“When you compare the prices of parking lots and street parking in central Manhattan, you can see that the latter is subsidized by $17 per hour. This is a highly inefficient and inequitable land-use decision for public space in the core of such an important world economic centre. I think that New York has good chances in terms of a sustainable future. Small qualitative changes can have big quantitative effects.”
“In transport, we do not really need new ideas or innovative planning solutions, they are all on the table. What we need is twenty-first century organizational structures, we need new models for our agencies, agencies that deal with innovative funding, with the fact that there are stake-holder groups involved, that the systems that were once seen as independent are now highly interactive.”
“New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority needs an inflation-sensitive source of revenues that will fund the continuation of the capital investment in this system, and that’s just for maintaining the existing system in a state of good repair, let alone the expansions needed to build a stronger city and bring more people into the central business district. It is both an intellectual curiosity and a political shame that people will not connect the dots between the fiscal resources and infrastructure needs.”
“Architecture can help us re-think the potentials and possibilities of integrating urban transportation systems and urban structures. Buildings have been traditionally designed to contain static populations and activities. Yet, as capitalism evolves towards what has been described as a regime of flexible accumulation, the amounts of people that are engaged in dynamic activities is increasingly large. One possible contribution to respond to the increasing demands on mass transport is to change the way we conceive stations. To think of the transportation terminal as an object, an ascetic monument not connected to the social and commercial tissues of the city, is a missed opportunity to explore more contemporary forms of transportation space.”
“Here is this fantastic city [New York], it has tens of thousands kilometres of road lanes, but most transport consultants don’t touch them. So, how can they find a way to move all these people around? The only possibility is of course to go ahead with extremely expensive underground systems which by the way I don’t think they are very pleasant. When deciding about transport, it is more than about engineering or even economics. I think it is about politics. What do we want in New York? To leave some cars parked along some streets which really solve no problems, no parking problems at all? Or to make some fantastic bike lanes which could really easily be moving 20 or 30 percent of Manhattan’s population. If you would just implement some exclusive bus lanes since going by bus in Manhattan is so slow that sometimes you are faster by foot. This is a political decision.”
