Uploaded on 2014-10-13 by CarolinaTrotta

[1]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14132109425634426.jpg This is a picture of the street São Clemente (Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro), which is the way I walk to reach the place where I work. This is an important street for the city since it passes throughout the neighborhood and connects it to other neighborhoods. In this picture the visible information we can see is the car traffic, the flow of people on the sidewalks (and, if you look well, there’s a lady trying to cross the street at a stretch without crosswalk) and two bicycles tied to a pole. There are also many signposts and some advertisements. We can see the aerial wiring and a lot of trees on one side of the street (they belong to the building on that side of the street). Finally, it is possible to see a recurring aspect in the city, the hills framed by buildings. The first invisible information on this photo is that this is a very old street, and one of the consequences of this is that it is narrow. Despite being a major street, when it was taking shape, many years ago, people didn’t had the idea of the amount of traffic it would receive. We can see that the oldest buildings are closest to the street an that’s one of the reasons why the sidewalk width is fickle: at some parts it’s less than one meter (with poles that make impossible for two people to walk side by side), and at other parts it’s more than 3 meters. At this street there are schools, stores, places to eat, a subway station access, the entrance to Dona Marta hill and other points of attraction, besides the houses and residential buildings, which generate a high flow of pedestrians on this street. Another related invisible information to this aspect is that in places where the sidewalk is wider there is a greater concentration of people and shops or places to eat. The second invisible information on this photo is the BRS (Bus Rapid Service) system recently deployed at this street. It consists of organizing bus stop (only some bus lines are allowed to stop at certain bus stops) and of separating traffic lanes to be exclusively for public transportation (this is made by painting a blue line at the street that indicates witch lanes are exclusive for buses). When it began to be deployed in the city, this system generated controversies because people believed that removing a strip of car traffic would make the traffic even more chaotic. What happened instead was that the car traffic continued to be the same (congested, as always) and the public transportation become faster. I believe that these two information have complementary potential to contribute for the knowledge about cities and about how to make them better. The key concept is the space. The space you give to each component of the city, and how it influence people’s lives. If you take away some space from cars, giving it to the public transportation, you improve the public transportation and the traffic doesn’t become (more) chaotic. On the other hand, even though there’s no adequate structure for pedestrians, people still walk to the places they need to go (the same principle is valid for bicycles). This shows that people like to walk; they prefer doing it in short distances at streets where they can stop to eat look, or buy something. Knowing this about people, knowing in with streets they prefer to walk, and having in mind that taking away space from cars doesn’t necessarily means to turn traffic into chaos, it is possible to rethink about a means of encouraging healthier locomotion for both cities and for people.