I first consciously noticed how badly we treat our common spaces when someone I know, who is fanatical about cleanliness, reached over her wall to dump trash on the other side. The casualness with which it was done made it clear that this was not a one-off. With somethings, once you see it, you cannot unsee it. I began to see this everywhere, this casual misuse of public spaces. Another prime example is road-side parking. We build houses to use every inch of the land we own, then we steal from the common land to park our cars or grow our gardens.
Another example is our pavements, where we have them. They are completely useless for their primary role - to allow people to walk in safety. They are more obstacle courses than walkways. Businesses consider the pavement adjoining their property as part of their property. Recently, I was pushing my cycle along on a pavement. I stopped to check my phone. The security person outside the shop in front of which I stopped immediately asked me to move on since it would, he claimed, turn away potential customers. Duh? The irony was the more than half the pavement was blocked because the shop was using the pavement to display its wares.
Pavements and roads are public spaces. Most roads are choked because the leftmost lane is usually commandeered by hawkers, taxis, rickshaws, and pedestrians. The pedestrians are forced to walk on the roads since the pavement is commandeered by the shops.
The knee-jerk reaction would be to resort to fines. But fines generally lead to rent-seeking behavior from the people monitoring these behaviors. Furthermore, fines inherently support the rich over the poor. The implication is that once it is paid, one can continue to break the law. For instance, if a shopkeeper knows that displaying wares on the pavement will bring in business that is greater than the fines it would attract, then there is no incentive to curb that behavior. We have to change the incentives. My go-to solution is to use time. If the shopkeeper who displayed wares on the pavement is required to close the shop immediately and also go to some authority in person to submit an explanation, it would be a strong disincentive to keep things on the pavement. Business people hate losing business time.
Finally, parking. Reserving kerbside space for parking is a gross wastage of scarce public space. Instead we should incentivize the construction of multilevel parking lots within our cities and towns. This brings about multiple benefits. Almost immediately, it frees up one extra lane on the roads. It also reduces double parking, which is a direct result of having kerbside parking in the first place. It will also reduce pollution from idling cars. In cities that have extreme heat, it will mean people not coming back to cars that feel like ovens. Forcing people to walk to shops after parking will lead to better health outcomes.
As our cities and towns cram more and more people into smaller areas, it will require us to make effective use of our public spaces. It will need a rethink of how we design public spaces, how we use them, and the kind of services we need to ensure cleanliness.
As John F. Kennedy said, "All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, not in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin."
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