Napoleon referred to England as a nation of shopkeepers. In Bailgate we have narrow minded short sighted shopkeepers who cannot see further than the end of their nose.
Bailgate should have been pedestrianised years ago. Shame on Lincoln City Council for failing to grasp the opportunity to pedestrianize Bailgate. [see Pedestrianise Bailgate]
A Bailgate free of motorised traffic would create a far better environment. There would be more people on the street, longer dwell time. In the summer local restaurants could put tables and chairs in the streets.
Where else do we find historic parts of a city with traffic passing through?
Would anyone seriously consider opening up The Shambles and other ancient streets in York to traffic to enable park outside a shop, to pop in to buy one item?
Car parking a red herring. There is plenty of car parking around the castle and at The Lawn.
If car parking is an issue, allocate the same number in the adjacent car parks, free or limited charge for two hours, more than sufficient time to shop and have lunch.
In Athens, local residents with the help of anarchists, block streets with wooden boxes containing plants.
Pedestrianised streets, low traffic neighbourhoods, low emission zones, not only create a safer cleaner environment, they also create business opportunities for example e-cargo bikes powered by solar energy for local deliveries.
One third of car journeys in South Yorkshire are less than 500 metres! That’s about five minutes walk.
The Good Society does not happen by chance.
We need to see Doughnut Economics Lincoln. [see Doughnut Economics Cyprus]
A measure of the liveability of cities, the ratio of parks to car parks.
The car promises mobility, but delivers immobility.
Enrique Peñalosa served as Mayor in Bogotá for three years from 1998. When he took office he did not ask how life could be improved for the 30 percent who owned cars, which seems to be the question asked elsewhere, he wanted to know what could be done for the 70 percent — the majority — who did not own cars.
Peñalosa realized the obvious, that a city that is a pleasant environment for children and the elderly, ie like Venice, would work for everyone. Within just a few years, he transformed the quality of urban life with his vision of a city designed for people.
Under his leadership, the city was transformed, cars were banned from parking on the sidewalks, 1,200 parks were created or transformed, a highly successful bus-based rapid transit system was introduced, hundreds of kilometres of bicycle paths and pedestrian streets were created, rush hour traffic was reduced by 40 percent, 100,000 trees were planted, and local citizens were involved directly in the improvement of their neighbourhoods.
The works carried out and the direct involvement of the people created a sense of civic pride among the city’s 8 million residents, making the streets of Bogotá in this strife-torn country safer than those in Washington DC.
Enrique Peñalosa has observed that:
… high quality public pedestrian space in general and parks in particular are evidence of a true democracy at work. … Parks and public space are also important to a democratic society because they are the only places where people meet as equal … In a city, parks are as essential to the physical and emotional health of a city as the water supply.
The reforms Peñalosa initiated in Bogotá were carried on by his successor, Antanas Mockus.
Curitiba, a provincial city in southeastern Brazil, has a population similar to Philadelphia or Houston. It faces the problems of all Third World cities, unwanted migration into the city, rural dwellers pushed off the land and lured by the cities. The migrant poor form slums and shanty towns on the edge of the city.
Population 300,000 in 1950, 2.2 million by 1990, and an estimated million more by 2020.
We are used to seeing pedestrian areas in towns and cities, we take them for granted, but in the early 1970s, car-free streets were a novelty.
Curitiba was one of the first cities to have a pedestrian area. This was thanks to Jaime Lerner, a planner by profession, being appointed mayor.
In 1972, the historic boulevard the Rua Quinze de Novembro, was converted virtually overnight, into a pedestrian area. Workman planted tens of thousands of flowers. The street was closed on the Friday night, when it reopened 48 hours later, it was a pedestrian area, one of the first in the world.
Shopkeepers had threatened to sue for loss of trade, by midday Monday, they were petitioning for the surrounding streets to be pedestrianised.
To put what Lerner was doing in context, this was at the time of the construction of Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil, a dazzlingly modern new capital of skyscrapers and wide motorways that was widely seen at the the time as the city of the future.
People took the flowers, workman added more. Protests by motorists, were met by children bearing flowers, which has led to the alternative name of the street Rua das Flores.
Had this historic street not been pedestrianised, it was destined to be destroyed for an overpass, as have so many historic streets in towns and cities across the world.
Cities should not only be designed for people not cars, they should be designed that people do not need cars.
Jaime Lerner turned out to a be a visionary, a rarity in local government, and ultimately served three terms in office, twelve years. His successors continued his vision.
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