To answer that, we return to a phrase we used earlier: tactical urbanism. For the last couple of decades, this movement has been seizing moments of opportunity to improve urban life.
Sometimes a city government is the instigator, as in 2009, when New York closed several blocks of Broadway, one of the busiest streets in the city, to traffic. Sometimes citizens employ guerrilla tactics — converting a vacant lot into a miniature park or garden, for instance, or throwing up orange traffic cones in the middle of the night to create a bike lane.
The basic idea is to show people the benefits of a change, however temporary, in order to shift the political dynamic in favor of a more permanent alteration. You can bet that parents whose bored children are suddenly able to ride their bikes in the Oakland streets are seeing this whole set of issues with new eyes.
When Broadway was closed, thousands of New Yorkers flooded the street, delightedly plopping down in cheap lawn chairs the city had set out on the pavement. From that moment, the vision of a Broadway for people took hold, and the blocks of Broadway through Times Square have been closed to traffic for a decade.
Similarly, tactical urbanist projects all over the world have led to closed streets, new parks and many other amenities. A large majority of these projects entail reclaiming public space from the automobile. A third or more of the space in any city is devoted to streets, and in the middle of the last century, much of that was converted to traffic lanes and free parking spaces.
Today, we have been thrust into perhaps the greatest opportunity ever for tactical urbanism. With traffic missing from the streets, people are sensing how completely cars dominate them in normal times, endangering the lives of the pedestrians and cyclists squeezed into tiny strips along the margins. This situation was never sensible or moral, but until now, fixing it was politically impossible in many cities.
A viral twist of fate has given us a chance to alter the balance, creating streets that work for everyone. Cities that were thinking about lane changes or street closures before the pandemic should move quickly to try them out, and the most popular should be made permanent. Government leaders must pay particular attention to poor neighborhoods, which tend to be forgotten but whose people have just as much right to bike and walk as anyone else. Those neighborhoods are often deprived of parks or sports fields, so a street with few or no cars can be a godsend for children.