Cities thrive on crowds, diversity, and high-rise, writes Elizabeth Farrelly.

Downtown Sydney may look like your regulation forest of towers with an unusually spectacular frontispiece. But the glittering spires are not the only distinguishing marks. This particular six square kilometres, Central-to-the-Quay, is unusual in its peninsular nature, its fabulous climate and its narrow, crooked streets. These change everything.

From the moment Sydney went high-rise, 50 years ago, it was never going to be Barcelona or Vienna, their compact low-rise cores riddled with cultural enterprise, ancient and modern. Sydney was never going to be Manhattan either, its streets three times as wide and blocks four times as long, its city fathers even then imposing a step-back rule to bring daylight into the streets (and incidentally producing some of the world's prettiest skyscrapers, the Chrysler Building, for one).

Sydney city was never going to be London, crammed with world-centre institutions and global financial reach; nor Hydra, its twisting, cobbled streets serviceable by mule. Sydney's downtown was never going to be sun-drenched or verdant in any way that might let it compete, as a sunny day people-magnet, with beach or harbour. But, despite all that, Sydney's is no dead-heart downtown. It is itself, a flawed but intricate and interdependent ecology that deserves our understanding before we meddle.

Take congestion, probably the commonest city complaint. Traffic congestion, pedestrian congestion; buses and taxis congestion. It sounds bad, very bad. The very word implies a medical model, like hearts or lungs or liver, where any sclerotic impediment is a bad thing. But cities are not organs and city-type congestion is just an extreme case of a condition that is the very essence of urban life: crowding.

Cities, unlike hearts, are not improved by zero congestion. Pretty much the whole of Australia has zero congestion (unless you count the flies). Cities are designed to concentrate - or congest - human energy. They are less about moving through than being there; they thrive on bustle, busy-ness and friction, creative and otherwise.

Let's begin with the pocketbook-chafing fact that New York's bus and subway riders pay far more at the farebox than riders in any other major transit network. Their burdenwould go up again early next year under a proposal by the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The current base fare of $2 would rise 25 cents to achieve the authority's goal of boosting revenue by 6.5 percent. Another fare increase, as yet undetermined, would follow in two years.

The planned increases reflect the M.T.A.'s attempt to address projected financial woes, including huge out-year budget gaps, while also improving service and expanding the system. Its proposed solution depends on raising fares and tolls possibly as early as January. Foregoing a fare hike entirely, as the city and state comptrollers have both urged, may not be possible; there hasn't been an increase in more than three years. But every effort should be made to minimize the riders' pain.

There are ways this could be done. The M.T.A. is proposing to raise $262 million through higher fares and tolls. Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign, a nonprofit riders' advocate, suggests a more equitable sharing of costs. His group is calling for the city and counties to contribute $65 million, and the state to pitch in an equal amount. If they did that, riders would face only a 10-cent fare hike. It is a reasonable approach, and lawmakers should give it serious attention.

Keeping fares affordable is critical in a city where so many riders have low incomes. It also encourages people to use mass transit instead of their cars.

DRIVING a taxi in New York City can be a grueling, thankless job. It is also a unionless job. But on Wednesday, many of the city’s 44,000 licensed cabdrivers are planning to go on strike for 48 hours to protest the new global positioning systems being installed in the city’s 13,000 yellow cabs.

While the Taxi and Limousine Commission supports these devices and has mandated that they be up and running in the city’s entire fleet by January, many cabdrivers — myself included — see this new technology as one big expensive headache. Perhaps the commission should listen to cabdrivers before pushing a device that we’d be better off without.

The device has no navigational abilities. The monitor, which is set into the partition separating the driver from the passenger, cannot be seen or accessed from the front of the cab. It does not give directions or plot routes. All it does is keep track of where you are — both on- and off-duty — and this information is then stored in the commission’s databases.

Officials at the commission say the primary purpose of the devices is to track lost property and make sure cabbies aren’t taking passengers from point A to point B by way of point Z. Sadly, there are some bad cabdrivers out there who take visitors for a “ride,” but in reality, we have much more to fear from our passengers than they have to fear from us.

However, for me and many of my fellow drivers, privacy issues aside, it’s all about money. With prices ranging from around $3,250 to $4,000 to lease and install each unit, the initial costs alone are enough to drive some cabbies out of business. For private owner/operators, this could kill their year.

The costs continue to pile up after the devices are installed. The test drivers who already have the touch-screens have reported finding the monitors covered in spray paint, stickers, soda and scratches.

At long last, Congress is showing a willingness to confront global warming. The Senate's recent approval of higher fuel economy standards is a constructive step and key lawmakers are promising comprehensive legislation this year that will, for the first time, limit the emission of greenhouse gases.

But for all the talk about warming, leading politicians have yet to educate their constituents (and their colleagues) about an unpleasant and inescapable truth: any serious effort to fight warming will require everyone to pay more for energy. According to most scientists, the long-term costs of doing nothing - flooding, famine, drought - would be even higher than the costs of acting now. But unless Americans understand and accept the trade-off - higher prices today to avoid calamity later - the requisite public support for real change is unlikely to build.

Energy is currently underpriced in part because its cost does not reflect the damage inflicted by fossil fuels. Underpricing leads to overconsumption. Worse, it leads to underinvestment in alternatives. As long as today's energy is relatively cheap, there is little incentive for private firms to develop new fuels and technologies.

Washington is poised to offer a helping hand, as well as significant money, to assist Mayor Michael Bloomberg in his efforts to solve New York's traffic gridlock. But there is one bump in the road - Albany, which must approve the city's proposed remedy before any money can begin to flow. And some legislators are balking.

The federal Department of Transportation plans to make available $1.2 billion in grants, loans and other financing to metropolitan areas across the country to help them test strategies to relieve traffic congestion.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg likes to talk about the big picture, even if it might not be pretty. Yesterday, he warned New Yorkers how their city could suffer by 2030 without his plans for the future. With a million new people coming into town, housing needs would soar. The sky could be as gray and toxic as London in the '50s. Every road into Manhattan would be above capacity - a gridlock nightmare that would make today's traffic jams look tame.

By DONALD SHOUP
Published: March 29, 2007

Los Angeles

MOST people view traffic with a mixture of rage and resignation: rage because congestion wastes valuable time, resignation because, well, what can anyone do about it? People have places to go, after all; congestion seems inevitable.

But a surprising amount of traffic isn't caused by people who are on their way somewhere. Rather, it is caused by those who have already arrived. Streets are clogged, in part, by drivers searching for a place to park.

Several studies have found that cruising for curb parking generates about 30 percent of the traffic in central business districts. In a recent survey conducted by Bruce Schaller in the SoHo district in Manhattan, 28 percent of drivers interviewed while they were stopped at traffic lights said they were searching for curb parking. A similar study conducted by Transportation Alternatives in the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn found that 45 percent of drivers were cruising.

Spot zoning fails to accommodate the greater good
By Harris Steinberg

... Spot zoning yields mega-projects alongside three-story historic structures. It allows soulless parking structures to sit along once-vibrant retail corridors. And it enables gated communities to straddle the river's edge.

FOR the past two decades, New York has been an inspiration to other American cities looking to revive themselves. Yes, New York had a lot of crime, but somehow it also still had neighborhoods, and a core that had never been completely abandoned to the car. Lately, though, as far as pedestrian issues go, New York is acting more like the rest of America, and the rest of America is acting more like the once-inspiring New York.
As a New Yorker who has spent two years researching roads and transportation across the United States, I am saddened to see our city falling behind places like downtown Albuquerque, where one-way streets have become more pedestrian-friendly two-way streets, and car lanes are replaced by bike lanes, with bike racks everywhere.
Then there is Grand Rapids, Mich., which has a walkable downtown with purposely limited parking and is home to a new bus plaza that is part of a mass transit renaissance in Michigan. The state is investing in high-speed trains, and it is even talking about a mass transit system for the nation's auto-capital, Detroit, where a new pedestrian plaza anchors downtown. In Indianapolis, an urban walking and biking trail will soon link inner-city neighborhoods - something New York certainly hasn't tried.
We have lost our golden pedestrian touch in New York mostly because we still think about traffic as though it were 1950, and we needed Robert Moses to plow a few giant freeways through town to get the cars moving again. But the fact is that more roads equal more traffic.