At the start of the pandemic, Oakland, California found itself in a bind. Anxious citizens, ordered by the county to shelter in place, were seeking fresh air and exercise and gathering in the few open spaces available to them. Everything authorities knew about Covid-19 at the time suggested that such densities could be a recipe for disaster.
The solution, announced on April 10, 2020, was a policy known as Slow Streets – an aggressive plan to close 120 kilometres of city roads to most car traffic, allowing these thoroughfares to become places for walking, jogging, biking, and other outdoor activities. Shortly after Oakland’s move – and partly following its lead – analogous programs appeared in cities across the United States, transforming their urban fabrics seemingly overnight.
Cities have long been shaped by disease. During plagues, rulers in ancient China’s Western Han Dynasty ordered infected citizens into “isolation houses”. A yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia in 1793 helped spur the creation of a sanitation department and municipal garbage collection. The cholera epidemics of the 1800s led to designers favouring straighter boulevards, which prevented infected water from pooling in crooks and accommodated long pipes underneath to move waste more efficiently.
The effects of coronavirus are now written all over Oakland’s streets. Parking spaces in certain commercial districts have been converted to parklets so diners can eat en plein air, giving the areas a European feel. Long stretches of the city’s roads remain car-light, and the municipal government had made it easier to temporarily close streets for outdoor markets and other community events. But as the greatest danger from the illness ebbs, questions remain about how to build on the best parts of such programs, and whether or not the pandemic has permanently changed our approach to urban design.
As a resident of Oakland for more than 15 years, I was surprised by the swiftness of the Slow Streets rollout. Before the pandemic, changes that might make roads safer for pedestrians and cyclists always seemed to move with an interminable slowness. But in the world-shattering emergency of Covid-19, the city government saw it needed to use the means at its disposal.
“A resource we have in spades is our streets,” says Warren Logan, who directs policy for mobility and interagency relations in the Oakland mayor's office. “And if we’re not using them to commute – then is it an opportunity to provide a sense of safety and community without having people leave their homes too far?”
On the day of the April announcement, Oakland placed moveable signs at either end of four streets in different neighbourhoods indicating that they were closed to through traffic, doing the same to an additional six to eight kilometres of roads per week over the next couple months. Rapidity was part of the initial design. “I wanted to show Oakland, and, frankly, the country that the government can move really quickly, in part when it gets out of its own way,” Logan says.
Fairly soon, though, city administrators realised they had to change tack. Surveys conducted online found that residents in wealthier and whiter neighbourhoods were much more vocal and positive about the closures than those elsewhere. “In America, our cities are segregated, inequitable, and systemically unjust,” says Ryan Russo, who directs Oakland’s Department of Transportation. Even before the pandemic, his department had been striving to put equity first in a city that is too often divided along racial and economic lines.
Officials set up working groups with community organisations, in particular those in East Oakland, where residents tend to be poorer and come from marginalised backgrounds. Citizens – many of whom were essential workers needing to travel to hospitals, grocery stores, and other places of business – expressed dismay at the Slow Streets program. For years, they had struggled to get simple infrastructure like stop signs and speed bumps installed, and now the city was impeding their ability to get around. Both Russo and Logan recall that the initial dialogues were challenging.
“It took us a while to get to a place that was constructive,” Logan says. “I know that there’s value in venting, there’s a catharsis to tell somebody, ‘You messed up.’”
At the end of May, Oakland began offering a new phase of Slow Streets called Essential Places with the aim of addressing many of these inequities. Rather than close down entire streets, the city set up quick barricades using traffic cones and signs to narrow crosswalks in front of locations like shopping centres and clinics, allowing pedestrians to reach them more easily. East Oakland resident John Jones III, director of the non-profit Just Cities, who had been critical of the program’s rollout, called this an example of positive change “that’s really going to reduce harm,” in an interview with local outlet Oaklandside in November.
The city never actually reached its intended goal of closing 120 kilometres of roads, settling for around 34 kilometres by the summer of 2020 and deciding against going further based on the feedback it received. For streets that continued to divert all non-essential traffic, officials worked with a local artist to redesign signage, which now feature a scraper bike—a brightly-modified bicycle created by local youth of colour—as well as an outline of two young Black girls playing.
“I think it’s meaningful to use culturally competent way-finding,” says Logan. “So that you are reflecting back to the community that we’re talking about you.”
Slow Streets continued to iterate throughout 2020. In June, Oakland rolled out an initiative called Flex Streets to help businesses and restaurants apply for and build parklets in front of their storefronts, allowing for small open spaces to appear throughout the city. The previously cumbersome process was highly bureaucratic and often slowed down by other business owners’ complaints. Now, says Logan, there’s an easy template that only needs review by a single official, saving time and money. The number of parklets in Oakland has skyrocketed from four to over 100.
Outside advocates think that Slow Streets’ steps and missteps have both been beneficial. “It’s difficult for government to innovate,” says Darnell Grisby, executive director of TransForm, which pushes for transit and walkability improvements throughout California. “It’d be nice if the public sector was allowed to try and fail the way that tech companies do. I think the taxpayer would get a lot more out of it.”
Overall, Oakland has spent a trim $160,000 on material costs for both Slow Streets and Essential Places, and was able to use many shutdown roads for Covid-19 testing sites and vaccinations over the course of the year.
Grisby, who moved to the city from Washington D.C. in November, says he’s been pleased with Oakland’s openness to dialogue. He hopes that this past year’s trials have helped create an appetite for progressive changes to infrastructure and transportation.
“Necessity is the mother of invention and the pandemic created a lot of necessities,” he says. “It reminded us the importance of urban spaces and our time together as human beings. Sometimes we’ll need support from one another, and what that looks like collectively happens to be called government.”
The future of Slow Streets is “still a little bit TBD,” says Russo. But administrators intend to continue many of the initiatives and expand their toolkit, in particular now that vaccination has made it easier for large groups to gather. For instance, East Oakland merchants can call neighbours and propose to close down a street for a cookout with less hassle, says Logan. “We’ve included a way for the city to say ‘Yes,’ rather than, ‘I don’t understand this.’”
Prior to the pandemic, such ideas would have met with more resistance, he adds. Asking the city to shut down a tenth of its streets to through traffic would have likely been a non-starter, but people now have a better understanding of the value of such renovations.
“The lasting impact I’m hoping to have is that residents and merchants stop being afraid of change,” Logan says. “I want to challenge people’s understanding of the ways they use space, and show they can benefit from flexibility and innovation.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
