Liberal Landscape

In the world of urban planning, Hamburg has perhaps become best known for HafenCity, which has been slowly replacing Hamburg’s obsolete 19th-century port in the years since 2003 (an enormous new container port has grown up across the Elbe). HafenCity is claimed to be the largest urban renewal project in Europe. It is not only big, but the fact that (unlike, say, London’s Docklands) it abuts the old central business district makes it particularly important. The coming-into-being of HafenCity has presented Hamburg with an opportunity to create a kind of ideal 21st-century inner city.

I spent a fair amount of time in HafenCity when I was in Hamburg late last month. In many ways it’s an admirable place. Its mixture of office buildings, residences, and institutions gets away from what is widely felt to be the pernicious effect of rigid zoning in mid-20th-century cities, although there is a certain amount of internal zoning: residential areas are largely on the western side of HafenCity, offices in its central spine. Just about all the new buildings contain “sustainable” elements; most have achieved gold “ecolabel” status (that is, a European Union certification analogous to LEED status). There are numerous pedestrian- or bicycle-only corridors. Automobiles are allowed, but play almost no role in internal movement. For the most part they are kept to the edge of HafenCity, or put underground. HafenCity even includes a new subway line (U4). It now has two stops, and a third will open soon. There is also access to HafenCity from subway lines U1 and U3 just to its north.

HafenCity’s form provides an excellent window into what people who have the power in the early 21st century to create urban spaces are thinking cities should be like. The fact that HafenCity’s ecological virtues are stressed in its official literature is pretty significant. So is its relatively modest density. No one officially connected with HafenCity has ever seriously proposed building really tall buildings there or recreating anything like, say, a 19th-century city.

HafenCity’s status as a 21st-century enterprise is manifested in one more way. It may be the product in part of government planning and have all kinds of official backing and financial support, but it is also a speculative real-estate venture. It’s supposed to be a commercial success. Thus, it’s created an enormous publicity apparatus. There’s an elaborate Website and two on-site information centers, where one can begin a free tour or choose from a great many beautifully illustrated brochures.¹ Of course, one should view advertising for HafenCity like any other advertising, somewhat skeptically. I don’t quite know what to make of the fact that the substantial academic literature on HafenCity describes the place just as positively as the advertising.²

I must admit that in some ways I found HafenCity mildly disappointing, chiefly perhaps because on weekdays at any rate it seemed rather empty. It doesn’t feel at all like an inner-city neighborhood in a major city. The Hamburg metropolitan area has a population of something like five million and has several dense, bustling, and complicated inner-city neighborhoods.³  These are all quite different in feel from HafenCity, which has a population of something like 3700 in its two square kilometers. HafenCity is also the location of approximately 14,000 jobs, but the other inner-city neighborhoods host commerce too, and the figure given for HafenCity apparently includes jobs in the long-existing Speicherstadt.⁴ Let me add that HafenCity’s emptiness has something to do with the fact that it’s not even half finished. Only approximately one of its two square kilometers has been built on. Eventually, there are supposed to be two or three times as many inhabitants and jobs. And it needs to be said that on weekends HafenCity gets a bit more crowded, as numerous mostly local tourists visit HafenCity’s largest building, the Elbphilharmonie, or go on guided tours.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder whether HafenCity wouldn’t feel a bit more, well, urban (that is, bustling) had it been built to a higher density. The apartment buildings are mostly only six or seven stories tall, and they do not touch each other except at their base. I’ll admit that I may be imposing a personal aesthetic taste that makes no sense in the context. It might have been difficult to get world-class architects to participate in a project with buildings that weren’t quite separate from each other. It’s also possible that a denser project might have found it harder to pass the ecological tests that HafenCity set for itself. Furthermore, it’s easy to imagine that there wouldn’t have been as much of a market for larger apartment buildings. Away from its center, Hamburg is not a particularly dense place. The city of Hamburg has approximately 2400 people per square kilometer, and the Hamburg region is even more spread out.⁵ Hamburg’s most prestigious districts (for example, around the Alstersee) are definitely not built to a very high density. They consist of smallish apartment buildings and quite a few single-family houses. There aren’t very many high-rise residential buildings in Hamburg. The modest, ecologically sound buildings of HafenCity fit Hamburg pretty well. Let me add that plans for some of the as yet un-built-on areas along the Elbe show taller buildings.

I still couldn’t resist contrasting HafenCity with the Speicherstadt, just to its north.

The Speicherstadt, built at the end of the 19th century, was claimed to be (and probably really was) the world’s largest warehouse district. The Speicherstadt, which consists mostly of two rows of enormous buildings on both sides of a canal, separates the Altstadt from the old port. It is still one of the world’s most distinctive places. It was constructed at the one time in Hamburg’s long history when the city, the largest port in continental Europe’s most powerful country, could be said to have taken on elements of “world-city” status. It was the world’s 20th largest city in 1900 and 18th largest in 1914.⁶ Its size and status were connected with Germany’s pre-World-War-I effort to build a major empire in Africa and the Pacific. A huge number of goods were flowing through Hamburg’s port. The Speicherstadt was built to support this trade. It’s truly an amazing place in a way that HafenCity, as a physical entity, really isn’t.

It needs to be added that, like Germany’s other big cities, Hamburg, even without HafenCity’s ecologically sound features, would seem to most Americans like a rather “green” place.

There is plenty of healthy inner-city housing. Public transit, consisting of integrated U-Bahn, S-Bahn, regional rail, and bus routes, is excellent. Most lines have services at regular (often five- or ten-minute) intervals until late in the evening. The elevated portions of the U-Bahn, like their counterparts in Berlin and Vienna, look like the “els” in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia but are mysteriously much quieter for reasons that I wish I understood.

Sidewalks are generally well-maintained. Cyclists are catered to admirably, with spaces on sidewalks or lanes in streets that almost never put cyclists at risk of being doored (the pedestrianization of bicycling does make speed difficult, however).

Drivers are almost always respectful of pedestrians and cyclists. There are also nearly continuous walking/bicycling paths around Hamburg’s inner-city lake, the Alstersee, and along the Elbe downstream from Hamburg; these paths are jammed on weekends and busy on weekdays.

It is true that there are freeways and major highways in Hamburg that can be enormously overcrowded and horribly polluted by diesel fumes, but official policy in recent years has leaned in favor of restricting car use, and Hamburg is generally a comfortable place for anyone preferring to live a life that has little to do with automobiles.

HafenCity is different from the rest of Hamburg. It’s newer. It’s on an island in the Elbe rather than inland. And the relationship of building to street to non-motorized-vehicle right-of-way in HafenCity is different than elsewhere. HafenCity is also far less bustling than certain other inner-city neighborhoods and has the controlled feel of most of the world’s newly created urban districts. I suspect, though, that it would be difficult to prove that HafenCity is substantially sounder ecologically than the rest of Hamburg even though this is one of its major claims to fame.

I had been in Jakarta only once before, in 1998. I concluded then that Jakarta was just about the most pedestrian-unfriendly city on earth. Many of its roads had only the narrowest of cracked sidewalks—and carried mind-bogglingly huge amounts of traffic most of which consisted of incredibly loud and polluting two-stroke motorcycles. In several cases the narrow sidewalks were bordered by unspeakably dirty canals on one side and overcrowded roadways on the other and seemed almost absurdly dangerous.⁷ Numerous streets even in the central city actually had no sidewalks at all, or else had sidewalks that had been so completely taken over by vendors that one had little choice but to walk in the roadway. Crossing streets was extremely difficult. Drivers never yielded to pedestrians, and there were hardly any traffic lights or bridges. There were naturally very few people walking anywhere, even though motor-vehicle ownership in Jakarta was not very high. Curiously, population density in the city was rather substantial, and there were numerous very tall buildings, but access to these buildings was intended to be mostly by vehicle. It was very odd that Southeast Asia’s largest urban area was so automobile-oriented, but that was just the way it was.

I’ve since learned that much of the autocentric planning in Jakarta can be attributed to the actions of the government of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, who ruled in the years between Indonesia’s independence after World War II and 1967.⁸ Sukarno had actually been trained as an engineer and had worked for a year as an architect, and he brought to politics a set of strong prejudices about cities, which he was able to act on after becoming a near dictator in 1957. Sukarno’s ideas can fairly be termed Corbusien. He was absolutely obsessed with turning Jakarta into a modern-looking city, that is, one with tall buildings and wide highways. He is said to have been particularly proud of Jakarta’s Semanggi cloverleaf highway interchange (“the first in Southeast Asia”). It was Sukarno who presided over the construction of a network of mostly elevated toll highways in the Jakarta area, and who insisted on bulldozing Jalan⁹ Thamrin and its extension Jalan Sudirman through the center of the city, and it was he who pushed the construction of skyscrapers and what in effect was a new CBD in South Jakarta.

In Sukarno’s imagination, all of these new urban features represented progress and modernity, and their presence made Jakarta a modern city. It’s worth remembering that the period of Sukarno’s reign was the 1950s and 1960s. This was the era when superhighways were being pushed through the centers of American cities and when Brasília was being built. Pedestrian needs played virtually no role in much of the urban planning of this era, and they certainly didn’t in Jakarta, even though Jakarta, unlike U.S. cities or Brasília, was the kind of place where only a minority of the population could afford a private car.

Sukarno was effectively deposed in 1967 and replaced by a military officer, Suharto, who ruled until 1998. The Suharto government apparently concerned itself much less with urban matters, and local officials had more power. But it’s not clear that there was any great change in priorities. Jakarta kept growing, and it continued to rely almost exclusively on automobiles. The unfortunate consequences of Jakarta’s excessive reliance on motor vehicles were no secret. Air pollution levels in Jakarta were sometimes astonishingly high, and traffic jams were so frequent that it could take hours to travel a few kilometers. There was also the ever-present issue that the poor had limited mobility in a city built for cars. Plans to build a subway line were formulated at least as long ago as the early 1990s, but they were never implemented, and a financial crisis in 1997-1998 put them on hold indefinitely.

In the years after my 1998 trip, however, as in many other urban areas, there was a real change in what was felt to be desirable. The government has been taking quite a number of steps to alleviate the problems of automobile dependence.

[1] Old train lines were revived. The KRL Jabodetabek is a regional, mostly electrified rail system that dates back to the Dutch colonial era. It had so deteriorated and was felt by the government to be so antique that it was actually closed completely in the 1960s. It reopened in 1972 (long before the current revival of interest in reducing the role of the automobile in urban transportation), and the government has gradually modernized the system in the years since. It elevated some of the central-city tracks in the 1980s. It renovated stations. It acquired new (or used) Japanese rolling stock, and it insisted that passengers use electronic tickets. And it recently (2017) added a branch to the Airport.¹⁰ These days, trains on the major lines run every few minutes for most of the day. The KRL Jabodetabek (like its counterpart in Mumbai) resembles a rail rapid-transit system in its service frequency.[¹¹ It does, however, betray its origins as an ordinary railroad. There are grade crossings. Tracks are shared with intercity passenger and freight trains. And the system doesn’t quite go where a modern rapid-transit line would. It only skirts the edge of the CBD and spends a great deal of time in industrial areas.¹² There are roughly 850,000 passengers a day. This is an impressive number, but perhaps not so high when you consider that the Jakarta area (Jabodetabek) has a population of something like 30,000,000.¹³

[2] A large BRT system was established. The government also built TransJakarta (sometimes spelled Transjakarta), opening the first line in 2004, and adding numerous new lines in the years since. TransJakarta is claimed to be the world’s largest bus rapid transit system. It now consists of more than 230 km of routes on thirteen separate corridors.

There are also a number of feeder routes (which appear not to be counted in the statistics). On most of the corridor routes, bus lanes and stations are in the center of major roads. Passengers prepay. Stations are sheltered from the elements.

Transfers are free. Many of the buses use natural gas. Service on the major lines is frequent, and stations include countdown clocks. The system is quite impressive and makes getting around Jakarta by public transit enormously easier than it was in 1998. TransJakarta is generally considered a great success and its expansion has enjoyed considerable political support. But it needs to be said that there does not seem to be signal preemption, and red lights definitely slow the system down.

An additional problem is that some of the corridors are not fully separated from the main roadway. Only the original route 1 has acquired even “silver status” from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. TransJakarta has also evidently not been very successful in luring people out of cars. There are approximately 450,000 passengers a day, which does not seem like a huge number when you consider that the Jakarta proper (to which TransJakarta is limited) has a population of more than 10,000,000.¹⁴ That is, many smaller BRT systems in (mostly) smaller cities (for example, those in Bogotá, Guangzhou, Mexico City, Istanbul, and Curitiba) attract far more passengers.

[3] Construction of a subway and an LRT line was begun. After several earlier attempts that ended in failure, the government has recently finally begun to build a modern rail transit system. The initial segment, from Plaza Indonesia in the CBD to the southern suburbs, is scheduled to open in 2019, and an extension north to Kota Tua and a second, east-west line are supposed to follow. The CBD portions of the line will be in subway. This “MRT” will be joined by an “LRT” line (which, despite the label, will apparently have its own right-of-way). The first part of this, in northeastern Jakarta, is supposed to open before the Asian Games in August 2018, and it too will be extended, first toward the city center, where it will meet the subway, and then in several directions at once.¹⁵

[4] There have been some traffic restrictions. Motorcycle traffic has been restricted on some roads at some times of day. And. of course. the TransJakarta lanes are in theory closed to ordinary traffic.

It could actually be argued that,  even if modal share remains modest, Jakarta has become a place with a fairly large amount of reasonable-quality public transit and that, within a couple of years, it will have quite a bit more (see map).

I spent a few days in Jakarta in mid-March. I’ll gladly concede that my twenty-year-old memories may not be altogether reliable, but I had the sense that things really have changed, at least to a limited extent. Sidewalks in central Jakarta are still pretty empty, but there seemed to be a few more pedestrians than in the past, many of whom were on their way to or from TransJakarta stations. The stations come along approximately every kilometer, so walking is often needed to get to destinations. The building of BRT stations in the middle of many major streets has an additional advantage: station bridges can also be used for crossing streets. Many of the bridges even come with elevators, although I noticed that some of these are broken. Most passengers seem to avoid them. Of course, a bridge every kilometer constitutes a fairly ungenerous street-crossing provision!

The sidewalks may get a little more use than was the case twenty years ago, but there isn’t much sign that they are any safer or more pleasant to use. Sidewalks are narrow, and adjoin traffic lanes. Surfaces are often cracked or missing. Vendors sometimes block the way. Motorcyclists feel free to invade any sidewalk at any time.

Furthermore, it is still not easy to cross streets with no bridges, even at corners with traffic lights, as drivers of turning vehicles do not feel they need to stop for pedestrians. Many Jakartan pedestrians tend to slither across streets, expecting that, if they walk slowly, drivers will miss them. This does not feel very safe to me, or, it seems, to most Jakartans. The majority of those willing to cross busy highways through moving traffic appear to be young men. I did come across a couple of actual pedestrian signals in the tourist area Kota Tua, but drivers were ignoring them.

There are still hardly any special provisions for pedestrians. The OpenStreetMap database’s pedestrian facilities categories show very little except paths in some of the few parks. It misses paths in kampung, however.¹⁶

There are, it must be said, a few streets—side streets off the major roads, streets in Glodok, the old Chinatown, and, arguably, some of the streets in kampung—which work more or less like traditional Western big-city streets, where shops and housing offer easy pedestrian access. But even on these streets, shops and residential buildings often have parking facilities. There is not much expectation in Jakarta that anyone will walk anywhere.

None of this is a secret to people in Jakarta, and there have been some grassroots protests. A new group—the Jakarta Pedestrian Coalition (Koalisi Pejalan Kaki)—has been trying to change conditions.¹⁷ This group has been quite successful at generating publicity, which is an important first step. It’s not clear, however, that it’s managed to change conditions.¹⁸

This jibes completely with the well-known recent study in which physical activity was measured for 111 countries.¹⁹ Indonesia came in last.

The disappointing ridership figures for TransJakarta are sometimes blamed on middle-class reluctance to use public transport, and it’s likely that there is much truth here. But surely the poor pedestrian environment, which makes it difficult to walk to and from the stations, is a factor as well. Public transit can’t live up to its potential if the stations are only marginally accessible.

I did come across one event that I found startling and delightful. On Sunday mornings, Jalan Thamrin and Jalan Sudirman, except for the TransJakarta lanes, are closed to traffic for several kilometers, including the stretch through Jakarta’s CBD.

There must have been at least a hundred thousand people enjoying this event on the Sunday I was there. Most were walking or hanging around, but there were some cyclists and runners as well. There were also food vendors, advocates of various causes, and buskers. The latter included dozens of people dressed as characters from Javan traditional tales, as well as a great many musicians, most of whom were presenting what seemed to be Indonesian pop, but I came across a group of two violinists and one guitar player who were doing pretty well by Pachelbel’s canon.

Jakarta’s street closures were of course inspired by Latin America’s ciclovías. They go back to 2002, although they have become more common and regular in recent years. The event that I attended seemed to this perhaps naïve observer like an almost perfect manifestation of one of stated goals of the original ciclovías in Bogotá: to encourage people of different social strata to enjoy public space together.²⁰ It was an infinitely happier use of public space than Jakarta’s norm, in which public space mostly involves pedestrians working their way gingerly along noisy, irregular sidewalks and across uncrossable streets.

The most common phrase for ciclovía in Indonesian seems to be the English “car free day,” which tells you something: this event is an import. The “car free day” is an astonishing vision of a very different Jakarta. The coach turns back into a pumpkin at 11 sharp, however. This felt rather depressing to me. Perhaps it does to Jakartans as well.

It’s rather curious that in Southeast and East Asia, it’s generally the richer urban areas—Hong Kong, Singapore, and the cities of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan (in something like that order)—that have become the most transit-oriented and pedestrian-friendly, and the poorer urban areas—those of Burma and Indochina, for example—that have remained most reliant on private motor-vehicle transit, even though private motor-vehicle transit is surely out of reach of many of the inhabitants of the poorer cities.  Jakarta’s efforts to become a modern city have left it much more like the latter places than most Indonesians would probably want to acknowledge. Its transit share remains low, and its pedestrian infrastructure is pretty awful. Jakarta is still one of the world’s least pedestrian-friendly cities. The rotten pedestrian environment of course sets up a feedback loop with the low transit share. Sukarno was wrong. In 2018 anyway, being modern does not seem to mean wide roads and cloverleafs and tall buildings that you can get to only in a car. It appears to mean allowing automobiles only a modest place.

Will current efforts to add better transit to Jakarta change things? It’s easy to imagine that they will help the transit dependent and the minority of middle-class people who prefer taking public transit. But has there been a case where an urban area in recent times has gone from having a low transit share to having a high one? I’m not sure there has. It’s not easy to change well-entrenched cultural habits that define transit use and urban walking as low-prestige, or to alter a society where a huge proportion of the built environment is designed exclusively for automobiles. Maybe the best that one could hope for is a bit of change around the edges, but even that is likely to happen if and only if the government keeps supporting the building of rail transit—and maybe above all if it begins to devote serious energy into disciplining automobile drivers and improving pedestrian infrastructure.

I spent a few days in Panama City at the end of January. I had been there only once before, in 2012, before the Metro opened. It’s a surprisingly distinctive place.

Panama City’s most astonishing feature is surely its skyline, one of the world’s most impressive. Curiously, more than 80% of its tallest buildings are residential structures. Among cities of the Western Hemisphere, only New York, Chicago, Miami, and Toronto have a larger number of tall (> 150 m) apartment buildings, and Panama City has so many new towers under construction that it could easily pass Miami and Toronto soon. Here’s a chart of tall residential buildings in the whole world, compiled from data assembled by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat:

Consider, for the moment, how extraordinary Panama City’s position is. Its urban area has a population of only a million and half. It’s smaller than every single one of the other urban areas on this list with the exception of resort town Pattaya, in many cases by an order of magnitude. All the urban areas with anything like as many tall residential buildings as Panama City are much larger. Panama City is definitely punching above its weight when it comes to tall apartment buildings.²¹

Why were all these buildings built? The reasons are not completely clear. Many of the apartment dwellers are no doubt well-off Panamanians of whom there are quite a few,²² but it’s quite clear that a large proportion of the units are only occupied part time and that a good number of the inhabitants of the buildings are foreigners. Numerous Latin Americans feel a need to acquire property in a relatively safe foreign country, and Panama fits the bill. Like the United States, Panama uses the U.S. dollar as its currency; it lacks burdensome foreign-exchange controls; and it’s felt to have a reasonably stable political system. Even more than the United States, it welcomes well-off part-time foreign residents, including many North American retirees. Furthermore, costs are lower than in the United States (Panama City has sometimes been characterized as a cheaper alternative to Miami for Latin Americans in search of foreign real estate). Also, there’s no getting around the fact that the Panamanian authorities are generally considered not to be particularly interested in how well-off people have acquired their fortunes. Some people say that Panama City’s apartment buildings were built at least in part with profits from the Latin American drug trade, or with the proceeds of various kinds of corruption. I have no way to judge the accuracy of this widely-held view.

It’s actually quite difficult to get precise data on who’s living in the apartment buildings, since the Panamanian census doesn’t seem to gather data at anything comparable to the U.S. census’s tract or block level and only provides very basic socioeconomic information. The most detailed easily available data are for corregimientos (districts). Corregimientos in Panama City cover too large an area to be useful in looking closely at the apartment districts alone, but it’s easy enough to get a good sense of Panama City’s social geography from these data. The apartment buildings are nearly all located close to the Pacific, in predominantly upper-middle class neighborhoods (see the map).

You’d think when you see Panama City’s skyline that the streets of the city would feel a bit like those in Manhattan. They don’t. The buildings are surprisingly automobile-oriented. They come with a great deal of parking, and there’s bumper-to-bumper traffic for much of the day on some of the streets in the apartment districts. There are sidewalks just about everywhere, but they’re not very well maintained, and they’re generally not all that busy, although they’re not empty either. At corners, sidewalk users run into the usual Third World problems. Some drivers simply won’t stop for pedestrians no matter what. Crossing streets on foot isn’t something you do casually.

Many of the commercial areas in the apartment districts are quite suburban in form too, with huge amounts of parking. There are several large vertical shopping centers. There is also a major inland commercial center along the Via España in El Cangrejo, which has a form I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. There is a reasonable amount of space for both pedestrians–and parking.

The conversion of this street from a very wide two-way boulevard into a slightly narrower one-way street, which occurred when the subway was being built, was what allowed this form to be created. Dogmatic urbanists would hate the accommodation to automobiles, but merchants on the street would probably argue that there was no choice. El Cangrejo is certainly the closest thing Panama City possesses to a traditional middle-class residential and shopping district; it’s also a major banking center. It’s a reasonably congenial place for pedestrians, except at street corners. It’s not a coincidence that most of Panama City’s mid-range hotels are located nearby and that this area is the only place in Panama City where tall apartment buildings have been built away from the coast.

Panama City does provide pedestrians with one truly outstanding experience. There’s a recreational path along the Bay which (like the highway it parallels) is known as the Cinta Costera. The Cinta Costera path takes you from the Punta Pacifica, where many of the high-rise apartments are located, to Panama’s 17th-century core, the Casco Viejo. Because of the curve in the Bay, you can see from one end to the other. The views are really wonderful. The Cinta Costera path gets quite a bit of use, which varies enormously depending on the time of day and the day of the week. In the morning, the path seems to be populated almost entirely by more or less serious runners, cyclists, and walkers.

At midday it’s nearly empty except for a few foreigners. Late in the afternoon, the path gets crowded with people of all sorts, and on weekend afternoons it can feel as though all Panama City is there.

It’s a successful space, but I don’t want to exaggerate its virtues. It’s only 4 km long (and I suspect that the distance between kilometers 3 and 4 is short). It’s also not too far from the Cinta Costera highway, and you can hear traffic every second.²³

Panama City also offers another high-quality walking and bicycling experience, along the Amador Causeway. This causeway came into being as a breakwater for the Panama Canal’s Pacific entrance. Because it adjoins the low-density former Canal Zone, the Amador Causeway is not easily accessible to as many people as the Cinta Costera, but it still attracts numerous users, especially on weekends.

Panama City’s Metro is also quite impressive considering Panama City’s modest size. It’s true that the Metro itself is not that long—16 km, of which 7 km  are in a subway—but a second 22 km line is under construction, and additional lines are planned. The current route runs from Albrook (the site of Panama City’s major bus terminal and what is said to be Latin America’s largest shopping mall),

through the old downtown around the 5 de Mayo Plaza, then along Via España through El Cangrejo, and finally on an elevated line north/northeast through some heavily populated, relatively poor neighborhoods.

Trains are short—only three cars long—but the stations were built to handle five-car trains, and it’s planned that they will when Line 2 opens. Trains operate quite frequently during the day, and are often jammed. Approximately 260,000 persons a day have been riding Panama City’s Metro, which isn’t bad for a small system in a city that is not exactly gigantic.

For a medium-sized city in a medium-income country, Panama City has acquired an impressive set of modern big-city features. I wouldn’t say that it always feels like a traditional big city when you’re down on the ground—but neither do most other Third World cities. Their major growth period occurred when accommodating automobiles seemed more important than anything else, and autocentric habits have become thoroughly embedded in the structure of class privilege. It wouldn’t be easy to reverse this.

 

I’d been in Bangkok half a dozen times since the 1990s and had come to know the city moderately well. Although it’s a large, pleasantly complicated place, with a rich traditional culture and a distinctive approach to modernization, Bangkok had never been one of my favorite cities: it was just too automobile-oriented. Considerable investment in new rail transit lines in recent years, however, encouraged a revisit, and I spent several days there in mid-January. In this post, I describe my reaction, after a bit of background history.

One key to understanding Bangkok is that in modern times it has always had a much weaker city-planning apparatus than some other Southeast Asian cities, notably Singapore. There has been a strong preference for doing as much as possible by private enterprise.

Thus, as Bangkok grew enormously between the years of the Vietnam War and the 1990s, it invested practically nothing in public transport. The expectation was that most urban transportation would be by automobile, or by privately-run bus companies. Automobile—and motorcycle—ownership grew to high levels, especially given Thailand’s status as a middle-income country. The city expanded horizontally and ended up covering an enormous area, something like 3000 sq km. Thai cultural preference for single-family houses was a factor here. (A complication is that Bangkok’s large Sino-Thai population—at least according to a widely believed stereotype—has traditionally preferred living at greater density.) An elaborate network of mostly elevated expressways was built by the Expressway Authority of Thailand, some in partnership with private enterprise, but, as in so many places, limited-access roads could not come close to keeping up with demand, and traffic jams and high levels of air pollution became features of Bangkok life. Furthermore, because motorcycles with two-stroke engines made up such a large percentage of vehicles, noise levels on Bangkok’s major urban roads were among the highest in the world.

The widespread realization that road-building alone could not solve Bangkok’s mobility problems led to a decision in the 1980s to add rail transit. The early history of Bangkok’s modern rail transit lines, however, is not pretty. The government preferred to pass on responsibility to private enterprise, at least in part (the State Railway was involved too). The result was two separate failures. The Lavalin Sky Train and the Bangkok Elevated Road and Train System (the “Hopewell project”) both went bankrupt. The latter bankruptcy left Bangkok with a legacy of thousands of concrete columns, which became one of the most distinctive features of its urban landscape. Finally, an elevated railroad run by the Bangkok Mass Transit System (BTS) opened in 1999. It was joined by a subway system operated by the Bangkok Expressway and Metro Public Company Limited (MRT) in 2004 and the elevated Airport Rail Link (run by the State Railway) in 2010.

The first two systems have both been extended since their debut, and further extensions are under construction, mostly elevated. Except for a stretch through Rattanakosin, the oldest part of Bangkok, even the MRT subway has shifted to building only elevated lines. Additional rail lines are planned, including monorail lines to be operated by two additional companies.

The preference for passing as much rail building as possible onto private firms has had consequences. Fares, for example, are pretty high considering that Thailand is not a rich country. You pay by distance on Bangkok’s urban rail system, and travel between the ends of lines can cost nearly $2. Furthermore, while the rail transit lines seem to form a kind of network, there are no free transfers between routes run by different companies or to the privately run bus companies—or, of course, to the motorcycle taxis that often cover a journey’s “last mile.” As a result, it can cost several dollars to cross the city, more than you’d have to pay in New York or Paris. This must have some effect on ridership, which is less than a million in an urban area of perhaps 15,000,000. Bangkok has only to a limited degree become a transit-oriented place.

The peculiar geography of the elevated/subway dichotomy in Bangkok is also connected with Bangkok’s use of private firms to build its rail lines. BTS was the first successful rail-building firm, and it naturally got to build in the busiest, most important places, which happened to be the most pedestrian-oriented parts of the new central business district: along Sukhumvit and Silom Roads, for example, and around the Siam Square shopping malls. The BTS always aimed to build what it called (in English) a “Skytrain”; all its lines are elevated. The MRT concession called for a subway line, and the MRT ended up building for the most part in places where, in many cities, subways would have seemed less necessary: major arterials that have only a modest amount of pedestrian-oriented commerce. It needs to be said that the elevated railroads do not seem to discourage pedestrian traffic very much. The modern trains running on welded rails make very little noise—far less noise than the road traffic—and the quite massive concrete elevated structures in a generally hot city actually may provide a bit of welcome shade.

Despite the city’s autocentric development history, Bangkok seems at first sight to be a “vibrant” place with a healthy pedestrian life. The major commercial streets in the new CBD, as well as in older neighborhoods along the Chao Phraya River like Chinatown and Banglamphu are full of people, modest shops, and street vendors.

Side streets in these parts of the city are often pleasantly crowded too, and so are many commercial centers in the suburbs.

The very substantial fly in the ointment is that it’s so hard to cross streets. Drivers simply won’t yield to pedestrians, even when pedestrians have a green light and drivers are making a turn on a red. There is also an issue when motor traffic emerges from side streets or driveways. Here too drivers expect that sidewalk users will yield. I haven’t been able to locate statistics for Bangkok alone, but it’s telling that Thailand has the world’s second highest rate of automobile fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants.

Of course, casual automobile aggressiveness is a problem throughout the Third World, and it’s not unknown in developed countries (like the United States!), especially in places where there are few pedestrians. But the problem seems most acute in certain large urban areas of the Third World. There are parts of some cities (Delhi and Jakarta, for example) where pedestrians have practically been intimidated out of existence. Bangkok has lots of pedestrians, which makes the awkwardness of pedestrian-motor vehicle interaction all the more problematic.

The marginalization of pedestrians in much of the Third World is no doubt in part a function of the association of automobile ownership in poorer countries with wealth and a certain tendency in these countries for wealth to come with automatic privileges. There is also the issue that widespread automobile ownership is a fairly recent phenomenon and that driving skills are pretty low. The lack of enforcement of the traffic rules in many places is another factor. Then there is the related (and extremely complicated) issue that “rule of law” does not seem to come naturally in certain non-Western countries.

It needs to be said that these things can change. Russian and Italian cities were precarious places for pedestrians not so many years ago. Some combination of enforcement and culture change has made them much more pedestrian-friendly. In Moscow and Rome drivers often stop when pedestrians are approaching crosswalks. In Bangkok and many other Third World cities crosswalks are meaningless and even traffic lights don’t prevent drivers from feeling they have the right of way.

Have things gotten better in Bangkok? They probably have. Red lights are more likely to be obeyed than they were in the 1990s. The ratio of cars to motorcycles seems to have increased. This may have unfortunate consequences in some ways, but on the whole this is a good thing for pedestrians, since motorcycles are noisier and more polluting than cars and since motorcycle riders are far more likely than car drivers to pay no attention to traffic rules (for example, to ride on sidewalks when there’s a traffic jam). Furthermore, government-mandated reductions of lead in gasoline and a shift from two-stroke to four-stroke engines in motorcycles have marginally reduced road noise and air pollution. And, while I haven’t been able to locate figures, many people in Bangkok believe that the growth in rail transit lines has reduced the number of vehicles on the roads despite the continued rise in automobile ownership.

The government, however, has done little for pedestrians. Aware that there’s an issue here, the authorities have cracked down somewhat on sidewalk vendors, who, up to a certain point, actually make sidewalks more interesting for pedestrians, but, so far as I can see, they’ve done nothing to make street crossings less precarious, which is where the real problem lies. Punishing the poor is easier for many governments than disciplining the relatively wealthy (Thailand’s poisonous class-based politics may exacerbate this tendency).

In any case, Bangkok, unlike, say, Singapore or Hong Kong, has made little effort to build walkways of any sort. The “pedestrian facilities” that appear in the OpenStreetMap data base (see map above) consist mostly of paths in Bangkok’s few parks (which can be very crowded);

alleys in the older parts of the city near the Chao Phraya River and footpaths in the anomalous (and still rural) Phrapradaeng Peninsula; overhead crossings over major streets (which almost never have escalators or elevators); a single walkway under the elevated railway in what has become Bangkok’s most important modern shopping district;

and (maybe most distinctive) a certain number of paths along remaining canals. Some of these date back many decades, and, in certain cases (for example, in the eastern part of the city) go on for many kilometers. Others are not very usable for long-distance walking. They feel rather private, are discontinuous, and can bring one too close to badly polluted waterways. However, as the sign in this photo suggests, many canals, with a bit of improvement, could become distinctively Bangkokian and extremely useful pedestrian corridors.

A few canal walkways have been renovated seriously. One is the path (which even contains a lane for bicycles) between Lumphini and Banjakitti Parks, the central city’s two largest public open spaces.

The possibilities of the bicycle, however, have generally been neglected. The government has painted a few bicycle lanes here and there and has built a serious if somewhat useless bicycle track around Suvarnabhumi Airport. It’s also allowed a bikeshare program to be set up. But bicycling just isn’t safe enough to seem practical to most people, and there are few bicycles on Bangkok’s streets.

Bangkok remains a big, serious city that is enormously likeable in many ways, but it remains an extraordinarily difficult place for anyone who wants to walk more than a short distance.

Austin, with a population of just under a million, is now the 11th largest city in the United States.²⁶ Both the city of Austin and its urban area grew by more than 16% between 2010 and 2016. No other U.S. with more than 250,000 people in 2010 grew this much. Austin generally ranks near the top in various measures of the importance of the tech industry too. For, example, in Richard Florida’s ranking of global cities by venture capital investment, Austin ends up between much larger Toronto and Shanghai, and tenth in the United States.²⁷

As it happens, Austin was by far the largest North American city I’d never been to, and I spent three days there just before Christmas.

I was struck by several things:

[1] Pedestrians are not rare in Austin’s downtown. I wouldn’t say that I came across any sidewalks that were really crowded, even at noon on a weekday, but downtown Austin certainly has more pedestrians than, say, the downtowns of much larger Houston and Dallas. The proximity of the University of Texas with its student population of more than 50,000 may be a factor here. So surely is the amount of residential land use in, and on the edge of, downtown (see just below). The large homeless population contributes too, although I’ll bet the city fathers would rather that no one noticed that.

[2] There’s a huge amount of new mid- and (especially) high-rise residential construction in central Austin.

There are numerous residential buildings over 100 m tall, including the not yet quite completed Independent, which will soon replace its neighbor the Austonian as the highest American residential tower west of the Mississippi. Austin may be the only big city in the United States whose downtown skyline is dominated by residential buildings:

These new buildings are most definitely not TODs; they all come with a great deal of parking. It’s not altogether clear that a, say, fifty-story building whose major entrance is a ramp to a multi-floor parking facility necessarily makes much of a contribution to downtown “vibrancy,” but it’s absolutely true that an awful lot of people are, at least in theory, attracted to the idea of “downtown living” in Austin (prices are high for Texas), and you do see at least a few apartment-dwellers walking around the central city.

[3] There’s quite an impressive set of paved and unpaved “hiking/biking” trails stretching along both sides of the Colorado River of Texas, which lies just south of downtown (see map, above). On a cool Sunday afternoon, these trails were much busier than any downtown sidewalk. I was struck (as I was while visiting the Atlanta BeltLine the previous month) that most trail users were walking. Runners and cyclists were a minority. This is definitely not the case on recreational trails in North American cities where neighborhood walking is commoner.

I was particularly impressed by the pedestrian-only bridges and walkways over the River, one of which—the Pfluger Bridge—has become a multi-use meeting place.

Of special note are two trails that run (or will run) along creeks that pass through downtown into the Colorado and that have a history of causing floods. The first trail runs along Shoal Creek. A rough path along this creek has been there for a while. It’s narrow, winding, irregular, and perhaps not very safe. In so far as I could see, the Shoal Creek Trail is little used. But its lowest portion is being improved radically, and this may change things. Waller Creek, on the eastern side of downtown, is scheduled to get an even more ambitious recreational path, as well as a series of parks.

[4] Austin has had a passenger rail line since 2010: a 51 km line between the eastern edge of downtown and the city’s northern suburbs.

On weekdays, Capital MetroRail (as it’s called) provides fairly reasonable (roughly) half-hour service during rush hours and hourly service at midday. It also provides hourly or better service on Friday and Saturday evenings. (But note that most trains don’t go all the way to the end of the line; the northernmost station in particular has little service.) MetroRail uses self-propelled cars on an only modestly upgraded single-track line, and it was built fairly cheaply, for something like $100,000,000. Its supporters note that rush-hour trains are crowded (and that as a result extra runs will soon be added). Its detractors point out that only something like 2900 passengers a day use the system, and that per-passenger subsidies are of necessity enormous. The ride seemed pleasant enough when I took it, but no one would say that the off-peak trains were crowded. There was free wifi—and two longish waits at sidings for trains going in the other direction. The two stations nearest downtown have an impressive number of mid-rise apartment buildings either just opened or under construction that, it’s claimed, were built because of the presence of MetroRail. I didn’t see crowds of people walking between the train stations and these buildings, however.

Austin probably provides the closest thing to what one might loosely call a traditional urban lifestyle that Texas offers—at least close to downtown, walking is an option—and it’s clear that this has quite a lot of appeal for many people.

Away from this rather small zone, most people in Austin, as in the rest of urban Texas (as well as in much of the United States), apparently lead completely autocentric lives. Despite the good work of Capital Metro, only approximately 4% of the population of the city of Austin took public transit to work in 2016. Downtown’s eastern edges are given over almost entirely to parking lots (plus a couple of homeless shelters and—incongruously—several new hotels). And, at rush hour, the arterials leading out of downtown and the bridges over the Colorado are jammed with traffic. When it comes to urbanism, Austin is on the whole not quite as weird as some of its inhabitants would like to think it is.

Hong Kong is perhaps best known in the world of urban studies for its extraordinarily high transit share. Public transit accounts for a larger percentage of journeys in Hong Kong than in any other city in the world.²⁸ Something like 77.6% of the employed population used transit to get to work in 2016.²⁹ Approximately 4.7 million people board MTR (Mass Transit Railway) trains every day, and an additional five million or so use buses, light-rail lines, trams, and ferries.

Hong Kong’s pedestrian facilities are as distinctive and impressive as its transit system.³⁰ The central parts of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, with their extraordinarily dense housing stock, intense street-level commerce, and excellent public transit, are among the most pedestrian-oriented places on earth, and the newer, somewhat less dense housing developments away from the center, despite their tower-in-a-park designs, are fairly pedestrian-friendly as well. The chief problem that pedestrians face in central Hong Kong is that the sidewalks can be so crowded that it isn’t easy to walk fast. There is also the issue that pedestrians are expected to be fairly obedient when it comes to crossing streets. Many sidewalks are fenced to prevent jaywalking, and, since Asian traffic engineers are in charge, the wait for traffic lights to change can be maddeningly long.

The most extraordinary pedestrian facilities in Hong Kong, however, are actually not in the densest sections of the city at all but in the substantial hilly regions that cover a large part of the urban area. A little history is necessary to understand this. The British colonial government owned essentially all the land from the moment of its inception in 1841, and the government in place in the years since the 1997 Handover has not altered the system in any substantial way.³¹ Since a large portion of government revenue consists of income from its ownership of the land, there is no incentive to change. Non-governmental land “ownership” in Hong Kong involves long-term leases, and these leases bring in an enormous amount. Still, the leases have not been granted casually. Land use has been as tightly controlled as anywhere in the world. Hyper-capitalist Hong Kong has had an extraordinarily socialist system of land-use governance in the 175 years of its existence. A basic element of this governance is that—except in the hilly area behind the Central district—high-density building has generally been allowed only on flat (or at least fairly flat) land, of which there is relatively little, especially on Hong Kong Island. The government has added enormously to the stock of flat land through its almost continual landfills, but the majority of land in Hong Kong is still hilly and for the most part is not built on. Much of this land is given over to parks, and most of the rest is used for reservoirs, cemeteries, transmission towers, and other land uses that do not require frequent, intense human presence.

The emptier parts of Hong Kong are as a result laced with walking trails and lightly used roads. It is very likely that no large city in the world has as much recreational land close to densely built-up urban land as Hong Kong. The map below gives some sense of how this works. The light grey lines indicate roads. The green lines show links that are classified in the OpenStreetMap database as pedestrian facilities.³² In the heavily built-up parts of the city (for example, along the northern shore of Hong Kong Island) these include paths in urban parks, pedestrianized streets (of which there are quite a few), and overhead walkways (which are especially numerous in the Central district). In the less built-up areas (for example, in the central part of Hong Kong Island), the green lines mostly indicate trails of various sorts. These range from older paved roads that have been closed to traffic to rough dirt paths in the woods. As always, there can be a certain ambiguity about whether a rough trail is “established” enough to map; some of the suspiciously isolated bits of trail probably reflect cartographers’ uncertainty. A minor complication is that the trails are supplemented by lightly used roads that are perfectly comfortable for walking or running. The fact that post-Handover government agencies have paved some of the trails has made the distinction between “road” and “trail” still harder to discern.

The “country trails,” footpaths, and pedestrian-friendly roads of the lightly populated parts of Hong Kong are wonderful, but there are a couple of problems with them. The first is that they are (by Hong Kong standards anyway) in the country, often what seems like a long way from both residential districts and MTR stations. Of course, this is one of their virtues too, but their remoteness makes them somewhat inaccessible to many potential users. The second problem is that many—maybe most—of these facilities are anything but flat. Some, in fact, are extraordinarily steep. For runners and hikers who want serious exercise—and for those who appreciate the views you get on the trails (such as that shown in the photo along the top of this page)—the trails’ steepness is an advantage, but, clearly, not everyone is going to want to manage ten and fifteen percent grades.

Hong Kong’s Leisure and Cultural Services Department in conjunction with other government agencies has consequently been putting most of its energy in the 21st century into creating pedestrian facilities that complement the old country trails and avoid some of their weaknesses. It has been systematically creating walkways called “promenades” along some of Hong Kong’s waterfronts. The Chinese term for “promenade”—海濱花園 [Mandarin pronunciation: hăibīn huāyuán], which means (approximately) “waterfront garden”—is perhaps more descriptive than the (slightly odd) English term, or at least the first part of it is: the promenades all follow coastlines. Thus, they are mostly quite flat. Many adjoin residential areas, and many are close to MTR stations. Thus, they are easily accessible to more people than the “country trails.” They are, in short, much like many of the other waterfront recreational trails that have been built in cities throughout the world over the last fifty years.

The promenades (again like many of the world’s other new pedestrian facilities) reflect the geography of easy opportunity. They have been built where it was easy and cheap to build, which along Hong Kong’s waterfront has meant either in conjunction with landfill projects or in areas where old port or industrial facilities have closed. Thus, the promenades can be somewhat discontinuous. For example, along the north shore of Hong Kong Island, there are promenades in Sun Yat-sen Park; in the new park near the Star Ferry Terminal; around the Convention Center; north of Victoria Park; along Quarry Bay; and along Aldrich Bay (see map).

The lack of continuity of course doesn’t matter as much as it would for, say, a rail line; there are good pedestrian links between these separate promenades. But someone attempting to run or walk along the whole north shore of Hong Kong Island would at least be forced to slow down considerably between promenades. The authorities are of course aware of the problem and have plans to fill the holes eventually, but there isn’t much to be done when the intervening spaces are in use by industries or port facilities.³³ No one has ever accused the Hong Kong government of failing to respect the needs of its successful commercial enterprises.

Many of the promenades are carefully designed. The Kwun Tong Promenade, for example, is sited in an area once used in part to process recycled paper. Sculptures at the end of the promenade were created to suggest paper stacks. Actually, just about all the newer promenades include not only artwork but also pavements, benches, and fences that suggest that a designer has been at work. The promenades also pretty much all provide stunning views as well. A brief look around from just about any spot would suggest that you couldn’t be anywhere else in the world but Hong Kong.

Walking and running are not the only activities that occur on the promenades. There is plenty of space for sitting, and it gets used. There is also room for traditional Chinese group activities like stretching and dancing. And you see numerous fishermen along those coastal fences.

The promenades can be crowded, but they are surprisingly orderly. Like much else in Hong Kong, they are subject to rather elaborate rules. Smoking, dogs, and bicycles are all generally forbidden, and the rules are usually obeyed. There is a separate dog park at one end of the Quarry Bay Promenade, and there are apparently a few other dog parks in Hong Kong, but it is probably fair to say that dogs in general are not pampered quite as obsessively in Hong Kong as in, say, the United States.

The fact that bicycles aren’t accommodated is a sore point for serious cyclists. Bicycles aren’t allowed on promenades and most other pedestrian paths, and there has generally been no attempt at all to create bicycle paths in the denser parts of Hong Kong.[7. When you cross the border and go to Shenzhen, one of the first things you notice is how many bicycles there are on the sidewalks. But shiny new Shenzhen has much wider sidewalks than Hong Kong. Like many other Chinese cities, it also has quite a few central-city bicycle lanes.] Perhaps this makes sense; it’s not quite clear where bicycle paths could go. There are “cycling tracks” here and there around Hong Kong, mostly running along streets away from the center, and you certainly see serious cyclists on outer-city roads. Furthermore, the Ma On Shan Promenade (and perhaps other outer-city promenades as well) has a parallel bicycle path. But, generally, pedestrian facilities in Hong Kong are not at all hospitable to cyclists.

Hong Kong’s waterfront promenades, its older and more remote country trails, its central-city overhead walkways, and its ordinary sidewalks make Hong Kong one of the world’s best places for pedestrian life.

The still far-from-complete Atlanta BeltLine is one of the most discussed pieces of non-automotive infrastructure in the country. Two books have been written about its creation.³⁴ A huge number of newspaper stories have also been devoted to it. Furthermore, dozens of organizations and individuals have produced websites that argue for (or occasionally against) the building of the BeltLine. Atlanta BeltLine, Inc. alone has compiled what may be the world’s most elaborate website for a single urban project. A Google search on “Atlanta BeltLine” (in quotes) comes up with 374,000 hits.³⁵

For those who do not know, the BeltLine is a proposed 35-km recreational trail/light-rail line forming an oval around central Atlanta at a distance of very approximately between three and six kilometers from the city center.

The BeltLine is being built mostly in the rights-of-way of abandoned railroads. The project has numerous goals, among which are: to provide recreational space in neighborhoods that need it; to provide non-automotive transportation in a city that’s as dependent on the automobile as any; to encourage redevelopment to focus on the central city rather than the region’s sprawling edge; and to provide some kind of connecting link among the disparate neighborhoods of central Atlanta. The BeltLine’s official motto is “Where Atlanta comes together.”

The two books about the BeltLine are quite different.

The first is by Ryan Gravel, whose 1999 master’s thesis is at the origin of the movement to build the BeltLine (although it turns out that there were earlier proposals that weren’t completely different). Gravel attributes his vision of the BeltLine in part to an epiphany he had while participating in a Georgia Tech year-abroad program that took him to Paris in 1995. He writes as glowing a description of the traditional (that is, the cleaned-up late 19th-/early 20th-century Western European) city as anyone has ever penned.³⁶ I’m sure he wouldn’t claim that building the BeltLine would make Atlanta anything like Paris, but he does imply that it would help alleviate at least a little of what’s wrong with the place: among other faults, its automobile dependence, its sprawl, and conceivably even its social cleavages.

The second book, by Mark Pendergrast, describes the history of the BeltLine in a more conventional way. You wouldn’t think it would take 327 pages to describe the history of an as-yet incomplete project, but the 2017 book is in fact not even quite up to date. BeltLine discussions have been occupying Atlanta’s politicians and journalists since the early 21st century and have been enormously complicated. Perhaps only a description of the travails of New York’s never built Westway would require as many pages.

Part of what Gravel and Pendergrast focus on is the political drama that has accompanied the establishment of the BeltLine. Very few Atlantans are willing to speak publicly against the BeltLine these days, but in the past, as in many places, residents of well-off neighborhoods were sometimes unenthusiastic about making it easier for residents of poorer neighborhoods to move around and either resisted the BeltLine openly or opposed funding. Open opposition may have faded away, but there have still been a number of recurrent issues that have impeded progress. Money has always been a problem.³⁷ Even where the rail properties have been available, they have had to be purchased. Georgia is a conservative state whose legislators have often been quite hostile to its capital city, whose population makes up less than a tenth of the population of the Atlanta urban area and less than 5% of the state’s population. Thus, Atlanta has been pretty much on its own in garnering funding. There are also some fairly substantial structural issues. While parts of the BeltLine right-of-way have been easily available and present few construction issues, there is still rail traffic on others, while, in certain places, massive (and expensive) bridging or tunneling would be required to cross major active rail lines and highways. In addition, MARTA rail stops—set up in the 1970s and 1980s long before anyone had thought of the BeltLine—are almost all far from the four points where the BeltLine is supposed to cross MARTA rail. Then there is the fact that the light-rail component of the BeltLine has never been viewed quite as enthusiastically as the recreational-trail component. Most of the BeltLine’s right-of-way is, as you’d expect of an old railroad alignment, bordered by industrial or formerly industrial land. Population density is generally low. Few important destinations lie along the route. Could one really justify putting rail transit in such a corridor? The fact that Atlanta’s new streetcar line (a 4.3-km loop running mostly east of downtown) has turned out to be slower and less attractive to passengers than had been expected has not helped the case. Finally, there is the painful issue that, despite the BeltLine’s proponents’ hope that the BeltLine would somehow bring Atlantans together, gentrification along the completed Eastside segment of the BeltLine has undermined this goal. People like me would be inclined to argue that gentrification is a sure sign that the BeltLine is a great idea, but it’s been a red flag to some poorer Atlantans, who have probably in any case never been as interested in a recreational trail as their more well-off neighbors across town.

As of late 2017, the BeltLine recreational trail could be said to be maybe a quarter complete, although this very much depends on what one counts. There are finished segments on the Eastside (3.2 km) and in Northwest Atlanta (1.6 km). On the Westside maybe 5 km are open, but these are partly provisional stretches along roads rather than in the BeltLine corridor; a complicating factor is that some connecting Westside trails appear on BeltLine maps. Several additional segments, especially in southern and eastern Atlanta, are under construction (one opened after I’d written this text). There are also some parts of the right-of-way that are available for hiking, but these are still rather rough. Still, it really does seem as though much of the BeltLine recreational trail is well under way, although there remain some sections where intractable issues have prevented even the establishment of a formal construction plan. The projected parallel streetcar route remains very much part of the BeltLine plan, and space for it has been carefully left along some of the completed sections, but there has been absolutely no construction. There hasn’t even been the kind of preliminary engineering work that’s required for major projects these days. No one’s willing to say that the streetcar plan is unlikely ever to come to fruition, but it definitely looks far off.

I went and walked along the completed Eastside Trail, the Eastside stretch of the BeltLine, in late October. I was there twice, at midday and during the late afternoon on a beautiful weekday.

I was struck by several things. The trail is quite wide, fourteen feet (a little more than four meters). It is not striped at any point. The right-of-way is shared by cyclists, runners, and walking pedestrians, as well as a few rollerbladers and skateborders. This was less of a problem than one might have imagined, partly because the trail was not that crowded but chiefly because the proportion of walkers was higher than on any North American recreational trail that I’d ever been on. Cyclists simply weren’t numerous enough to be in a position to make walking uncomfortable, as happens on many shared rights-of-way. I don’t know whether things are different on weekends, but, it should be said that there may be few cyclists in part because the Eastside Trail is rather short, only 3.2 km, and doesn’t have an obvious commuting destination at either end.³⁸ The Eastside Trail is now touted in Atlanta’s tourist literature as an important attraction, but it’s as yet a modest one. (The Westside parts of the trail, in difficult neighborhoods, are not mentioned in the tourist literature, and I was advised by the airport tourist office—the tourist office!—not to visit them alone.)

The question remains of why the BeltLine is of such enormous symbolic import to Atlantans.

An obvious answer is that Atlanta is strikingly short of recreational trails. Even with a completed BeltLine, the Atlanta urban area would have many fewer kilometers of recreational trails than, for example, the much smaller Denver urban area. This is especially significant given Atlanta’s success in attracting highly educated immigrants. For something like the last forty or fifty years, millions of mostly middle-class, highly-educated, urban Americans have spent great amounts of time bicycling, running, and walking. While these activities are possible just about anywhere, they are most comfortable on off-road recreational trails. This is particularly true in a place like Atlanta, where traffic and culture seem to discourage the use of ordinary streets and sidewalks for recreational activity.³⁹ The BeltLine is fulfilling a long-delayed, genuine need.

There is also the fact that the BeltLine can be seen as a distinctive Atlanta-specific facility. Most of the new recreational trails that have captured the imagination of the inhabitants of the places where they’re located—and that have attracted funding most easily—give their users privileged access to distinctive local features. Thus, for example, the Lower Manhattan segments of the Hudson River Greenway provide views of the Hudson, of the Jersey City skyline, and of Lower Manhattan that would not otherwise be easily available, at least along a comfortable, linear, non-automotive facility. Atlanta’s virtues are not the same as New York’s, but the views of the row of skyscrapers along the Peachtree Street NE corridor that one can see from the Eastside Trail are pretty impressive and definitely remind trail users that they’re in Atlanta. Furthermore, while actual rails seem to have been preserved only for one trestle on the Eastside Trail, the trail’s topographic features—the embankments and culverts—connect users to the trail’s past and to Atlanta’s history as a railroad town.

There is also the BeltLine’s vague (and perhaps not completely coherent) goal of somehow bringing Atlanta together and possibly even reducing the area’s social and economic disparities, or at least not making them any worse. Ryan Gravel’s writings have hinted at this aim; official BeltLine literature concurs; and some of the legislation authorizing BeltLine expenditures has encouraged it as well. For example, the tax allocation district established to provide some BeltLine funding was mandated to provide a certain number of affordable housing units to offset BeltLine-related gentrification. Its failure to accomplish this even caused Ryan Gravel to resign from the BeltLine Partnership board in 2016.⁴⁰ It’s certainly arguable that the hope that the BeltLine would do anything to lessen the gap between Atlanta’s richer and poorer neighborhoods in any way except literally was somewhat naive. Other cities—Chicago and Washington, for example—have managed to build vastly larger networks of recreational trails that take one through economically and racially diverse neighborhoods, but, so far as I know, no one’s ever argued that building these trails would lessen the very real divides among them. The trails do encourage movement between these neighborhoods. In Chicago, for example, many middle-class, white people are perfectly willing to use the Lakefront Trail between Hyde Park and the Loop, at least when it’s busy, even though they’d hesitate to walk or bicycle through some of the relatively poor, African-American neighborhoods just across Lake Shore Drive, and it’s possible that residents of the poorer South Side are encouraged by the presence of the Lakefront Trail to explore the North Side. This isn’t a meaningless exchange, but it doesn’t do anything to reduce the social and economic gulf between high- and low-status neighborhoods. It’s a little unclear why the BeltLine has had to take on this enormous—and perhaps impossible—task either. But the BeltLine’s goal of somehow bringing Atlantans together is clearly important to many people and is of course built into its distinctive geography. A circle weaving through very different neighborhoods is itself a powerful symbol, and its appeal is almost certainly one of the reasons that the BeltLine has so much symbolic weight and is actually getting built.