cent more carbon dioxide than private cars
per passenger-mile. Half the time those
cars are on the road they’re roving, empty,
trawling for fares.
If you’re hoping that electric cars will
solve that carbon problem, well, maybe.
But electrics are a stable 2 percent of
the US fleet; SUVs are 70 percent and
climbing. It’s not enough to make a dent.
“There’s this incredibly tech-centric dis-
cussion around fuel sources that misses
the many ways that cars pollute,” says
Jeff Speck, author of Walkable City: How
Downtown Can Save America, One Step at
a Time. “Even if they swarm, they’re about
1/500th as spatially efficient as a train, and
in cities, space is capital.”
If a city’s most valuable resource is its
land, the idea should be to let more people
make use of it, not fewer people with more
expensive toys. “Congestion is an economic
problem, not an infrastructure one,” Tum-
lin says. Streets are a resource, often poorly
managed. Transit serves more people more
efficiently. That’s the real problem with
Ubers and Lyfts, in the end. “Left to their
own devices, private mobility operators
will provide more exquisite personal con-
venience for the privileged,” he says. “The
result of Uber and Lyft is that my streets can
move fewer people.”
“For a lot of people a car means freedom
and social status,” says Janette Sadik-Khan.
“But if a city provides you no choice but to
drive, a car isn’t freedom, it’s dependence.
If you have no choice but to drive for every
trip, it’s not your fault. Your city has failed.”
↙
THIS IS TUMLIN’S HONEYMOON PHASE.
He’s still a little famous for dressing, one
Halloween, as the city’s new marquee bus
terminal, with a tessellated white metal
skin and, famously, a broken spar that
required an eight-month closure for repair.
He printed out the Penrose pattern for his
suit and wore a top hat with a crack. Tum-
lin’s social media presence is so cheeky,
people @reply him to complain when buses
are late. The mayor and Board of Supervi-
sors support him.
But the city’s public works department
is embroiled in a corruption scandal that
could expand, and Tumlin’s agency is
groaning under the weight of bad morale
and hundreds of unfilled jobs. Some of his
jobs problem is just city bureaucracy BS.
But another is also an issue nationwide:
housing. Being a bus operator has, histor-
ically, been the kind of job that provides a
pathway to the middle class in the US, espe-
cially for people of color. Yet someone who
can’t afford to live in the Bay Area can’t get
that job. “The rising cost of housing out-
paces an employer’s ability to pay,” Tumlin
says. “I am talking out loud about convert-
ing office space to dormitories.”
At about the same time as American cit-
ies started pulling up their trolley tracks,
they were passing laws that made it harder
to build dense housing. Governments
started encouraging people to own their
own houses on their own plots of land, and
weird baby boomer pastoralism and rac-
ism produced exclusionary zoning laws.
The result? Small businesses can’t thrive.
Gentrification displaces poorer residents.
Homelessness goes up. The construction
of new homes gets pushed to the edges of
cities and beyond, so people have to drive
more, which makes their lives more expen-
sive and emits more greenhouse gases.
Transportation and housing are as inter-
twined as strands of DNA. But in California,
legislation that would have made it easier
to build clustered, multiunit housing near
transit lines has failed to pass the state’s
Senate two years in a row. If you make it
illegal to build dense cities, it’s hard to cut
carbon. “Housing policy is climate policy,”
says Constantine Samaras, a climate and
energy researcher at Carnegie Mellon Uni-
versity. “City policy is climate policy.”
A lot of home-owning Americans
find local produce shops and neighbor-
hood cafés in front of apartment build-
ings charming as hell in Paris or Tokyo,but they’ll take to the city-council barri-
cades to prevent their construction back
home—in defense of “parking” or “neigh-
borhood character.” That’s especially true
in San Francisco. “Most of us came from
somewhere else and had an amazing
arrival experience that was transforma-
tive. We became our best, truest selves,
and it was magical and beautiful. But we
cling to the San Francisco that was here
when we arrived,” Tumlin says. “I escaped
a place that was oppressive and conform-
ist and had this astonishing coming-out
experience, but one that was extraordi-
narily self-involved. There is an upside
to conformist societies: They tend to be
communitarian, especially if you are in
the in-group.”
That’s an extraordinary critique, not
just of San Francisco but of the California
dream. Tumlin is saying that to have the
cities we need, we need to let go of the cit-
ies we have. The ideal city is a place where
lots of different kinds of people with lots of
different amounts of money can live and
work. It has to be easy to get around with-
out a car, even for people whose bodies
can’t ride bikes or hop over potholes, and
for people who have kids to drop off on the
way to work and groceries to buy on the
way home, and maybe flowers to buy next
door to the dry cleaner’s. These are places
where people want to live, because it’s nice
there. The fact that those places also adapt
to and mitigate climate change instead of
causing it is a bonus.
Tumlin and his generation of planners
are offering a new vision of what broke
American civil society. The culprit wasn’t
rock and roll or miniskirts or hippies. It
wasn’t immigrants or violent comics or
violent TV or violent videogames or drugs
or feminism or atheism or Fox News or cell
phones or Russian hackers or even Dun-
geons and Dragons.
It was just cars.ADAM ROGERS (@jetjocko) is a senior cor-
respondent who covers science and culture._Of course e-scooters have no tailpipe emissions, but a study found that greenhouse gases from manufacturing, collection,
and charging make them less green than most bus, bike, moped, and walking trips, thanks largely to vandals who cut the
scooters’ lives short. Boosting their life spans to two years would make the greatest carbon-cutting difference.