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A coherent approach to traffic

Last week, the citizens of Bogota, Colombia did a wise and wonderful thing: they participated in a no-car day. Instead of driving, they walked, used public transportation or rode their bikes. It's an idea Americans should embrace as well.

Bogota is infamous for its congested streets and eye-burning pollution. On a normal workday morning, 800,000 automobiles clog city streets. Tensions are always high as drivers jockey for position and pedestrians choke down the smoggy air. "Normally, it's like a war here in the morning," a university professor said.

On Feb. 24, tensions were low, as people were free to move about the city without fear of being run over. A carnival atmosphere prevailed, as street performers entertained at the now traffic free intersections. By noon, the city's air pollution had been reduced by 25-30 percent.

Bogota's transportation problems made the move necessary. A city of seven million and counting, traffic has become dangerously unmanageable. No new arteries have been built in 20 years, forcing existing roadways to carry vehicular loads beyond their safe capacity.

In other words, their transportation situation is similar to Tucson's situation. Tucson is a fast-growing city, suffering similar transportation issues. Six-lane thoroughfares like Speedway and Broadway frequently feature bumper-to-bumper traffic. Hazy brown streaks of car exhaust fumes enshroud our scenic mountain ranges.

Unfortunately, Tucson apparently isn't considering transportation solutions similar to the Colombian city. Enrique Penalosa, Bogota's mayor, declared the no-car day to attract attention to the city's burgeoning public transportation system. Previously, Penalosa widened sidewalks and limited parking on busy streets to further encourage people to leave their cars at home.

Tucson's approach to solving its transportation problems seems less coherent. Individuals neighborhoods have installed traffic-mitigation measures, including speed humps and drive-arounds. The development between University and Sixth east of campus will eventually turn Tyndall into a pedestrian-only thoroughfare.

On the other hand, the city also plans to widen existing roads and construct new ones to accommodate all of the automobiles projected to infest the city in the next decade or so. Calls for the construction of a freeway surrounding and/or crossing the city continue to find space in city planning debates. Proponents of increasing the number and size of Tucson's roads insist more thoroughfares are the sensible way to manage Tucson's traffic.

But the only thing more roads will manage to do is encourage the proliferation of automobiles. More roads means more traffic. If we continue to build roads to handle increasing traffic, traffic only gets worse because the core issue hasn't been addressed. The issue isn't too few or too narrow roads. The problem is too many cars.

Automobiles can be wonderful things. They allow us to travel great distances in brief amounts of time. They allow us to transport large amounts of goods at one time. As personal transportation, they are almost unparalleled.

But Americans don't consider their cars mere transportation. We look upon them as extensions of ourselves. We own more cars than we need to demonstrate our ability to consume. We fetishize SUVs because they waste scarce resources and allow us to say we've experienced nature because we've driven over it. Cars have become a symbol of our freedom as Americans and as consumers.

We live in a car culture, where we are encouraged to drive more than we need. Particularly in the western states, we construct our cities so that we have to drive to carry out even the most menial tasks. Neighborhood stores perfect for short errands are things of the past, replaced by mega-stores at the city limits. In some sense then, cars have become tools that limit our freedom: By using our cars for inessential tasks and as status symbols, we create a system in which we cannot live without a car.

It doesn't have to be that way, though. Bogota's success replicates similar care-free days in Paris, Rome and other European cities. Let's follow their lead and break the automobile habit.