Trillion dollar streets

Cities are islands of private property connected by public space. But even though public space represents a substantial amount of a city’s surface, its uses are limited mostly to the circulation of cars. Forty-nine percent of the land in Manhattan is public, not because Central Park is big, but because streets represent 36% of the island. That means that in Manhattan alone more than $500 billion worth of land is dedicated almost exclusively to cars (Bloomberg.com, 2018). Of course, streets are necessary. But our current allocation of public space may be far from optimal. In the US, trillions of dollars of land in prime locations are dedicated to streets and parking spots. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Compare Tokyo to New York. The Asian mega city dedicates only 29% of its surface area to streets. This 7 percentagepoints difference is due in part to Tokyo’s restriction on on-street parking. Covid did not evolve to change our cities, but is certainly giving us an opportunity to do so. One place where the disease has put enormous pressure is on the excessive allocation of public spaces to cars. Cities across the world have closed hundreds of miles of roads in an effort to open streets to their residents (Streetsblog USA, 2020). But to reduce the spatial footprint of cars, cities will need more than goodwill and orange cones. They will need to solve supply side and demand side problems. On the supply side, public transportation is the obvious substitute to private vehicles (although they do not solve the problem of package delivery). But for a change, I would like to focus on the demand side of the problem. The demand side question is: who wants to keep cars out of the streets and actually has the power to do so? Here the obvious solutions are to increase the space dedicated to bicycles, sidewalks, and cafes (Manjoo, 2020). But once we consider the land value of streets, more radical alternatives come into play.