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15 Dec 2022
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In These Cities, Car-Free Streets Are Here To Stay

What happens when you close down a city street to cars? More people do non-driving things, like walking, biking, strolling, skating and frolicking in the space normally reserved for motor vehicles. Car-free advocates would say that as greenhouse gas emissions and traffic violence go down, happiness and connection go up — it’s hard to connect with your neighbors while ensconced in two tons of steel.

Despite the benefits, closing streets to cars can make some people, er — a bit upset. Opponents argue that businesses will suffer (despite evidence to the contrary), congestion will increase (not so, says CityLab) and disabled and elderly people will have less access to public space (there’s a column for that). Like any change that pushes back against car culture, car-free streets face significant challenges.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, cities around the world closed down streets to cars and opened them up for people. Over two years later, some of these experiments were so popular that they are here to stay. Here are four car-free streets that are still going strong or just getting started.

John F. Kennedy Drive in San Francisco

The people of San Francisco have spoken: Keep JFK Drive car-free. Historically, JFK Drive (now known as JFK Promenade) has been closed to cars on Sundays since 1967. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down most of the city and put a premium on outdoor space for socially-distanced play, it made sense to keep the street car-free seven days a week.

As anyone who has biked, skated or rolled during an open streets event can attest — once you go car-free it’s extremely hard to go back. Making JFK Drive car-free not only increased walking and biking, it turned the street into a space for art, music, celebration and connection.

In April, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a motion keeping JFK Drive closed to cars, along with 40 improvements that would make the park more accessible to disabled people, seniors and others.

The 1.5 mile street in San Francisco’s famed Golden Gate State Park was then the subject of dueling ballot measures this month — Prop J would keep cars out and Prop I would reopen the street to motorized vehicles. Supporters of Prop I argued that permanently closing the drive to cars would exclude people with disabilities from accessing the park. In the end, voters passed Prop J with almost 60% voting “yes” and rejected Prop I with over 60% voting “no.”

Jodie Medeiros, who leads the pedestrian advocacy group Walk San Francisco, says car-free movement at JFK is critical to protecting pedestrians from vehicle traffic. “For two years, we have seen how much people not only love but really need this car-free space,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Car-free JFK is all about our safety.”

According to San Francisco Recreation and Parks, visits to the park increased 36% since the closure, totaling nearly 7 million visits, while over 90% of the streets in the park are still open to cars.

Griffith Park Drive in Los Angeles

It started with tragedy: On April 16, 77-year-old Andrew Jelmart was riding his bike through Griffith Park when he was struck and killed by a speeding driver. While the park is a popular spot for hiking, biking and horseriding with over 50-miles of trails, cars often use it as a shortcut to avoid adjacent freeways. Los Angeles has long been known for its car-centric culture, but Jelmart’s death sparked a movement to make at least part of Griffith Park Drive car-free.

It might seem like a no-brainer that parks should be for recreation, rather than for drivers trying to get from point A to point B faster, but the tragic death of a cyclist drove the point home. By the end of June, the park announced it was temporarily shutting a stretch of Griffith Park Drive to cars. By Aug. 18, the change was made permanent.

As mobility advocates and writers have pointed out, most of the park is still open to cars — the section of Griffith Park Drive that is newly car-free is less than a mile long. However, city officials estimate that the closure keeps about 2,000 cars per day from cutting through the park, making it safer for people walking and rolling.

The city of L.A. has rarely moved this quickly to implement safety improvements for people outside of cars, even in the face of tragedy. In this case, it helped that the Department of Recreation and Parks has sole jurisdiction over Griffith Park Avenue, avoiding some of the public pushback that projects like this often face. In addition to the closure, the park has also announced new plans to curb speeding, calm traffic and improve cycling infrastructure.

34th Ave in New York City

Although not shut down to cars 24/7, one of the most successful car-free street projects is 34th Avenue (now known as “Paseo Park”) in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, New York City. Currently, the street is car-free every day between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m, turning 26 city blocks into a de facto public park. With the newfound space, the neighborhood hosts a myriad of cultural activities, including yoga, dance, gardening, ESL classes and arts and crafts for kids.

Started in the early days of the pandemic, the 34th Avenue open street project was organized as part of New York City’s Open Streets initiative. Volunteers from the neighborhood put out traffic barriers every morning and started organizing events, activities and games. This year, only 20 miles of open streets remain in the city, down from a high of 83 miles.

The city’s department of transportation says that the project has reduced traffic violence involving pedestrians by a whopping 41.7%. A study conducted by Streetsblog showed a dramatic reduction in all car crashes.

Although the project has sparked controversy in recent months, 34th Avenue is a testament to community organizing and the possibilities of a street centered on people, not cars.

Capel Street in Dublin

Capel Street is a popular retail and restaurant district in Dublin that went car-less in May, making it the longest car-free street in the country — but not without some pushback.

On the face of it, the street – since named one of Time Out’s coolest streets in the world – seems perfect for pedestrianization. Capel is home to such TikTok-famous eateries as Krewe, Bovinity and a secret Asian street food restaurant hidden in the back of a supermarket. A new report out of New York City has found that far from hurting restaurants, car-free streets actually increased business for restaurants enrolled in the Open Streets program. They saw a 19% increase in revenue over previous years, or almost $6 million total during summer 2021.

Capel Street’s car-free journey started gradually, with more space on the street dedicated to outdoor dining during the pandemic. Then, last year, Dublin piloted a program shutting down the street to cars during weekend evening hours for 17 weeks. A public outreach survey found that almost 90% of respondents supported making Capel Street traffic-free, saying that it “improved their experience” of the street.

While some businesses were opposed to the idea, Dublin city councilors voted this month to keep the street closed to motor vehicles.

Before the Pandemic

Even before the threat of a highly-infectious airborne virus pushed cities to begin getting serious about outdoor dining and pedestrianized streets, some cities were already working toward implementing car-free zones in their city centers. In Paris, air and noise pollution pushed Mayor Anne Hidalgo to institute several car-free days beginning in 2015. Reports by the Airparif association, which measures urban pollution levels, suggest that nitrogen dioxide levels fell by nearly a third on the Champs-Élysées, by as much as 40% along the Seine, and about 20% at the Place de l’Opéra, during a car-free day in September 2015. Now, the city plans to ban private vehicles from the city’s historic center by 2024, ahead of the Paris Olympics.

The success of the occasional car-free days in Paris also inspired a movement in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2016, Mayor Fernando Haddad announced a ban on cars every Sunday along the city’s iconic Paulista Avenue. The move has been welcomed, including by the local business owners who were initially skeptical: A 2019 study conducted by a group of local NGOs found that 86% of store owners supported the program. Indeed, many are encouraging the city to expand the ban to Saturday afternoons as well, to encourage more foot traffic and sales.

“With the closing for cars, people started to walk a lot more, to stroll around, and the sales on Sundays grew seven-fold,” one local bookstore manager told Next City. “It was the best thing that could have happened for us. Sundays are now, by far, our busiest days.”

Original article here

09 Dec 2022
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The U.S. diet is deadly. Here are 7 ideas to get Americans eating healthier

The data are stark: the typical American diet is shortening the lives of many Americans. Diet-related deaths outrank deaths from smoking, and about half of U.S. deaths from heart disease – nearly 900 deaths a day – are linked to poor diet. The pandemic highlighted the problem, with much worse outcomes for people with obesity and other diet-related diseases.

“We’re really in a nutrition crisis in this country.” says Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.

Now, there’s growing momentum to tackle this problem. The Biden administration will hold the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health on September 28th, and will announce a new national strategy. This comes more than 50 years after a landmark White House conference that helped launch today’s major federal food assistance programs.

“The 1969 conference was transformative,” Mozaffarian says. The programs it ushered in, like the WIC program, have helped feed millions of low-income families.

But this hasn’t been enough to solve the dual problems of food insecurity and diet-related disease. Food policy leaders say it’s time to think anew and build on what we’ve learned. The U.S. can’t “fix” hunger by just feeding people cheap, high-calorie, processed foods – the food that’s so abundant in our food supply, they say. Instead, it’s got to find ways to nourish people with healthy, nutrient-dense foods.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm and thinking about food more broadly and how we can fix this crisis,” Mozaffarian told NPR. He’s co-chair of an independent task force that includes doctors, chefs, food policy and business experts, as well as farming and health advocates, who are helping form the agenda at upcoming the White House conference.

In a new report, they’ve proposed a wide-ranging set of recommendations to end hunger, advance nutrition and improve health. Here are seven big ideas they’re excited about.

Treat food as medicine

There’s a growing movement to integrate food and nutrition into health care, by providing healthy meals and groceries to patients to help prevent or manage diet-related illness. The task force wants to see this kind of work expand.

“We should pay for food-based interventions that are effective,” Mozaffarian says.

For example, there’s mounting evidence that providing prescriptions for fruit and vegetables can spur people to eat better and manage weight and blood sugar. The idea is for health care systems or insurers to provide or pay for healthy groceries, combined with nutrition education, to help patients change their eating habits. It is being piloted around the country.

“Produce prescription programs help improve diet quality and food security,” says task force member Dr. Hilary Seligman, a food insecurity expert and professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco, noting that they can help with diet-related diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes.

Another idea is to offer medically tailored meals aimed at helping people who are already sick reverse chronic disease. Currently the federal government is running pilot programs that let Medicaid or Medicare pay for the meals in several states.

Focus on quality of calories, not just quantity

The U.S. food supply is awash in cheap calories. And when you’re on a tight budget or relying on benefits like SNAP (food stamps), processed foods like chips and soda can set you back less than fresh produce. Of course, eating processed foods also contributes to cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and other chronic illnesses, warns Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association.

Brown says federal food assistance programs have helped to address hunger. “However, many U.S. food policies and programs focus on improving access to sufficient quantities of food,” she says. Instead, it’s time to modernize these policies and focus on the quality of food, “so people have access to enough nutritious food.”

The task force wants to see food programs redesigned to nudge people towards healthier options. The report points to the GusNIP nutrition incentive program – which, in select communities – gives SNAP participants more money to buy fruit and vegetables. It’s a similar concept to the Double Bucks program which doubles the value of SNAP benefits when used to buy produce at farmers markets and other venues.

“It is important to scale up these efforts to ensure that everyone has access to healthy food options,” says task force member Angela Odoms-Young, a nutrition professor at Cornell University.

The task force recommends that Congress establish a nationwide produce incentive program for all SNAP participants. “These types of programs can help promote equity,” Odoms-Young says, noting that people of color disproportionately suffer from chronic illnesses.

Expand access to dietary and lifestyle counseling

The Affordable Care Act mandates that diet counseling be covered by insurers as a preventive care benefit for those at higher risk of chronic disease. The exact details of who is eligible for which services are left up to an advisory group of doctors and health care providers, as well as insurers, and many patients who would benefit may not have access to this service.

“The vast majority of Americans should be getting preventative behavioral lifestyle treatment,” Mozaffarian says. Too often, he says, doctors prescribe drugs for conditions before recommending or trying lifestyle changes. “Doctors go right to the drug,” he says. “I think that’s a big problem.”

The task force recommends that Congress expand Medicare and Medicaid coverage for medical nutrition therapy to people with high blood pressure, prediabetes, celiac disease, HIV/AIDS, cancer and other diet-related conditions. It also calls for expanded coverage of cooking classes and nutrition assistance, as well as coverage of the Diabetes Prevention Program, delivered by telehealth.

This behavior-change program has been shown to be more effective than medicine in reducing the onset of Type 2 diabetes among people at high risk.

Support food entrepreneurs

People who start food businesses can help nourish their communities and create jobs. The task force calls on the federal government to pass policies that boost new healthy food enterprises, including providing new loans and grants to food and nutrition-related companies centered on health, equity, and sustainability. The idea is to focus especially on businesses owned by people of color and other marginalized groups.

“We don’t need more businesses creating diabetes and obesity,” says Tambra Raye Stevenson, who runs Wanda, a non-profit group that aims to build a pipeline and platform for a million Black women and girls to become local food leaders. “We need entrepreneurs that provide teaching kitchens, community gardens, healthy food retails, wellness studios, nutrition services, healthy consumer products, and urban agricultural centers,” she says.

She points to food entrepreneurs like Amanda Stephenson who opened a specialty food market in an underserved neighborhood in Washington, DC, Fresh Food Factory, and Mary Blackford of Market 7 who is planning a food hall that features Black-owned food and lifestyle businesses. “They are our food she-roes making a positive impact and providing healthy food access for our children and other women,” says Stevenson.

In the lead up to next month’s White House conference, groups like Food Tank, a food think tank, have organized listening sessions with food researchers and entrepreneurs. “For food to be more accessible and affordable, we need entrepreneurs that use science and technology,” says Danielle Nierenberg of Food Tank. She points to innovators like Journey Foods, which is helping entrepreneurs bring nutritious foods and snacks to market.

Increase the number of new farmers growing healthy foods using regenerative farming techniques

If all Americans began to eat the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables each day, there would be shortages. That’s because corn and soybeans are grown on most cropland in the U.S.. Now, there’s growing recognition of the need for more specialty crops – including fruits, vegetables, and nuts.

The task force recommends that Congress create a Farmer Corps to support new farmers, building on the Beginning Farmers and Ranchers Development Program. The idea is to provide new farmers with paid internships and apprenticeships to learn about sustainable farming, and funding to cover a living wage and housing. It also is pushing for loans to go to farmers growing with sustainable practices.

Growing the same crop, season after season, as many farmers do, can make lands less productive over time, and deplete nutrients from the soil.”The unfortunate reality is that today we subsidize conventional practices that degrade the soil,”says David Montgomery, a professor at the University of Washington and the author of What Your Food Ate, who attended a listening session.

“What we need to sustain agriculture is to incentivize restoring healthy soils and train more farmers to be successful doing that,” he says.

Make school meals free for all students

School meals have been a fixture in U.S. schools ever since President Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act back in 1946. For decades, the federal government has reimbursed schools for meals they serve, and low-income students can qualify for free or reduced priced meals. Research has shown that low-income children who participate have better health.

Yet, many families who are eligible for free or reduced-priced meals may not receive them, sometimes due to the paperwork, bureaucracy or stigma of participating or enrolling. Amid the pandemic, school meals have been offered for free to all students. Now, the task force says this should be a permanent change.

“Without access to free meals at school, many children go without food at all during the day, and many more do not have access to the nutritious foods they need to thrive,’ says Seligman, of UC, San Francisco. She notes that school meals help not only with kids’ nutrition, but they also reduce absenteeism and improve academic outcomes.

Establish a federal ‘food czar’

In order to turn ideas like these into action, the task force recommends the creation of a new role in the federal government, a national director of food and nutrition, a food czar figure, if you will. The new director would help streamline and coordinate the many disparate efforts already underway. The U.S. government spends more than $150 billion each year on food and nutrition related programs, and the health care system also spends billions on treatment of diet related diseases.

“This spending is fragmented across 200 separate actions and 21 different departments and agencies without harmonization or synergy,” the task force concludes. Now, they conclude, it’s time for a new approach.

Original article here

06 Dec 2022
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A Nobel Prize-Winning Psychologist Says Most People Don’t Really Want to Be Happy

We think we want to be happy. Yet many of us are actually working toward some other end, according to cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics.

Kahneman contends that happiness and satisfaction are distinct. Happiness is a momentary experience that arises spontaneously and is fleeting. Meanwhile, satisfaction is a long-term feeling, built over time and based on achieving goals and building the kind of life you admire. On the Dec. 19, 2018 podcast “Conversations with Tyler,” hosted by economist Tyler Cowen, Kahneman explains that working toward one goal may undermine our ability to experience the other.

For example, in Kahneman’s research measuring everyday happiness—the experiences that leave people feeling good—he found that spending time with friends was highly effective. Yet those focused on long-term goals that yield satisfaction don’t necessarily prioritize socializing, as they’re busy with the bigger picture.

Such choices led Kahneman to conclude that we’re not as interested in happiness as we may claim. “Altogether, I don’t think that people maximize happiness in that sense…this doesn’t seem to be what people want to do. They actually want to maximize their satisfaction with themselves and with their lives. And that leads in completely different directions than the maximization of happiness,” he says.

In an October 2018 interview with Ha’aretz (paywall), Kahneman argues that satisfaction is based mostly on comparisons. “Life satisfaction is connected to a large degree to social yardsticks–achieving goals, meeting expectations.” He notes that money has a significant influence on life satisfaction, whereas happiness is affected by money only when funds are lacking. Poverty creates suffering, but above a certain level of income that satisfies our basic needs, wealth doesn’t increase happiness. “The graph is surprisingly flat,” the psychologist says.

In other words, if you aren’t hungry, and if clothing, shelter, and your other basics are covered, you’re capable of being at least as happy as the world’s wealthiest people. The fleeting feelings of happiness, though, don’t add up to life satisfaction. Looking back, a person who has had many happy moments may not feel pleased on the whole.

The key here is memory. Satisfaction is retrospective. Happiness occurs in real time. In Kahneman’s work, he found that people tell themselves a story about their lives, which may or may not add up to a pleasing tale. Yet, our day-to-day experiences yield positive feelings that may not advance that longer story, necessarily. Memory is enduring. Feelings pass. Many of our happiest moments aren’t preserved—they’re not all caught on camera but just happen. And then they’re gone.

Take going on vacation, for example. According to the psychologist, a person who knows they can go on a trip and have a good time but that their memories will be erased, and that they can’t take any photos, might choose not to go after all. The reason for this is that we do things in anticipation of creating satisfying memories to reflect on later. We’re somewhat less interested in actually having a good time.

This theory helps to explain our current social media-driven culture. To some extent, we care less about enjoying ourselves than presenting the appearance of an enviable existence. We’re preoccupied with quantifying friends and followers rather than spending time with people we like. And ultimately, this makes us miserable.

We feel happiness primarily in the company of others, Kahneman argues. However, the positive psychology movement that has arisen in part as a result of his work doesn’t emphasize spontaneity and relationships. Instead, it takes a longer view, considering what makes life meaningful, which is a concept that Kahneman claims eludes him.

Kahneman counts himself lucky and “fairly happy.” He says he’s led “an interesting life” because he’s spent much of his time working with people whose company he enjoyed. But he notes that there have been periods when he worked alone on writing that were “terrible,” when he felt “miserable.” He also says he doesn’t consider his existence meaningful, despite his notable academic accomplishments.

Indeed, although his contributions legitimized the emotion as an economic and social force and led to the creation of happiness indices worldwide, the psychologist abandoned the field of happiness research about five years ago. He’s now researching and writing about the concept of “noise,” or random data that interferes with wise decision-making.

Still, it’s worth asking if we want to be happy, to experience positive feelings, or simply wish to construct narratives that seems worth telling ourselves and others, but doesn’t necessarily yield pleasure. Meet a friend and talk it over with them—you might have a good time.

Original article here

01 Dec 2022
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December Artist of the Month: Roland Nissan

Artist Statement: Roland Nissan

I’m an urban sketcher and painter working primarily around London and the Southeast of England. I concentrate on buildings and street scenes. Since I use my sketchbooks as a form of daily visual diary, my work can also include home scenes and, of course, drawings from my travels. I sometimes get commissions to sketch people’s homes and other memorable places.

I’m lucky to have been able to retire early from my desk job in London to concentrate more on my passion of art and sketching. When I’m not sketching, I like to play guitar and ride my motorbike. Since teaching myself to draw about 10 years ago, I’ve amassed a huge number of sketchbooks and piles of paintings. Mostly I draw on-site, as I believe this is the best way to capture the ambience of the scene. I’m proud that my work has been noticed around the world due to exposure on social media and in the local press. I have fans all over the world where some of my paintings have travelled.

You can see my work on my social media channels, where you may also contact me for sales and commissions:

Twitter @RolandN

Instagram @rolandnissanart (where I post most days)