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The Happy City1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Itinerary | Home
This choreography is now spilling over into Paris’ traffic lanes, says Marzloff. With cars and bikes and buses mixed together, nobody can be sure what will be on the road ahead of them. Everyone is becoming more awake to the rhythm of asymmetrical flow. The clincher? Making the road seem more dangerous by injecting thousands of bikes into traffic may actually be making it safer. Bike accident statistics have flatlined, even as the number of cyclists has jumped in Paris by nearly 50 percent in the last six years. Marzloff and I encounter four empty Vélib’ stations in half an hour. “We’re just at the beginning,” Marzloff tells me. “What will happen when we have 200,000 people using Vélib’ every day?” Parisians are indeed moving differently, but this new dance is only one symptom of a more fundamental transformation. Changing the way we use city streets may make us happier. That’s because such changes tinker with psychology that has guided us since the Stone Age. It all comes down to trust. According to evolutionary psychology, our cave-dwelling ancestors fared much better against long-toothed beasts and other enemies when they worked together. Over the millennia, humans evolved mechanisms to push us toward trust. Researchers have found that our brains still release feel-good neurotransmitters when we co-operate with others – even with strangers. Flash forward to rush hour: If you’ve fought gridlock in Paris or Sydney or Vancouver, you have likely experienced the animosity – and bursts of adrenalin – produced by driving. University of British Columbia professor emeritus John Helliwell, an economist who studies happiness and social connections, told me that this is but a tiny whiff of the anxiety our ancestors once felt when caught alone in the wilds. It’s you, alone against the lions. On the other hand, encounters we have on foot or by bike tend to build trust. It’s in the eye contact we make as we choreograph our movements. When it works, we become just a little less fearful of each other. “Frequency of positive interaction is the key,” insists Helliwell. So the more we meet outside of our cars, the kinder and gentler we’re likely to become. Helliwell’s data on Canadian cities has shown that our happiest neighbourhoods are those that report high levels of trust. As a bonus, those trusting, happy folks are more likely to volunteer, to vote and to return lost wallets to strangers. This is more than academic psychobabble. Bogotá was mired in poverty, chaos, violence and crippling traffic when Enrique Peñalosa decided to redesign it using lessons from happiness theory nearly a decade ago. Armed with a stack of research on well-being, the then mayor vowed to turn his city into an engine for happiness. His method? Like Delanoë, Peñalosa declared war on cars. He abandoned plans for suburban highways and instead used the money to build vast parks, hundreds of kilometres of bike paths and pedestrian “freeways.” He pushed cars off prime road space in order to make room for an efficient rapid bus system so that the city would feel more fair. |
