Curitiba To Seattle: "Si, Se Puede!"
This week Seattlest played like a transportation groupie -- former Mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, Jaime Lerner was in town and we caught his public address at Benaroya Hall ("An Evening with Jaime Lerner") and then a breakfast talk ("Lessons from Curitiba") sponsored by the Trade Development Alliance of Greater Seattle and offering a panel discussion with Patricia Chase (International Sustainable Solutions), Kevin Desmond (King County, Metro Transit), and Jim Mueller (JC Mueller).
Hizzoner Greg Nickels (who's looking positively svelte these days) opened the Benaroya Hall talk by applauding the 25,000 people in the streets for demonstrating to Lerner how willing Seattle is to switch modes to walking.
Then Jaime Lerner took the stage in a black blazer, polo shirt and slacks, fired up PowerPoint, and stripped off the blazer to get down to business. Apologizing for his English, he was clear enough with his prescription for Seattle: get as many cars off the streets as we can as soon as possible. "It's viaduct in English?" he asked. "You know what my definition of viaduct is: the easiest way to move a car from one traffic jam to another jam."
People listen to Lerner because the pot-bellied fireplug of a three-time mayor, two-time governor has a lifetime of accomplishment to back his lectures up. He's most known for the phenomenal success of his mass transit solution for the city, which relies on bus rapid transit. But he's equally inspiring as a speaker on sustainability as he is on urban design, describing project after project from his worldwide consulting career, and the 540 people packing the Recital Hall gave him a standing ovation at the end of his talk, which we'll detail next.
Lerner has two favorite quotes about cities: "The city is not the problem; the city is the solution," and "The city is the last refuge of solidarity." His methodology is built on these two statements. He counsels referring to the city's design, its actual structure, as a way of prioritizing growth and development. The variety in a city's design represents its values. And he argues that the political will to "get things done" flows from the people, not an officeholder.
The trick is, he claims, to present people with a simple scenario and what it will accomplish. It's not necessary to have a scenario with all the answers; urban planning is a trajectory, it's correctable if the people refuse to support an element. But by the same token, it's got to be correctable. Lerner is drawn to what he calls "urban acupuncture." His solutions relate to focal points that regulate a city's health. They're simple, quick fixes with effects that multiply downstream. The key elements he looks for are mobility, sustainability, and identity.
Lerner lists "5 Simple Rules for Sustaining My City": 1) make cars unnecessary, 2) separate the garbage and recycle, 3) integrate work areas with habitation, 4) save the maximum, waste the minimum, and 5) make facilities multiple-use. In the first case, he introduced bus rapid transit and an integrated transit system. In 1974 it carried 25,000 people. It grew. Today it carries 2 million.
To promote waste recycling, he offered transit tokens in exchange for people sorting garbage. Zoning encouraged mixed-use residential/industrial areas. Structures were converted rather than torn down. Street vendors were given streetside mini-shops to promote their business and keep them from bothering pedestrians.
"Innovation is starting," Lerner says. Democracy is not about perfect consensus, it's about conflict management. He reels off project after project that took two months, six months, everything generally under two years. "Creativity comes when you cut a zero from your budget," he chuckles. It's almost never a question of scale or resources, but one of understanding what a city is good for. "If you don't have the money, provide the way" for others to do it. As a case in point, Curitiba provided the right-of-way for transit; 10 private companies run the bus fleet (which they own), and are paid by the kilometer for the use.
For Lerner, identity is when people can see themselves proudly reflected in their city. (The Seattle tour of Curitiba led by International Sustainable Solutions was surprised -- picture it -- by Curitiba's cleanliness and ethnic diversity.) While he was happy to talk about buses, he was also very proud of the symbolic ethnic "portals" constructed around the city to honor different immigrant groups, and of Curitiba's daycare program, 230 daycare centers financed by public, private, and religious entities.
And of course he did talk buses. But he was careful to point out all the ingredients to a successful bus system. Zoning marries high-density areas with bus rapid transit -- because Curitiba's transit system pays for itself, it's crucial that it not be a way of simply moving a group of people from Home to Work and Back Again. Along a high-density line, people are continually getting on and off the bus, so it maintains capacity.
And it maintains speed because the buses use restricted lanes, preventing them from getting stuck in traffic. (One key point, Lerner emphasizes, is that whatever mode of transit you use in an area, it must not have to compete with another for space. Buses get bus lanes. Cars and taxis get car lanes.) Bus boarding tubes, besides being an aesthetic shelter, let people pay ahead of time, so there's no delay in loading/unloading a bus. (At peak times, Curitiba boasts a frequency of a bus every 30 seconds.)
An integrated feeder system brings passengers in from outlying centers, and another set of buses travels around the perimeter, offering travel between those centers without going through downtown.
As good as this may sound to you, there are plenty of people who will line up to tell you why it won't work ("it" being any part or all of the above). That's why Lerner says his job is to inspire with his motto, "It is possible!" He aims to shake people out of death-spiral complacency with his "Start now!"and short timeframes for action. In fact, whether something can be completed in a short time is part of his triage approach -- if it's going to take 10 years for a single project, he wants no part of it. There must be something better that could be done in the meantime. Think harder.
Especially at the breakfast talk, populated by urban cognoscenti -- the City Council's Richard Conlin moderated, architects and developers batted eyes at each other -- it was evident that "It is possible!" was "nice to think so" as Hemingway once grumbled. No one sprang up with fire in their eye afterwards, ready to storm the Viaduct with pitchforks. These people all understood how things operate around here. Which is too bad. They will be first against the wall, come the revolution. Standing there, they won't impede everyone else's progress.
