Sidewalks

I'm obsessed with making Caracas's sidewalks useable.



This is what it looks like on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday night in much of Chacao and Las Mercedes, the only rich-ish neighborhoods that have anything like walkable streets. In fact, this is in El Rosal, which is widely credited as the most walkable part of Caracas. So what is wrong with this picture?

1. Yes, those are cars. Yes, that's a sidewalk. I've been asking the omnipresent parking attendants why they leave cars on the sidewalk and most claim that their business has special permission. When I ask to talk to the owner, the owner is never there. I have been telling police that I think this is bollocks, and that they should do something about it. They generally tell me to talk to a supervisor. I'll let you know how that goes. As is now, you can either walk in the street or walk through here:



2. Above, I said it's a sidewalk. But when you look close you can see that there's no significant change in relief between the street and the sidewalk. If anything, the sidewalk is just a poorly built parking area. Poorly built in the sense that the concrete is cheap -- notice all the cracks. (I recently noticed someone had used wood chips as an aggregate in a sidewalk in Chacao. The wood is gradually disappearing, leaving cavities. It looks kind of cool except that the cavities fill with dirt and grime and the concrete will probably endure much less time thanks to this cheap trick and the lack of engineering inspections.)

3. The lighting just doesn't work for pedestrians. Granted, Chacao is doing something about that. On Francisco de Miranda, the main avenue through that municipality, the city installed two-tier streetlamps with lower lights for peds and higher ones for traffic. Good stuff. Only problem is that the installation took months, during which there was no light at all for a long block of the street. During much of that time sidewalks were also closed for construction, so everyone had to walk in the street behind limp caution tape.

I keep thinking about making flyers to try and rally pedestrians to demand their rights...but further research is needed. I don't even know who we should be making our case to. Like I said, I'll keep you posted.

Golf

A couple posts below mention golf courses. Yes, there are golf courses in the middle of Caracas. There is also a military airport, several freeways, a national park, a bunch of non-park forests that wend 10 km uninterrupted by streets, a tremendous military base, a couple spread-out, gated university campuses, and a collection of shopping malls.

These big blocks of land are dedicated to one function -- transportation, defense, shopping. They are fine, in their place, but for those who don't, for example, need to go to the mall or the university or the airport, they are mostly obstructions to urban life, rather than amenities. Since most of the time, most of the people don't need to do any one task, it's best to keep these things either small, like a single city block; or porous, meaning streets go through; or diversified, meaning that the mall might have some offices and housing above the roof; or stashed safely on the edge of the city like a medieval wall, blocking further sprawl.

The best example of this being done right is El Avila National Park and the adjacent Cota Mil freeway, which protect the north side of the city quite well against sprawl. There are no informal "invasions" of land uphill of the Cota Mil, and while there are some invasions of the Avila elsewhere, most remain small, for now. (The only big one is the government's "Socialist City" for which it grabbed 5% of the park and is building an experiment...no word yet on the urbanism of that place, though if past affordable housing projects are a guide, it will be lousy.) Centro Commercial Ciudad Tamanaco is another effort at mixed-use, with its mix of offices, shopping mall and freeway ramps. Sadly, having three land uses, none of which are active after 9 p.m., isn't enough to create an urban neighborhood. Jane Jacobs recommended at least 7; I don't know if there's a magic number but this isn't it. A couple malls, like Tolon that I mentioned below, fit nicely onto a block without destroying the city. And I can think of one example of a porous mall, San Ignacio, which has a street through the short axis of a long rectangle.

There are a bunch of problems with these single-use districts. They make short trips long. They force everyone -- trucks, buses, cars, pedestrians, bikes, horses -- onto just a couple of streets, which have often been turned into freeways. They reduce the space available for housing, contributing to the city's current pattern of having high-rises as the only type of home that's commercially available. The streets are left to themselves, free of storefronts full of curiosities, the glow of living spaces above, and friends chancing to meet. In short, they are the death of cities.

The government has responded with various ideas, none of which get to the heart of the issue. There is a plan to move the population south, off the coast, to the "Eje Orinoco-Apure," the well-watered band of land from the Andes on the west across to the Orinoco Delta on the Atlantic coast. This is based on the false idea that the city is crowded -- it's not, it's just being inefficiently used. Another idea is to convert the golf courses into housing. This could work wonders if the planning were right, as the Caracas Country Club, in particular, is plopped right in the middle of one of the best potentially walkable areas in the city, abutting Chacaito. There is plenty of shopping and work and mass transport; a bunch more housing could be just the ticket. This project, though, is on hold; some say it's because the homes on the golf course are now occupied by supporters of the government -- and they don't want low-income housing any more than the viejo riche. Perhaps the most hopeful program are the community planning councils, which for once give residents a voice in long-term planning of streets and land use. Still, for these to have the best effect, they need to exist in a matrix of visionary, participatory planning for the whole city. Locals won't usually think about the effect of their plans on the broader city unless forced to.

Transport for Caracas

Ken Livingstone was here today, rubbing salt in my wound.

As mayor of London, Livingstone made a very odd deal: Cheap diesel from Venezuela for his city's bus system in return for providing cheap(er) bus fares for the poor of London, pro-Venezuela propaganda on London buses, and urban planning assistance for Caracas. This deal was a foil for all sorts of political types: People said Chavez was nuts to give aid to a country as rich as England, that Livingstone was nuts to help out a guy like Chavez, that this was a brilliant move combining socialist policies from rich and poor, that the whole thing was hogwash. Yawn. For me, any effort to enhance the livability of Caracas is worthy of attention, no matter the political weirdness behind it.

Sadly, it wasn't to be.

Transport for London, the transit agency, supposedly send some people here and set up a little office. Half the diesel fuel, about $7 million worth, did make it to London. But for all the talk, we will never, Livingstone said, never see any report from the planners. That project is over, he said. Instead he will offer a bit of advice himself, with the goal of making this a "first-world city in a first-world country in 20 years." (The Spanish translator initially translated first-world as "first-class"; "first-world" isn't a popular aspiration for Chavistas. It's like telling a hipster that he could be in wearing a nice suit in 20 years.)

So, even though no one will give me $15 million in funding, maybe I should offer a few thoughts. It seems to me that the most central problem in Caracas is the lack of street life. Most streets are dead from dawn to dark, and the rest from dark to dawn. The busiest streets tend to be those connecting Metro stops to nearby shopping malls or major employers. (For some reason the stops never seem to be exactly adjacent to the most important destinations.) The lack of human presence is an auto-alimentación: a positive feedback loop. (Positive in the cybernetic sense, not the value sense.) The lack of people makes it easier for miscreants to prey on the few who are there, to leave piles of trash in the sidewalk, to park on the sidewalk, to design buildings with curb cuts across the sidewalk, and worst of all to eliminate the sidewalk completely. I'll post some pictures soon of the most depressing lack-of-sidewalks situations, but suffice to say they are manifold. (Was that pretentious enough phrasing for you?)

Happily, we have a role model for some aspects of this just 1,000 km away. Colombia's capital, Bogotá, was rescued with incredible haste -- a three-year mayoral term was enough to turn it from a fatalistic deathtrap into an optimistic deathtrap with many more bicycles. In one term, a mayor fixed a host of my biggest pet peeves: He brought back sidewalks that had been caved out to make unpermitted parking spaces, created a real car-free day, and made a citywide bus rapid transit system. Perhaps instead of Mr. Livingstone with his 20-year timetable, we could use a visit from Sr. Peñalosa?