hours per year slowly losing their minds
in traffic, a waste of $179 billion in lost
productivity and 3.3 billion gallons of gas.
Transportation accounts for nearly a third
of total greenhouse gas emissions in the
US, and more than half of that is from
cars. Combustion engines simply cannot
help emitting carbon-based molecules
that violently deconstruct Earth’s climate.
Cars—especially the short-hop, sub-5-mile
trips that people who live in cities take as
a matter of both habit and necessity—are
the most obvious cause of climate change.
Or: You. It’s you, driving to work, pick-
ing up kids, driving to the movies, doing
the shopping. Your car habit is killing the
world with fire and flood.
Really, though, it’s not you. It’s them—the
people who made the laws that shaped the
urban world and the people who built cit-
ies to fit them. Driving seems like what an
economist would call a revealed prefer-
ence, a thing people obviously love because
they do it so much. But it’s not. Driving is an
enforced preference. The modern Ameri-
can city is designed to favor cars and make
other ways of getting around suck. That’s
been true for at least six decades, but today
our limited ability to imagine different
shapes for cities is causing environmental
collapse. It’s time to hit the brakes. Want to
cut carbon? Get people to drive less. But to
do it, we’ll need different kinds of cities.↙
TUMLIN HAS A DEGREE IN URBAN STUDIES
from Stanford, which didn’t help him get a
job when he graduated in 1991 and moved
to San Francisco. He was poor, but that
was OK. “I was having my perfect young,
queer, new San Francisco arrival experi-
ence. Those were my formative years. I was
finally having a life.”
So when Tumlin finally got an offer a year
or so later, it held little appeal. It was back
at Stanford, running the unglamorous uni-
versity parking system. Except, dollars. “I
thought, OK, fine, I will do this, ignore myurban ectoplasm. He’s going to need it. Like
the Loma Prieta quake, Tumlin is about to
shake some things until they break—carve
up a few more roads to create bike paths,
new busways, parks ... whole new ways for
people to move around. It won’t be easy;
lefty, crazy San Francisco becomes the most
conservative city in the country when it
comes to changing the look and feel of the
place. But this is the revolution that Tum-
lin and a generation of new-wave planners
are waging.
“Almost no matter what you want to do
with cities, transportation is the fastest and
most cost-effective way of achieving your
goals,” he says. “If you want to reduce CO 2
emissions, if you want to advance social
equity, if you want to foster small busi-
ness success, if you want to increase land
value, if you want to increase public health,
if you want to reduce fatalities and inju-
ries—transport is the place to do it.”↙
CARS ARE GREAT. I SAY THAT AS AN
Angeleno who grew up thinking of them as
a perfect amalgam of fashion signifier and
Gundam mech-armor, but also because of
everything that the private automobile has
made possible. Vanguard of an economic
boom, the car democratized freedom of
movement and social privacy—privileges
that had been available only to wealthy
white men. The whole economic premise
of Fordism was that the laborers who pow-
ered the late industrial revolution, who built
the cars, should also be able to afford them.
And wow, did that ever happen. When the
assembly lines spun up at the beginning of
the 20th century, Americans owned just
a few thousand cars. By the end of World
WarII, it was 30 million. As of 2017, there
were more than 193 million cars and light-
duty trucks in the US. That’s roughly three
cars for every four adults.
Cars are also terrible. They kill about
40,000 people every year in the US and
injure millions more. Americans spend 54MOVE
FOR 30 YEARS, A 40-FOOT-HIGH SECTION
of US Route 101 wove like a blackberry
vine through a low, old neighborhood of
Edwardian and Georgian buildings in San
Francisco’s Hayes Valley. Then, in 1989, the
Loma Prieta earthquake, magnitude 6.9,
fractured the elevated roadway. Some peo-
ple wanted to repair it, but the city decided
to tear it down—a rare unbuilding in a
nation connected by highways.
Today it’s hard to imagine that anyone
defended the spur. The highway formed
a wall between neighborhoods, and the
right-of-way beneath it was a dark, unloved
space. With the freeway pruned away, the
city styled the newly revealed surface
street—Octavia—after a grand Parisian
boulevard, with an inner couple of lanes
separated from parallel side streets by tree-
lined islands. Octavia now terminates in a
long, grassy park with a geodesic children’s
play structure at one end. Nearby are pricey
shops and chic cafés.
Back when Jeff Tumlin was on staff at
the urban planning consultancy Nelson\
Nygaard, he worked on this remaking
of Octavia Street and Hayes Valley. Now
Tumlin—tall, lean, and bearded—is the
new head of San Francisco’s Municipal
Transportation Agency. On a sunny win-
ter morning, he and I head for that green
space so he can show me the freeway’s
ghost, barely visible in the odd, polygonal
footprints of newer buildings along Hayes
Street—they’re catawampus, tucked into
the spaces where the concrete artery used
to curve through, insensible to the city’s
grid. Take away the veil of freeway and you
get space for a more boogie-woogie street
fabric. Less freeway, more park.
Tumlin has a preternatural awareness of
_The state of California stopped buying (most) solely gas-powered vehicles for its fleets at the end of 2019—all part of the
governor’s efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions in the state.