Last year, at the back-to-back Strong Towns/Congress for the New Urbanism conference I attended, I made particular note of one of the Strong Towns presentations. The talk was by Barkha Patel, now the director of infrastructure for Jersey City, who began in the city government as a lower level planner.

She gave a long and very detailed talk on bottom-up/informal urban design and doing quick, cheap, iterative stuff to test out ideas, with the goal of beautifying streets and public spaces, and making them more pleasant, safe, and walkable. Barriers to test out protected bike lanes; surplus paint to denote new street uses; stuff like that. Strong Towns talks about identifying the most immediate small thing you can do to improve a place right now, and doing that over and over again, consistently. That’s what Jersey City did under Patel.

This is sometimes called “tactical urbanism”—i.e., bypassing some of the formal bureaucracy and just literally throwing down paint or cones or cheap stuff on hand and seeing what works. And it does work.

What really stuck with me, though, was her “origin story” for her transformation of the Jersey City streetscape, which, by the way, achieved a year of zero traffic fatalities in 2022. (Hoboken, even more remarkably, had seven years with no traffic fatalities as of early 2024.)

Specifically, the seriousness with which Patel took her municipal post is shockingly uncommon. Several years ago, not too long into her tenure as a relatively new transportation planner in the municipal government, a young boy was struck and killed by a car. She recounted this, clearly feeling she had a personal stake in it, and she still paused and almost teared up, so many years later. Pedestrian fatalities are things that happen. Many, maybe most, maybe all are avoidable in some sense, as these two New Jersey cities show, but there are so many that we’ve become inured to it.

My first impulsive thought, as she spoke about this young victim, was something like, what are you upset about, it’s not like it was your fault. But I corrected myself and realized—that’s public service. Actually taking your oath or promise to serve the public seriously. Actually believing that you owe the people something concrete, that your duty is more than steering the bureaucratic ship with a minimum level of competence. My impulse to shrug was—as far as you could tell—the impulse of a whole lot of public servants. Why are there so damn few, especially in smaller, somewhat more flexible cities like this, who take Barkha Patel’s view: I don’t know about you, but no children are getting run over in this city on my watch?

I didn’t take as many notes as I wish I had—I guess I was paying attention—but I did write down one of her lines verbatim, which captures something that’s, again, so common in cities we think of it as a law of nature. “The simple act of being outside seemed to require vigilance,” she said. This is true of traffic safety, the stress of motor noise, the possibility of crime, the lackluster condition of so many public spaces and facilities. It takes a kind of effort to be out in a city unless you have to because you don’t own a car.

And, by the way, 40 percent of Jersey City households do not own a car. Which means that, in dense urban places at least, none of this stuff is an elitist or boutique or lifestyle thing. In cities where such a large share of the population doesn’t drive or own cars, it’s pretty foundational that streets should be safe and pleasant for walking or biking, and that buses and/or trains should be clean and work on time. The city undertook a major overhaul of Jersey City’s Bergen Square, dating to 1660—one of the oldest public squares in the United States. Why did it take 2020s urbanists to restore what should have been an iconic central urban place all along?

That was the kind of weird duality of Patel’s presentation. All of it, as she described it, felt so obvious and natural. Like the kind of sensible stuff you’d have to have beaten out of you. It was as if she took her post and was flabbergasted at the status quo, which is how every person in municipal government should feel.

It’s a weird duality that applies to so much of urbanism, broadly defined: people like a lot of urbanist reforms once they’re in place—heck, even New York City’s congestion pricing got more popular once it went into effect!—and yet the resistance to it is almost immovable.

Obviously, results are more convincing for many people than promises. Mike Lydon, a tactical urbanist and planner who has done work with Jersey City, put this well in an interview:

The debates that follow installation is why data collection is such an important part of the methodology. There’s the qualitative: Do people feel safer? Does the project fit into their neighborhood? Is there a perception it’s working as intended? And then there’s the quantitative data: Is there more traffic congestion? Are vehicles traveling slower? Are more people walking or cycling? Are we seeing fewer crashes? There are ways to measure these things, even in the short term, that allow us to understand impact. And when people in a city can see that it’s safer to cross the street, see more people cycling, or hear that Citi Bike rentals are up 10% since we’ve made this change, for example, it becomes harder to argue against. It’s hard to argue against positive outcomes, like a reduced number of crashes or fatalities.

“It’s hard to argue against positive outcomes” is the money quote. But to get to positive outcomes, you have to do things. And the insight of tactical urbanism is that if you can get your foot in the door by doing little things quickly and cheaply, that can be worth more, in buy-in and results, than all the expert planning pie-in-the-sky in the world.

I really don’t think about technocratic expertise or good planning or practical action when I think about this. I think about lost wisdom, about common things artificially rendered scarce, about a society that allowed a revolutionary ideology to occupy its cities, ruin them, and pretend that nothing had ever changed.

And so in “Vision Zero” victories like Hoboken or reformers like Barkha Patel, I don’t see weirdness or radicalism or elitism, but simply what we should have been doing all along.

Social card image credit Flickr/Dan DeLuca, Attribution 2.0 Generic/CC BY 2.0 Deed

Related Reading:

Always Treat A Car Like It’s Loaded

Have You Ever Seen A City?

Prices and Truths

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