A city shouldn't have "tourist areas" It can have
neighborhoods that tourists enjoy seeing and visiting. But a "tourist
area" is an amusement park where nobody actually lives.
This is a plan to sacrifice what remains of our city's most famous neighborhood as a tourist area.
French Quarter streets where cars aren’t welcome. Sidewalks converted
to outdoor patios. And lower speed limits for the cars that do travel
through.
Those are just some of the ways New Orleans officials are
considering transforming the French Quarter and surrounding areas,
according to documents released by the city Tuesday. The draft plans are
all aimed at making the city's most important tourist areas more
pedestrian friendly, though some critics worry about the effect on
residents and necessary vehicle traffic.
If this were a plan to make the
entire city
more pedestrian
friendly, reduce the need for there to be as many cars on the streets,
and help people connect to their jobs or their social lives without
having to own a vehicle themselves, it would be a good idea. That's not
what it is, though. It's a plan to further isolate a "tourist area" from
local
access depriving it of even the pretense of the character that made it a
tourist attraction in the first place. Because, as always, step 3 is
profit.
City officials view the effort as one that will put New Orleans on a
par with Paris, the town of Vicchio in Florence, Italy, and other cities
that have prioritized pedestrians in tourist-heavy corridors and
enjoyed increased tourism as a result, Deputy Chief Administrative
Officer Ramsey Green said. He argued that the push is all the more
critical now, as the city grapples with a sharp drop-off in tourists and
the sales-tax dollars they bring, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic
and to local restrictions on French Quarter businesses.
"Our small
businesses, our restaurants, our places that people want to visit, how
do we give them more space than perhaps fits in their four walls? And
that's kind of what this is," Green said.
Not sure
what the actual logic is here so we're hesitant to even argue with it.
But to say the least it's a dubious notion that a travel business
depressed by fear of a still raging pandemic is alleviated by a car-less
Quarter. Worried about the health consequences of flying across the
country, sleeping in a strange bed, and dining out in public? Well what
if we told you nobody can park there now? Feel better? Besides, aren't
the marketing people focusing more on the "drive-in" traveler now,
anyway? What are we going to do with all those cars?
Oh dear.
Even
in better times, the desperate pursuit of tourism at the expense of
residents' priorities has become a global scourge. Cities all over the
world, including some of those cited by Cantrell officials have been
struggling with the consequences of allowing their culturally
significant neighborhoods to become playgrounds for the wealthy where
nobody actually lives.
Attracting 14 million tourists a year, Florence is Italy’s
most-visited city after Venice and Rome. Boasting a huge and rich
variety of the world’s heritage and surrounded by Tuscany’s rolling
hills, the city’s popularity is easy to understand.
But as with Venice and Rome, the growth in tourism has seen residents
driven out of town by the rising cost of living and arrival of Airbnb:
according to a Siena university study, one in five properties in the
historic centre is advertised as a short-term let.
Some measures, however, seem to be paying off. “One of the main
issues is that everyone is so focused on the historic centre, which is
only a 5km sq area in a city of 105km sq,” said Del Re. “So we are
heavily promoting areas outside of the centre.
Which
is why reasonable people are suspicious of the motivation behind the
plans in New Orleans. The laudable stated purpose of reducing vehicular
traffic in general is a flimsy rationalization offered in bad faith. In
truth we're just offering the tourism industry something it's been
wanting forever but we're only now desperate enough to give.
Plans to restrict more traffic in the French Quarter have been
floated before, only to be killed after critics accused the city of
trying to make the half square-mile area more palatable to tourists and
said the changes would make things harder for residents.
Mayor Mitch Landrieu backed down from a 2017 plan to permanently bar cars on Bourbon Street.
But
the potential this time around to recoup revenues lost to the
coronavirus contagion has apparently sold many bars, restaurants and
businesses on the idea after Mayor LaToya Cantrell first floated it in
May.
It's a classic example of
how capitalism commoditizes and consumes everything and how a crisis
like the pandemic only accelerates that process. In case of emergency
just pull the lever that makes all the unjust and policies that benefit
the wealthiest people go even faster. It's all we're ever capable of.
