation administrator in both the public and private sector (Federal Transit Administration and Parsons Brinckerhoff), moved quickly, showing a nimbleness not only in her conceptual plans, but even more importantly in navigating the city and state’s treacherous political waters. Sadik-Khan and her staff utilized the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) power to determine what happens on city streets. To not get bogged down in endless public debate, her teams launched themselves, commando style, and over a few days and nights painted new bicycle lanes and turned streets into plazas with café seating.
“We changed a parking lot over a weekend, from an underutilized area for parked cars to a plaza,” says Sadik-Khan in an interview with Fast Company about one of the first projects in the DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) section of Brooklyn.4 “And we literally just painted it, painted it green, painted the curbs. Added tables and chairs and planters. Three years later, the sales tax receipts are 172 percent higher than before in the adjacent areas. It worked.”
If it hadn’t, then the action could have been easily reversed. “One of the benefits of being able to try things out quickly is, if it doesn’t work, fine, put it back,” Sadik-Khan says in the same interview. “No harm, no foul. And that gave us the confidence to move forward with something like a Times Square [pedestrian plaza].”
This has resulted in the biggest change to how New York City streets are used in the last 75 years since cars began to dominate them — and for the better. Cyclists use the new bike lanes, and thousands of locals and tourists sit in Times Square and other lesser-known areas. And all this was done for a relatively small cost. The changes are now one of the most visible aspects of the city.
On a sunny weekday afternoon, Andre from Rome sat with his spouse at a café table in what used to be one lane where Broadway and Fifth Avenue intersect by Madison Square Park. In accented English, Andre noted the small but significant ways it was different and better than the famous pedestrian plazas in Rome, where thousands gather. “The tables move. That’s important. We don’t have that in Rome,” he said.
Nearby, a group of burly guys from Queens expressed their approval: “We’re sitting here aren’t we? We like it.”
During the same time period in 2007 and 2008, Bloomberg spent millions in money and political capital in a sweeping campaign attempting to get permission from the state legislature to set up a congestion pricing system, where drivers are charged to enter the city at peak times. After a year and a half of work, the state legislature did not even vote on the bill and New York City lost $350 million in promised federal funding. The point of this example isn’t to blame Bloomberg for his valiant attempt, but to point out that change can happen quickly if the right levers are used. Looking more broadly, the bicycle lanes and public plazas in New York and now many other cities fit into several related movements that are based on rethinking how and what streets are used for. They include the Complete Streets movement (www.smartgrowthamerica.org/complete-streets), and “Shared Space,” where traffic signs are removed and children encouraged to play in the streets, with the paradoxical results that streets are made safer. These are all examples of soft infrastructure.
A New Way to Pay for Roads
Thinking differently can happen at any level, whether local, state or federal.
Oregon has been a national leader in transportation and land use since the state passed the statewide growth control act, Senate Bill 100, in 1973, and in 1974 tore down the four-lane freeway Harbor Drive to create a waterfront park. Since then, both the state and the city of Portland are renowned for developing a cleaner and less car-centered form of life.
In recent years, the state DOT has continued its record of innovation by experimenting with a controversial but also much sought after innovation: paying for roads by charging drivers for how much they use the road, rather than for how much gas they consume. The Office of Innovative Partnership and Alternative Funding, part of Oregon DOT, experiments with different ways of funding highways and transportation. The same office has been experimenting with building solar panels into highways.
“The basic system worked like a dream,” says Jim Whitty, manager of the Office of Innovative Partnership and Alternative Funding that set up and ran the program.6 The information on miles driven was transmitted easily through a variety of devices to servers, which calculated information so bills could be sent out to the participants in the program. “It has taken us into a new world. It allows total scalability and flexibility,” he says.
After the success of the first pilot program, the Oregon legislature approved Senate Bill 810 in 2013 which sets up a larger pilot program that will put the necessary institutional infrastructure in place to make the program permanent, if desired. Oregon is on the way to being the first state to gradually replace the gas tax with what before had been a dream among planners, charging road use by the mile driven. The system being set up would also allow, if approved by the legislature, to have a type of congestion pricing where roadways that are in high demand are priced more highly than those that are not in high demand.
Whitty envisions a day where all newer electric or other low-mileage cars will use this technology routinely. The technology is such that car manufacturers could easily build these devices into their cars for their customers. Programs like “OnStar” already use this information.
Whitty speculated on why Oregon has been such a leader in innovative and new policy on a variety of fronts.
“The Oregon trail was a long one,” Whitty says, noting the state’s pioneer history. “It took six months to get here, and six months to get back. We are used to thinking on our own. It’s built into the culture.”
The Chinatown Bus
It’s not just the public sector that manages to think differently.
While BRT gains adherents, until recently the old style inter-city bus travel, where one travels from city to city in a bus, had been steadily declining, year after year. The top companies, Trailways and Greyhound, had declared bankruptcy multiple times and were burdened by their expensive network of bus stations. Few people took an inter-city bus unless it was a necessity.
Then, on a somewhat shabby corner of a street in Lower Manhattan, another revolution was born. Ethnic Chinese began offering bus service to Boston at a ridiculously low price, often $10 one way. These buses had no stations. While perfectly respectable buses, they picked up people on the street. Gradually, non-Chinese began hearing about the $10 bus service to Boston, and taking it. It was a lot cheaper than the Amtrak train or driving yourself. At first, just a few daring urban adventurers took what people began calling the Chinatown bus, but others followed. Soon a lot of people were.
Flash forward a few years, and dozens of companies are offering such service; big international companies such as Megabus from England are investing in service; and bus service itself is being revived all over the country. Even established companies like Greyhound are benefiting. How big this service can grow is debatable. Sidewalks can only accommodate so many people, and some cities, like Boston, are requiring companies to use centralized stations. But it’s clear that inter-city bus service has been revived, and it all began when, out of necessity, some people began thinking differently.
Thinking Better
What all of these examples have in common is that none of them work by simply adding more of what’s already there, which until recently has been this country’s usual mode of operation, particularly with roadways. That’s changing.
For instance, Colorado is expanding a highway between Boulder and Denver that attempts to change the usual dynamic on high-traffic roadways, where more lanes are added in response to more traffic. Rather than simply add more lanes, the Colorado DOT, with support from the federal government, is adding a BRT lane, a high-occupancy vehicle lane, a “hot lane” where people pay for less traffic and a bike lane. It’s a lot to squeeze into an existing roadway, but the hope is that these will change the game from the usual one, where another lane is built which quickly fills up again. The idea is to alter the dynamics of development not only on the highway but off of it.
Emily Fishkin, director of infrastructure initiatives with the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), says policymakers were being pushed by circumstances to explore new ways of doing things.
“You can’t have 22-lane highways,” Fishkin says.7 “You can’t just keep adding lanes. So you have to do something different.”
What’s undeniable is that there has been a general trend over the last decade to build things smarter, lighter and more carefully, not only in transportation but for all types of infrastructure. Space is dearer, and infrastructure must be constructed more carefully. In this type of environment, the soft infrastructure becomes much more important. One can’t simply build indiscriminately, or throw money at a problem. In transportation, it means looking at alternatives to simply pouring asphalt. It means evaluating how people live, and considering what the objectives are, and whether there are other, better means to get there.
