News Roundup

Lessons From Colombia: Ex-Bogota Mayor Enrique Penalosa Lectures City Officials On How to Steer a Car-less Future

by Evan George

On the night famed urban environmentalist Enrique Penalosa came Downtown to speak, a First Street closure turned the community into a snake of tailpipes, lending a twisted sense of poetic justice to the event.

On Monday, Nov. 13, Penalosa, the former mayor of Bogota, Colombia, who is widely credited for setting that city of 7 million on a course of sustainable development, spoke to a rapt audience of politicians, planners and employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority at the agency’s Downtown boardroom.

Making cities more livable, he told the crowd, requires a shared vision among city leaders that extends beyond bus routes.

“It is not for traffic engineers to decide how we are going to solve transportation problems, it is a political decision,” Penalosa said. “How do we want our city to be? How do we want to live?”

City Planning Director Gail Goldberg was in attendance, as was Community Redevelopment Agency CEO Cecilia Estolano and staffers from City Councilwoman Jan Perry’s office. The event was co-sponsored by a spectrum of groups including the Alliance for a Livable Los Angeles, the Trust for Public Land and Bikestation, a nonprofit organization that operates repair and rental centers along public transportation corridors.

One sponsor after the next explained why their organization had helped bring Penalosa to Los Angeles. Single-issue agencies working alone, they agreed, will never manage the strides needed to make Los Angeles a city that lives within its means. Cooperation between city agencies and inspiration for “the city of dreams to dream” is needed, Goldberg said.

Enter Penalosa, a towering figure with a silver beard and big brown eyes who served as mayor of Bogota for only three years, from 1998 to 2001, because of the city’s limit on consecutive terms. In that short amount of time, Peñalosa made significant inroads to fixing Bogota’s severe environmental and social ills.

Walter Hook, executive director of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, introduced him by saying, “We were talking about [the solutions] and then Penalosa just went and did it.”

How He Went and Did It

Penalosa’s presentation detailed his administration’s achievements in creating 1,200 urban parks, an immense network of bike paths and one of the leading public transportation systems in the world. Even more impressive is that it was achieved in a city that a decade before was known mostly for pollution, traffic congestion and a failed economy.

Penalosa made strides by ignoring some experts and their conventional wisdom. When Japanese consultants suggested he build seven elevated highways to solve the city’s traffic woes, Penalosa recalled, he did the opposite.

Instead, the city invested in a world-class bus system, built pedestrian-only streets (one stretches 20 miles) and restricted car use in downtown Bogota. Thanks to a much-improved and “sexier” bus system, Penalosa said, public transportation in his city is actually too popular and 20% of rail riders own cars they don’t use.

The public transportation push was so successful that in a referendum during his term, the city’s voters approved an annual car-free day and nearly passed an initiative that would have banned all cars during peak commute hours.

“To make more highways or bigger roads to solve traffic jams is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline,” Penalosa told the crowd on Monday.

His visit comes at a time when state voters have approved nearly $20 billion in transportation bonds that city officials have said will aid many Los Angeles-area projects. Although a portion of the money will go to expanding rail systems, much of it will be invested in clearing up auto congestion by synchronizing traffic lights, improving roads and expanding highways.

Penalosa told Los Angeles officials his city might not be the perfect example for one the size of Los Angeles - or even Downtown - to follow, but that planners here will confront many of the same issues because traffic jams are just one symptom of a failing city.

Angelenos will never choose to leave their cars at home, he warned, until the city pushes them to do so with car restrictions in areas like Downtown, provides incentives to take Metro, and offers reasons to spend time in public space rather than in homes or cars.

“Traffic jams without public transportation is useless. But public transportation without traffic jams is useless too,” he said.

Goldberg thanked Penalosa for coming to Downtown Los Angeles and assured him that the gathered civic leaders had heard him loud and clear.

“Los Angeles is at a crossroads and we have an opportunity as we are planning for our future to plan it for cars, as we have always done in this city, or plan it for people,” she said.