What's also so nice during that video is that you can hear people talking, the music (that doesn't need to be blaring) and you can even hear birds.
Vehicle traffic mutes those lovely sounds.
I'm reading the book Happy City, which early on includes a focus on Enrique Penalosa, a former mayor of Bogota who made some significant changes to that city (his brother Gil was part of that and then ran for mayor himself in Toronto where he came second to Tory).
"And what are our needs for happiness? We need to walk, just as birds need to fly. We need to be around other people. We need beauty. We need contact with nature. And most of all we need not to be excluded. We need to feel some sort of equality." E Penalosa
He then threw out his city's ambitious highway plan (and hiked gas taxes) and instead poured his budget into hundreds of miles of bike lanes (this happened 1998-2001); a vast new chain of parks and pedestrian plazas; and a network of new libraries, schools and daycare centres.
"A city can be friendly to people or it can be friendly to cars, but it can't be both." E Penalosa.
That said, he still initiated some major road projects as needed, but there was much more balance on other priorities. Some of the heavier handed things he did included restricting how often people could commute to work per week via car. He was almost recalled early on in his term for these sweeping changes and had low approval ratings but by the end of his term he had some of the highest historical approval ratings ever.
There's a 2009 documentary called Bogota Change about how one of the world's most dangerous, violent and corrupt capitals transitioned into a model city.
docs.google.com
edmonton.taproot.news
