My Trip to Edinburgh

When you live in a place for a long time you come to think that your city is put together the way it is because that’s the way cities are supposed to be, and it’s hard to imagine any other way to put a place together. I had the good fortune to travel to Edinburgh, Scotland over Thanksgiving, and low and behold, there is another way to put a place together, and it works maybe even better.

Edinburgh is a city of about 500,000 people (Cincinnati has about 300,000 residents) with a metropolitan area population of about 1.8 million (the Cincinnati metropolitan region has about 2 million). When you get to the city center, what you see is people walking, and buses everywhere, and EVERYONE is getting on and off these buses at a feverish pace. There is a tram (like our streetcar – only it goes to the airport) and lots of people were on an off of that too. It takes a minute but you realize what you do not see is parking! Then after a couple of days I realized that traffic on streets did not seem congested. How can this be you ask? No parking! No congestion! I was puzzled too, but then I realized the public infrastructure investments have been made in busses, and trams, and green space, and cobblestone streets (ok those investments were made by a former administration), and so people walk and ride the bus and seem to get around just fine (did I say it was it was cold).

So… it occurs to me that when our public infrastructure investments are buying parking lots, and parking garages, and road expansions then we will keep driving, but only if we can afford a car. If you cannot afford a car, then you walk, or you wait, or you stay home. As a community we need to make a choice about the type of place we want. If we put this place together differently, and support different infrastructure options that better support pedestrians, then we could live differently. However, if we keep buying pavement and parking spaces with our public dollars we will limit our choices and our options.