Cities are islands of private property connected by public space. But even though public space represents a substantial amount of a city’s surface, its uses are limited mostly to the circulation of cars. Forty-nine percent of the land in Manhattan is public, not because Central Park is big, but because streets represent 36% of the island. That means that in Manhattan alone more than $500 billion worth of land is dedicated almost exclusively to cars (Bloomberg.com, 2018). Of course, streets are necessary. But our current allocation of public space may be far from optimal. In the US, trillions of dollars of land in prime locations are dedicated to streets and parking spots. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Compare Tokyo to New York. The Asian mega city dedicates only 29% of its surface area to streets. This 7 percentagepoints difference is due in part to Tokyo’s restriction on on-street parking. Covid did not evolve to change our cities, but is certainly giving us an opportunity to do so. One place where the disease has put enormous pressure is on the excessive allocation of public spaces to cars. Cities across the world have closed hundreds of miles of roads in an effort to open streets to their residents (Streetsblog USA, 2020). But to reduce the spatial footprint of cars, cities will need more than goodwill and orange cones. They will need to solve supply side and demand side problems. On the supply side, public transportation is the obvious substitute to private vehicles (although they do not solve the problem of package delivery). But for a change, I would like to focus on the demand side of the problem. The demand side question is: who wants to keep cars out of the streets and actually has the power to do so? Here the obvious solutions are to increase the space dedicated to bicycles, sidewalks, and cafes (Manjoo, 2020). But once we consider the land value of streets, more radical alternatives come into play.

中文翻译：

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万亿美元的街道

城市是由公共空间连接起来的私有财产岛屿。但是，尽管公共空间占城市表面的很大一部分，但其用途主要限于汽车的流通。曼哈顿 49% 的土地是公共的，不是因为中央公园很大，而是因为街道占了全岛的 36%。这意味着仅在曼哈顿，价值超过 5000 亿美元的土地几乎专门用于汽车（Bloomberg.com，2018 年）。当然，街道是必要的。但我们目前对公共空间的分配可能远非最佳。在美国，黄金地段有数万亿美元的土地专门用于街道和停车位。但它不必是这样。比较东京和纽约。这座亚洲特大城市的街道面积仅占其表面积的 29%。这 7 个百分点的差异部分是由于东京对路边停车的限制。Covid 并没有演变为改变我们的城市，但无疑给了我们这样做的机会。疫情造成巨大压力的一个地方是公共空间过度分配给汽车。为了向居民开放街道，世界各地的城市已经关闭了数百英里的道路（Streetsblog USA，2020）。但为了减少汽车的空间足迹，城市需要的不仅仅是善意和橙色锥体。他们需要解决供给侧和需求侧的问题。在供给侧，公共交通是私家车明显的替代品（虽然不能解决包裹派送的问题）。但作为一个改变，我想把重点放在问题的需求方面。需求方的问题是：谁想让汽车远离街道并且实际上有能力这样做？显而易见的解决方案是增加专用于自行车、人行道和咖啡馆的空间（Manjoo，2020）。但是，一旦我们考虑了街道的土地价值，就会有更激进的替代方案发挥作用。