Adding 1000 Gardens, Land Use, and the Biggest Problem With Car-Dependency
Greetings from a community garden in the Bronx, where the birds are chirping, the bumblebees are circling the flowers, and the compost bin is steaming hot.
I’m leaning back and relaxing in this little haven of nature.
As I feel the power of this garden, I’ve been asking myself a series of questions.
1) What if we had 1000 more gardens in New York?
We would have cleaner air, more access and connection to nature, less stormwater runoff and untreated sewage discharge, and more because community gardens have so many benefits.
The next logical question I ask myself is…
2) “How do we add 1000 more gardens in New York?”
It starts with land. We need more space.
This leads me to a third question.
3) “How can we use more precious city land for gardens?”
Last winter, for our monthly volunteer days, we organized trash clean-up days around the block.
The first month, even with our hands freezing cold, six volunteers came out and we picked up over 20 bags of trash, just by walking along one street that borders the highway.
The second month, to our dismay, the place along the street where we picked up trash before had accumulated trash once again.
I chatted with Grant, a mild-mannered carpenter and long-time steward who helped pick up garbage. How would we prevent trash from reaccumulating?
We weren’t going to change this chronic behavior. We were more likely to get rid of parking spots altogether.
As we chatted, I told Grant about a bill up for the city council called “Universal Daylighting.”
As I describe in my article on daylighting, this is when you remove the parking spot closest to an intersection.
This improves visibility for pedestrians and drivers. Combined with clear markers, it has been shown to mean fewer crashes, injuries, and deaths.
It’s already city law to have daylighting near schools.
At many of these blocks, the New York City Department of Transportation places “planters,” which add pollinator plants and absorb rainwater.
We are now working on a plan to remove the parking spot closest to the garden, where trash accumulates like fuzzies in one’s home.
In this, I find a micro-scale answer to my third question: we need to take space from cars and convert it to green space.
I’m not the first one to come to this conclusion.
Transportation Alternatives writes, “Public space devoted to cars includes 19,000 lane miles for driving and three million free on-street parking spaces, more than 1.5 spaces for every car in the city.”
They continue, “By repurposing 25 percent of car space, we could create more than 13 Central Parks.”
Or maybe 1000 more gardens?
Precious City Space is a Zero-Sum Game: Will We Choose People Or Cars?
I sympathize with the plight of car owners in my adopted borough of the Bronx much more than Manhattan car owners. It’s harder to get around than in other parts of the city.
However, prioritizing the private storage of automobiles on our public land means fewer bees and butterflies, more polluted water and air, more extreme heat, and less nature. All of these correlate to worse physical and mental health outcomes.
Cars receive free housing on the city’s dime while we all foot that bill.
It’s socialism for cars, rugged individualism for us.
My sympathy decreases as I walk under loud highways like the Major Deegan and smell the exhaust fumes. I remember that most people here don’t have access to a car.
Despite subpar transit, there are only 0.32 cars per household in the South Bronx. After all, the average cost of car ownership is now $1000 per month, even with all the subsidies.
We’d be better off taking 25% of public space for cars and giving it to other uses: wider sidewalks, bus-only lanes, bike-only lanes, housing, and more green space.
I imagine if Maria Solá’s fence extended six feet further to cover what is now a row of parked cars.
This thought exercise on adding 1000 more gardens brings up a key point: perhaps the biggest problem with building our society around the car isn’t the cars themselves. It’s the land they take up, and what we lose by not using that land for something else.
Until we can agree that the storage and movement of private vehicles isn’t the best use of public land, we will have to fight hard for every foot of green space, every widened sidewalk, every pollinator home, every planter pot, every calm bench we can sit on while we listen to birds chirp.
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