Make walking the priority

Last week I walked from Boston to Cambridge over the Longfellow Bridge. Of all the bridges over the Charles, the Longfellow is the most beautiful.

The surroundings were beautiful too. The blue sky was filled with puffy clouds—temperature, high 70s.  The towers of the Back Bay, set firmly in the Esplanade’s green foundation, provided a dignified urban contrast to the river, on which a duck boat entertained its passengers and two sailboats collided without mishap. Cars whizzed by and the Red Line rumbled along. It was my kind of place.

This glorious experience was marred by one thing: getting to the bridge. A walker has to either edge by cars on a one-foot curb or take a circuitous route up and down stairs. Once you hit the narrow sidewalk, it’s hard to walk two abreast. Forget about comfortably passing walkers coming from the other way.

If you intend to walk along the river and take the first steps down on the Cambridge side, you meet a granite circle and a blank wall. To find a path, you must cross the grass and dart through speeding traffic, hoping to make it our alive.

Walking back on the other side? Let’s just say the sidewalk is wider.

Bikes have as much trouble crossing the Longfellow as do pedestrians. In fact, other bridges across the Charles, the Craigie and the BU Bridge especially, are hazardous for bikes and unpleasant for pedestrians.

In the next decade the Department of Conservation and Recreation will renovate the Longfellow as well as other bridges over the Charles. Plans show that the pedestrian experience will improve—somewhat—on all of them.

But it feels as if we’ve missed a big opportunity for re-imagining how we move around this city. Once again, the design favors motor vehicle traffic over everything else.

It isn’t the first time we’ve failed on that score. We’re talking about raising transit fares while the idea of increasing the gas tax has floundered.

DCR is now renovating the Storrow Drive tunnel rather than creating a majestic pedestrian entrance to the Esplanade because its leadership did not have the guts to put people over cars. Unfortunately, the neighborhood participants in the Storrow Drive tunnel planning didn’t have the guts either.

Neither can city officials see past the car. The Boston Transportation Department shows they don’t yet understand how vehicle use must be discouraged in favor of walking, biking and T use.

But Boston is ripe for new thinking because the need is great, and we have a head start.

The Boston Business Journal recently reported that a study by Texas A&M University showed that in 2007 Boston drivers spent 91.1 million hours stuck in traffic, the 12th worst rate in the nation.

So much for Mayor Menino’s efforts to make Boston the nation’s greenest city, since the study estimated that the delays caused drivers to burn an additional 61 million more gallons of fuel—the 13th-worst rate in the nation.

While we might take comfort that we’re not as bad as LA, Chicago, Atlanta or Miami, we should also be embarrassed since we have a solution to the problem that these cities don’t enjoy. By the nature of our built environment, we have a head start in solving the problem.

A 2006 U.S. Department of Transportation survey showed that Cambridge has the highest percentage (20.1 percent) in the nation of people walking to work. Boston is fifth at 13 percent.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. In downtown Boston, fully one-third of the residents walked to work in 2000, according to the BRA’s census data. Another 20 percent took public transportation.

Given our walking preferences, it’s surprising there isn’t a walking revolution, with Boston citizens beating down the doors of our elected officials and agency heads, demanding that pedestrians get priority over everything else.

I don’t have the answers. But if I were King of Boston, or even Mayor, I’d convene a conference to imagine how we might make getting around our region more convenient, efficient and fun. Then I’d carry out the ideas. I’d be open to Paris’s bikes and London’s surcharge. I’d encourage experiments with untried ideas of our own—rezoning Charlestown, for example, so that businesses could once again flourish on Main Street, banning cars outright in the North End and Beacon Hill so that residents would be relieved from honking horns and the sound of idling cars, and plowing money now into the Urban Ring to jump-start critical rail (and underground) connections between the airport, Cambridge, Longwood and UMass.

Cars are important—don’t get me wrong. But for drivers, moving is the goal, not sitting in traffic.

If we focused on making it easier for people to walk, safer to bike and more convenient and affordable to take public transportation, those who needed to drive would find it nicer to drive. Our roadways would be less crowded and we’d be a lot more energy-efficient.