job description, and they will fire me. But
I’ll make enough money to go to graduate
school,” he says.
He arrived back on campus amid a cri-
sis. The earthquake that knocked over the
San Francisco freeway had also damaged
about a third of the university’s buildings.
Its considerable endowment was down too.
Stanford’s land had become its most valu-
able resource.
Taking advantage of that resource,
though, was a whole other thing. Constant
not-in-my-backyardist opposition to Stan-
ford’s real estate development efforts had
culminated in what Tumlin describes as
a “bizarre deal” with Santa Clara County,
where the campus sits. It was an omnibus,
but with a catch: The school was allowed to
develop up to 2.1 million square feet of new
construction—but only if peak-period traffic
around the campus stayed at 1989 levels.
That seemed impossible. More build-
ings would necessarily mean more people,
which would necessarily mean more cars,
right? And all of them would want to sit on
what Tumlin increasingly thought of as his
parking lots, so he’d have to build more of
those too ... which would induce demand
for more cars and cause more traffic. But
then his team came up with a radical plan.
“What’s unique about universities is that
they are the property owner, the developer,
the landlord, and the tenant,” Tumlin says.
“They can actually do systems thinking in a
way that is rarely possible for government
agencies, particularly transit agencies.”
Tumlin, the head of parking, decided not
to build any more parking lots.
Instead, his department offered every
Stanford employee $90 a year, cash, if they
didn’t buy a parking permit while simul-
taneously raising parking rates. Rather
than spend $18 million building new lots,
Stanford spent $4 million of the parking
income on paths and places to lock up bikes,
banned private cars from a main road on
campus—buses and bikes still allowed—
and built 2.1 million square feet of build-
ings. Traffic remained at its 1989 baseline.
While it’s true that universities are more
terrarium than town, the tension between
using land for cars or for people—whether
to build infrastructure for private journeys
or public destinations, if you will—stymies
cities too. How do you make sure people
can easily get to where they want to go?
Public transit networks, mostly rail, guided
the growth of US cities through the first
half of the 20th century. Even the boom-
ing metropolises of the postwar years—Los
Angeles most famously—sprawled along the
branches of metastatic trolley networks.
Then a methodical automotive-industry
public relations project taught Ameri-
cans that the freedom of movement cars
offered wasn’t just convenient, it was down-
right patriotic—much more so than dirty,crowded cities. Carmakers lobbied for road-
building—like, how about a whole inter-
state highway system?—and road builders
came to support anything that led people
to buy a new car. Cities across the US tore
the tracks up. You can see their ghosts in the
broad grassy median strips on boulevards
across the country.
Racism and classism go a long way
toward explaining why public transit got
nuked, but that nuking is still a weird,
self-hating move. It makes cities a lot less
fun. Researchers disagree about the degree
to which people love big houses on curvy
cul-de-sacs and malls anchored by big-
box stores versus, say, multiunit housing,
densely packed skyscrapers with street-
level retail, and a vibrant café culture. But
let’s just stipulate that people who like cit-
ies like cities.
Yet those preferences aren’t reflected in
the classic guidelines for traffic planning.
The standards simply favor plenty of park-
ing and streets that hold a lot of cars. The
result is sprawl, downtowns that empty at
6 pm, car-dependent suburbs and exurbs,
and roads choked with traffic. This kind of
city—Houston, Phoenix, greater Los Ange-
les—eats up resources and coughs out car-
bon. It’s obvious when you say it out loud,
right? Cities take up 2 percent of all land on
Earth, but they’re responsible for 70 per-
cent of global emissions. But in dense cities
with transit, people drive less. “Right now,
cars are the dominant life-form in most of
our cities,” says Daniel Kammen, an energy
researcher at UC Berkeley, “not people.”
European cities have been doing radical
surgery on themselves to cure those ills for
decades. But one of the first people in the
US to try to put that knowledge to work was
the head of New York City’s Department
of Transportation, a San Francisco–born
New Yorker named Janette Sadik-Khan.
Appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg
in 2007, Sadik-Khan had already been a
federal transportation official and worked
for New York under Mayor David Dinkins.
The year she started her new job, New YorkWhat You Can Do_
LEVEL 1
PRIME AND CHILL
Ordered today, arriving tomorrow: a
single pair of socks in a giant cardboard
box. Cut down on emissions and waste
by ordering big and shipping slow._
LEVEL 2
LEG UP
If we have to travel more than a quarter
of a mile, most of us drive. Extend your
walking range to a full mile or two, get-
ting your steps up and your carbon foot-
print down._
LEVEL 3
BECOME A TRANSIT EVANGELIST
Plan a car-free day in your neighborhood,
write letters to the editor, and campaign
for local pro-transit candidates—or run
for office yourself._In January, California stopped buying fleet vehicles from GM, Toyota, Fiat, and Chrysler, after they sided with the Trump
administration’s refusal to let the state set stricter fuel economy standards of 51 mpg on average by 2026. Ford, VW, BMW,
and Honda have signed on to the new rules.