Central Park was Not Always a Park

I had the pleasure of attending the Texas Trails Network conference last month in Waco as a City of Austin representative. I love getting paid to do things I would have liked to do anyway :) The conference had a little more focus on urban (read: paved) trails than my co-worker and I were hoping, but still, I learned a lot and had a great day.

Some of the things I scribbled down and thought others would also find interesting:

• Americans work 163 hours more each month than they did twenty years ago. That's four additional weeks of work each year!
• The Lady Bird Lake Trail is now the number one tourism destination in Austin (surpassing the Capitol)! 3,000 to 15,000 people use it every day.

The keynote address was given by Enrique Penalosa, the former mayor of Bogota, Colombia.
Penalosa was a radical and controversial mayor. Here are some of the things he accomplished in his three years as mayor:

• Reduced murder rate by 2/3
• Created a BRT system (bus rapid transit)
  
• Planted over 100,000 trees
• Created/refurbished over 12,000 parks
• Built 50 new schools
• Increased children's enrollment in school by 34%
• Built over 300 kms of bike paths and greenways
• Created a referendum (passed by the public) that created a yearly car free day and decided that from the year 2015 onwards, there would be no cars in Bogota during rush hours (6 AM to 9 AM and 4:30 PM to 7:30 PM).

Penalosa is very focused on equity and the notion that cities should maximize happiness for ALL of their citizens. In the context of our conference, Penalosa talked about parks and greenways. Here is one of this thoughts on parks:

Higher income groups always have access to nature at beach houses, lake cabins, mountain chalets, on vacations - or in urban settings at golf courses or large gardens. Parks allow the rest of society that contact as well.

He spoke of his experience building bike lanes that connected poorer areas of the city to downtown areas where many people worked. One point that resonated with me and I'm still ruminating on is the concept of sidewalks/pedestrian crossings at intersections. Think about a major intersection with many pedestrians. Pedestrians must enter the space of the cars by stepping down as they enter the intersection. Penalosa spoke of a different model - so simple, but quite a new one to me at least. Cars must enter the space of the pedestrians. How is that done? It's simple. The sidewalk simply continues at its same height through the intersection. In effect, this makes a speed bump for the cars and forces them to enter the pedestrian space. I wish I could find a picture of this. Imagine what a change this would be for handicapped people, children, bikers.

The only example I have found in the Austin area is in the South Park Meadows shopping center, which unfortunately is EXTREMELY car-dominated. However, the pedestrian crossings are made in this way, so that is a start.

Penalosa really is inspirational and motivating. He did things in his city that no one has been able to accomplish in America in such a short time, let alone Latin America. Here's a short excerpt of an interview with Penalosa talking about possibilities in NYC: