0 6 4
pick it up for them. Tumlin has shown me
this little street because it’s scaled to let all
that happen. “But I can’t say my job is tell-
ing people about civility,” he says.
After he left Stanford and ended up at
Nelson\Nygaard, Tumlin worked not only on
that Octavia park but in cities from Seattle
to Abu Dhabi. In fact, a lot of what he’s plan-
ning for San Francisco would look famil-
iar to the rest of the world. New York just
closed 14th Street, a key crosstown boule-
vard, to private cars—a bus trip that took
17 minutes now takes just 10, and weekday
ridership has been up 17 percent. Seattle’s
adding new homes and new transit. Oslo is
banning cars from its city center. The cen-
ter of Ghent in Belgium is divided into zones
that transit can cross freely but cars can’t.
London charges drivers to enter downtown.
And Paris—oh, man, Paris. After building
miles of bike lanes and turning huge swaths
of the city car-free, Mayor Anne Hidalgo has
reduced car traffic by 22 percent. Her reelec-
tion campaign is predicated on eliminat-
ing 60,000 parking spaces and building a
“city of 15 minutes,” where jobs, housing,
and anything great is within a quarter-hour’s
trip—on foot, on bike, or on Metro.
That’s all a ways off for San Francisco, but
you can see the road ahead. As Tumlin and
I pedal over to the long north-south artery
of Van Ness Avenue, we have to dismount to
get past a construction project, where work-
ers are putting in separate lanes for bikes
and buses. We hang a left on Market Street
and pull into the new bike lanes tucked
behind new boarding islands for buses, all
built in preparation for Market’s closure to
private automotive traffic. (A proposal to set
aside part of the San Francisco–to–Oakland
Bay Bridge for buses is pending.)
Of course there are obstacles. At one point
on our ride, the bike lane we’re following
takes a sudden turn away from the curb, out
into traffic, and then quickly back inward
again. Thanks to the litigious, whiny owner
of the store we have just passed, the bike
lane zigzags around exactly one car’s worth
of parking. And, acceding to local demand,
the transit agency built a handful of the city’s
new trolley-boarding platforms with a sin-
gle parking space, positioned so that a car in
that spot blocks the doors of an entire trolley
car. “While at the citywide level, I think we
could all agree that the safety of transit rid-
ers is more important than a single parking
space,” Tumlin says wryly, “at the block level,
it becomes more challenging.”↙
THE MISSION BAY NEIGHBORHOOD, SOUTH
of the Giants’ baseball stadium, used to be
wetland, industrial buildings, and park-
ing lots. Now Tumlin and I ride through a
gleaming new town, built higher and denser
than most of the city, threaded through with
a burgeoning UC San Francisco campus. At
a park that has become a semipermanent
cluster of food trucks, Tumlin and I lock up
the bikes and get food. Surrounded by med
school students nursing brunch cocktails,
we talk about a special irony of his new job.
Everything he’s trying to do is the philo-
sophical opposite of the plans a bunch of
powerful technology companies just a few
miles away have for disrupting cars.
Their solutions sound pretty good at
first. Electric cars don’t emit carbon—at
least not locally. Robot cars are supposed
to be smart enough, someday, to platoon
together as close as the segments of a cater-
pillar, solving traffic congestion. And when
we don’t need them they’ll just sort of float
away instead of requiring giant parking
structures. Imagine Uber, but without the
oppression of the proletariat.
Tumlin doesn’t buy any of it. New car
technologies don’t solve old car problems.
Models of a city where only robot Ubers
ply the roads hint at smoother traffic flow,
but a more realistic simulation—one com-
bining dumb private cars driven by dumb
people (not you, other people)—showed
increased congestion and more pollution.
Ride-hail services already simulate what a
robot autopia would look like, and it turns
out for solo trips they emit about 50 per-MOVE
“For a lot of people a
car means freedom
and social status. But
if a city provides you
no choice but to drive,
a car isn’t freedom,
it’s dependence.”_If an automaker shaves 10 percent off
the weight of a vehicle, it can increase the
vehicle’s fuel economy by up to 8 percent._In Portland, bike lanes with barriers that protect them from traffic have
helped reduce road fatalities for cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists by
75 percent over 20 years—even as the number of cyclists quintupled.