With a little effort, your city can be better this year. Here are some effective ways to do it.
Our cities are humanity’s biggest and most important collective effort, the massive, marvelously complex result of all of our great choices, debatable decisions, and really bad mistakes. They’re also the key to saving us from climate change, they drive our national economies, they support (or hinder) our personal health, and much more. So what if we picked some New Year’s resolutions that could improve our individual and family lives, hopefully making us happier, healthier, and more successful, while also improving our cities and communities for everyone?
Here are 25 ways that your choices can translate into better cities. Share them, and your own, using #ResolutionsForMyCity!
1. Vote in municipal elections. Too many of us don’t vote at the government level that most affects our actual lives on a daily basis.
2. Speak at City Hall in support of something good for your community and city, rather than just going to oppose things. And before you oppose something (such as well-designed density, new housing choices, or affordable housing), think carefully about who it’s meant to help, and put yourself in their place.
3. Choose different ways to get around your city. Walk, bike, skateboard, scooter, take public transit, as many times a week as you can. Focus especially on those short trips–for example, buy a shopping trolley and walk to the grocery store if possible. Lobby your leaders for improvements to support more choices, like better infrastructure and slower speed limits.
4. If you’ve never ridden a bike for transportation (as opposed to recreation)–and especially if you oppose safe bike lanes–spend a week riding a bike to work and other places you’d normally drive to. On one of those days, take your kids with you. Think about how you felt on every part of the trip.
5. Walk, bike, or use transit to take your kids to school, and teach them to do so on their own as soon as they’re able. Its safer, healthier, and developmentally better for them, and everyone else, than it is to drive them.
6. Take public transit whenever you can, and while you’re at it, look around at and engage with the real, honest humanity on display that you’re usually blind to when you’re behind the windshield.
7. When you’re supporting your kid’s interests, chose options that are in your neighborhood or are otherwise “local,” rather than sentencing you and your kids (and everyone else) to have to drive all over the city or region.
8. Before you indulge the urge to complain about “too much traffic” or “not enough parking,” learn all you can about induced demand or the law of congestion, and practice repeating to yourself the truth that “I’m not stuck in traffic, I am traffic.”
9. Take every opportunity you can to participate in civic life. Linger in and enjoy good parks, places, and streets every day, not just during special events. Your very presence and engagement adds life, vitality, and safety to a place, and helps them be more enjoyable for everyone.
10. Tell your elected leaders that you insist on real action on homelessness, starting with actual homes and supportive services, whether you can see its effects in your neighborhood yet or not. Remember that this is about human values, not property values. Remind them that providing homes for the homeless actually saves us all public money.