White said the group is wrangling to have “Contested Streets” aired on either PBS or a cable TV station. That makes me wish it had avoided mistakes like spending the first fifteen minutes on a tired rehash of the history of the highway in New York, in which raccoon-eyed roadbuilder Robert Moses comes in for a too-predictable beating and plummy announcers from the 1960s World’s Fair era are made to look foolish with their ludicrously upbeat predictions of a car-centric future. Such targets are the inverse of the milk cans at a street fair ball-toss booth: you can’t help but knock them down.
I also wish the video had reduced its reliance on talking heads Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia University and Mike Wallace of CUNY, eloquent as they are, and introduced us to the activists and policymakers who are devising New York’s creative traffic strategies. There must be a government planner who can stand in front of a camera and, like Jan Gehl, explain how the world wouldn’t end if certain streets lost their curbside parking to widen the sidewalk.
Why not show a local victory, anything from a traffic-calming intersection to the West Side greenway, and tell us how it happened? The fifteen viewers at Teddy’s spent most of the post-show discussion lamenting New York’s hostility to non-combustion propulsion. If they had just viewed a couple of stories about New Yorkers scrapping for better streets and, here and there, winning them, might they have talked instead about joining the cause?
The stakes are huge. New York wastes an estimated $2 billion of productivity a year on traffic congestion, a fact I gleaned from “Contested Streets,” a video that despite its minor shortcomings I would recommend to anyone looking to live in a less mechanistic, more humanistic city.
The economic impact of traffic congestion is explored further, and estimated at a loss of $13 billion per year, in a report released this month by the Partnership for New York City, Growth or Gridlock.
