Tourist area

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?

Hard Rock Parking Garage & Golf Cart Rental

— jabco (@JABC0) July 1, 2020

  

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.