was looking at a million more people mov-
ing in by 2030, but the administration also
wanted to reduce emissions. Sadik-Khan
came home from a trip to bicycle-crazy
Copenhagen with an idea: Move parallel-
parked cars a few feet out from the curb
and use them as a bulwark for bike lanes.
“We’d sort of lost the script that our streets
could be for anyone else,” Sadik-Khan says.
“People that were walking or biking or tak-
ing transit, they were left with a scrap of the
street.” So she took some of it back.
New York drivers, never shy, complained
about losing lanes. Retailers worried about
losing customers. But polling showed that
pretty much everyone else loved Sadik-
Khan’s changes. She got 400 miles of
bikeways built. She turned Times Square
car-free, started a bike-share program,
and helped found a national organization
of city planners that could teach US cities
to push these kinds of ideas as hard as the
old car-forward ones. “We just lit the spark,
gave cities permission to innovate,” Sadik-
Khan says. “Change is difficult. A lot of cities
are debating whether to build more roads
and highways. They need to stop repeating
the failures of the last century.”
↙
TUMLIN EXPERTLY PEDALS A BRIGHT
orange Jump bike toward the park on Octa-
via. I’m less expertly pedaling his bike, an
electrically boosted thing that’ll spin up to
25 mph if I don’t watch it. (Tumlin often
tweets about his rides on his ebike, and a
few weeks after our trip, someone tried to
steal it—during Tumlin’s photo shoot for
wired. He ran after the guy and got it back.)
Honestly, I look like a wobbly, bike-
curious dope in a secondhand helmet. Tum-
lin, on the other hand, cuts a natty figure in
a sweater, jacket, and really nice shoes. (At
work he favors tailored suits; a local news
outlet reported his new job with the head-
line “Mayor Appoints Stone Cold Fox Jeffrey
Tumlin to Lead SFMTA.”)
The Parisian version of Octavia, it turns
out, isn’t all he’d hoped. “We screwed this
one up,” Tumlin says. “The island is too
narrow, so the outside lanes are too wide.”
Traffic pours off the still extant part of the
old freeway toward the park, and some cars
use the outside lanes to bypass the center.
Making the point, a silver sedan rolls up and
presses us from behind. We float right and
it accelerates. I see Uber and Lyft stickers in
its rear window. As the sedan crawls past,
Tumlin looks through the window at the
driver, smiles broadly, locks the extended
middle finger of his left hand on target,
and says, amiably but loud: “Fuuuuuck
yoooooou.”
Maybe that makes Tumlin sound like a
zealot or an asshole. In my time with him,
he was neither; he says he just doesn’t like
bullies. And he thinks that cars screw up
cities. That’s why he peels off from the
park and turns down a side street. A hun-
dred years ago it would have been an alley;
a hundred years before that it might’ve beenMOVE
space for horse-drawn carriages. Now it’s
a cozy street full of shops—an expensive
luggage store with displays more like an art
gallery, a famous maker of custom-made
corsetry. We dismount where the street is
lined with stone benches and plantings that
make it almost too narrow for cars. That’s
what Tumlin wants to show me. This urbane
little street is designed for people moving
at the speed our eyes and brains are most
able to process and respond to, he says—
which happens to be no faster than a run.
But behind the wheel of a car, inputs come
too fast. Thirty miles an hour! Locked in a
steel box, toggling between a crime podcast
and Google Maps, an illusion of aloneness