Let’s take a moment to absorb this charming scene. We see a gorgeous historic stucco home with opulent window boxes framed by open shutters. I particularly like the many pumpkins and gourds at the base of the topiaries; they’re almost almost lascivious– in the best way! And at the center of this autumnal Garden of Eden is a woman on a bike, pausing to admire it all.

Now, I have a question for you: what’s missing from this photo?

Subscribe now

Her helmet? Well, unfortunately, that’s debatable. Studies report that drivers perceive cyclists in safety gear as “less human,” and therefore drive more aggressively when encountering a person in a helmet. So, this lady in red might actually be making herself safer without one.

Okay, not the helmet then. So, what is missing? Wait a minute! She’s on the sidewalk. And even though there is no dedicated bike lane anywhere in this area, and even though she likely feels much safer in this buffered pedestrian zone—away from the jacked-up trucks and distracted drivers sending texts from behind the wheel—technically, she’s breaking the law. It is illegal to bike on the sidewalk in Charleston. So, maybe what’s missing is a police officer writing a citation?

Also debatable. Very debatable.

What is clearly absent from this photo is… drumroll please…a car.

I know this city well, and I know that this particular house has a parking space in front of it. And yet, in this alluring autumnal image, there is no car to be seen. In fact, when I scroll through Explore Charleston’s website, it’s almost as though Charleston has no cars! Nearly every single one of the artfully shot publicity images is car-free.

Let’s consider this next photograph snapped from the High Battery.

Blue skies, beautiful homes, and lots of greenery. Just look at the vibrant tips of the oleanders skimming the inside of the seawall—how lush! What’s clever about this photo is what you don’t see. Hidden from view are the rows of parked cars on either side of the street, plus the two lanes of traffic cruising past.

Here’s another photo from Explore Charleston’s website—one with a horse carriage.

In this image, there are no cars on King Street. Not only have I walked along this street hundreds of times, I also lived in an apartment at this very intersection, and I can assure you there are cars passing through (and blasting music and honking) all the time.

Here are a few more from the website.

More beautiful images, and hardly any cars. The same goes for Explore Charleston’s robust Instagram page, with 338,000 followers. The grid is saturated with dreamy images and idyllic settings. You’ll find tantalizing citrus cocktails, sweeping sunsets, and fancy people doing fancy things. But you won’t find a lot of cars.

The post above particularly stood out to me. It’s another gorgeous shot of King Street, again with no cars. And if you squint your eyes, you’ll see not one but two people with bikes on the sidewalk. Huh. Did you know that Charleston recently eliminated all bike parking from King Street? At first, it became illegal to lock a bike on the sidewalk, which sort of made sense. King Street is tight. The sidewalks are narrow. Most of the space has been given to cars: two lanes for car traffic and a third for parked cars. When making space for pedestrians, instead of taking some space from those cars, bikes got the shaft. They had to be stowed in designated corrals. But then, the City removed all of those bike corrals, even the one in front of Blue Bicycle Books, which, to me—as a writer who travels by bike—felt sadly ironic. With this most recent mobility mandate, the City has not only made a clear statement about it’s attitude toward bikes, it has enshrined its values in law.

It’s an interesting paradox: the laws governing our roads make our streets inconvenient and dangerous for people on two feet or two wheels, and yet the city’s official tourism-marking agency sells Charleston as a pedestrian and cycling paradise.

I doubt Explore Charleston’s content creators intended to curate a gallery of car-free images. I think they just figured out what worked. They discovered that people reacted positively to car-free scenes. So, in turn, they responded with posts of car-free photos.

But why do posts without cars do well? Could it be that, on a subconscious-level, even people who believe cars deserve unchecked dominance on our roads would actually prefer a world in which they’re not around?

Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe it’s just that cars are ugly. Explore Charleston is no dummy. The people behind this economic engine know how to market a town: show the pretty; hide the ugly. Have the photographer squat behind the oleanders on the High Battery. Wait for the split-second moment when there isn’t a car in sight on King Street before snapping a photo. Find the glamor shot. Get the flattering angle.

Explore Charleston is not alone in this tactic. We all hide the ugly and show the pretty. When we want to take a picture of a live oak, we pivot just enough to exclude the chain-link fence in the background from our photo. We angle our laptops to hide our messy offices during zoom calls. Not only are we editing versions of what we want others to see, we’re showing the way we want the world to be.

So, this gets me thinking. What if Explore Charleston’s website gallery and Insta feed are not advertisements for the Holy City, but rather a vision board for our City’s great future? Maybe Explore Charleston is much more than a marketing agency and actually a portal to our collective desires. Perhaps this polished government agency is—whether intentionally or unintentionally — sending a clear picture of what Charleston should look like when we put down the camera and take action to make our city what we really want it to be.

I stilled, willing the enchanting music to return. I wanted to fold into the sound, to dissolve into its reverberations. Almost imperceptibly, the music floated back into our apartment. Where was it coming from? A church, likely, but which one? “Let’s find out,” my husband had said.

We shoved our sneakers on, hustled down two flights of stairs, and pushed against the heavy wooden door that opens to our street. We live in Ghent’s city center, just steps from the thousand-year-old Gravensteen Castle. All day long, hundreds of tourists stream beneath its portcullis and spill out toward the nearby cafes. Residents pedal past on bikes. Pedestrians cross the cobblestones to picnic beside the canal or perch on the low wall near the tram stop. Our street is busy, often packed. And yet, it’s quiet enough for music to find its way through the bustle and into our home. How?

In 2017, Ghent implemented a circulation plan that routed through traffic outside the city. Cars are allowed, but by design, biking, walking, and public transit are significantly more convenient modes of travel. The result: far fewer cars on the road. And guess what else? Much less noise. Take a listen to the video below.

On our bustling street, there is the ever-present hum of conversation, punctuated every now and then by a sneeze, a whistled tune, or a sudden burst of laughter. The murmur reminds me of when I was a child and my parents were throwing a party, and I’d fall asleep to the convivial chatter in the rooms below. I think I enjoy this particular noise on a primal level; it signals to me that the village is near, that I am safe.

There are other sounds outside our Belgian home. When the tram snakes past, a low rumble grows and gently recedes beneath the human voices. We live in a low-emission zone, so the motors of the cars that do pass are fairly quiet. They don’t go fast either, generally keeping pace with the bicycles. And importantly, as the cars are seen as guests on the roads, drivers don’t blast music or honk their horns. The street is not theirs alone, so they’re respectful. It’s only when mopeds grind through that the serenity is ruptured.

Because of this mostly acoustic streetscape, Anthony and I were able to follow our ears toward the celestial sounds, even when in the thick of this busy urban area. The music softened as we took wrong turns down narrow alleys and became amplified as we got closer to the source. We were jogging along the backside of a church when my husband said, “there.”

He was pointing to the top of the city’s bell tower. I tilted my head back. Somewhere, hidden high up in the stone tower, people sang. Also unseen, a musician played a carillon, striking bronze bells with a wooden baton. We’d found the source— the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Anthony and I sat on a bench holding hands as we let the music flow through us.

It turns out, our song-chase was the first of many musical experiences in Ghent. A few weeks later, near the city bell tower, a piano appeared.

This piano is one of several placed around the city for anyone to use. There are no posted rules. No signs. And somehow, it all works. The result is organic gatherings of random passersby joining together for a moment of song.

The scene above was unrehearsed. Fully Spontaneous. However, I want to be very clear about one thing: that it happened at all was not accidental. Ghent’s urban planners fully intended for people to gather here. They redesigned this area—which was once a parking lot for cars—to be a place for people to congregate.

In fact, many vibrant gathering spaces in Ghent were once dedicated to housing cars. Part of Ghent’s 2017 circulation plan included reclaiming those spaces, returning them to the people. Filip Watteeuw—the man who spearheaded Ghent’s bold transition from a car-centric to a people-centric city—put it simply: “When you make space for cars, you get cars. When you make space for people, you get people.”

And as I have witnessed, when people gather, they make a joyful noise. From an old man whistling a cheerful melody to a busker squeezing his accordion, this city sings. Even choirs spring up in the most unexpected places.

It’s a wonderful, wild experience to turn a corner in search of a croissant and stumble upon an exuberant choir. The music made me smile. It made the people around me smile. What we hear affects us.

Back home in Charleston, I live at an intersection frequented by car commuters. Loud truck engines rev past. People make calls on their Bluetooth, with the voice on the receiving end cranked to max volume. I hear all types of music, too—pop, rock, country, even gospel— blasted from car speakers.

And the honking. There is so much honking. Right turns are not allowed at the red light on our corner. And as signs are often ignored, the drivers idling behind the car stopped at the red light don’t realize why the car ahead has not turned right. Out of frustration, they blast their horns. This happens all day long.

We have screens on our windows to keep fresh air flowing through the house during the shoulder months, but often the noise pollution from the cars is so bad I have to close them in order to concentrate on my work. Ten years ago, I planted a palmetto tree because I love the sound of the rattling of the fronds, but the racket of the traffic has grown so cacophonous that I generally avoid my my front porch altogether. In order to cocoon myself from the clamor coming from the cars and trucks on the street, I have cut myself off from the natural environment.

Before I moved to Ghent, I would have thought, well, that’s what I get for living in a city. But now I’m singing a different tune. I’m realizing we don’t have to automatically defer to the whims and impulses of motorists. We can refuse to accept the pollution of our city’s soundscape. If we want whistling and conversation and spontaneous group singing, we can have it.

Like Ghentians, Charlestonains have a choice. We can shape our built environment to create the sounds we do want. We can reroute commuter traffic, trading car speakers at max volume for community choirs delivering max joy. We can transform parking lots into places for people to come together and make a joyful noise. We can prioritize quieter modes of transit and encourage a culture where motorists respect the neighborhoods they drive through. We can create a new soundscape so that on fine days, we can open our windows and return to our porches.

If we want to, we can compose a different city score altogether.

Back in the 1900s, someone might have called me a “jay.” That was the term used by American city slickers to describe unsophisticated rubes from the country awed by their new surroundings.

While we’re back in the 1900s, let’s stay there a bit. It’s a time when the streets in the US were still thought of as public spaces—where children played, vendors sold wares from pushcarts, and streetcar riders hopped off the trolley to walk home. People zigged to the pharmacy and zagged to their friends’ houses. Streets were places to congregate, connect, and cruise from one place to the next.

But then the cars arrived, and a battle for space ensued. A bloody battle.

People were being struck and killed by automobiles at alarming rates, particularly children. Initially, the public blamed the automobile. But then, lickety-split, the narrative flipped. In a matter of years, the blame was placed squarely on the pedestrians.

Why? And how?

In light of the many maimings and deaths, car manufacturers and others who profited from the proliferation of the automobile needed to win over the American public. They needed both to reduce deaths and to also claim the streets for cars. They needed people out of the way, crossing the street only at designated intersections. They needed to convince Americans that streets were no longer a place for children to play and for people to connect. To do that, they had to change the culture.

Remember that slang word “jay” at the top of this article? As you might guess, the term “jaylwaker” is related. Initially, “jaywalker” was an obscure term, but then the automobile advocates learned that using the shame-laden word was an extremely effective tool to shift behavior. By appealing to a person’s deep desire to avoid shame, automobile advocates convinced the American public that it wasn’t that cars were dangerous, it’s that the pedestrians who got hit by them were idiots.

Check out the ad below as one example. This image comes from the fantastic article by Peter D. Norton: “Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street.”

Take a close look at that big guy in the center. He looks goofy. Dumb. Ugly. And maybe deserving of his impending crash with the automobile?

And the dialogue box above his head suggests he’s a newcomer to Brooklyn. So, that would make him a tourist. A “jay.” It would make him someone like me when I first arrived in Ghent and also like the thousands of visitors who come to Charleston every day—someone naive to their new surroundings. Someone in a different head-space. Someone awed.

When I have conversations about pedestrian safety back in the States, I hear echoes of this 100-year-old campaign, even from elected officials. They say something like, “yes, pedestrian safety is a problem! We need to teach pedestrians, especially tourists, how to be more careful.”

This absolutely baffles me.

First of all, could it be we’re going after the wrong population? When we target pedestrians to carry the burden of safety, it’s like telling a kid at the school cafeteria to wear a poncho, because there’s yet another food fight, and while it’s messy and no one likes jello pudding in their hair, food-throwing kids will be food-throwing-kids. What can you do? Or, it’s like telling runners to wear poop-proof shoes, because people no longer have to pick up after their dogs. Or blaming women for sexual assault because they dressed too alluringly.

Charleston’s Heads Up! campaign feels equally ridiculous.

The campaign, launched in 2023, was supposed to make the city “much safer” for people outside of cars. While I am glad for any efforts to make pedestrians and cyclists safer, the guiding principles of the campaign seem very much rooted in the jaywalking mentality concocted a century ago. When I first encountered the campaign signs in the city, the only ones I saw were the ones directed at pedestrians, encouraging us to use the crosswalk, look up from our phones, and maybe even lift a hat off our head to be more visible. For realz! (See red sign in photo below).

When researching the campaign, I did see there were initiatives to reach out to the drivers as well. The green sign on the left of the photo above is directed at that population. It reminds drivers to “expect people in crosswalks.”

Um. Yes. For heavens’ sake, please expect people in crosswalks! Isn’t that the bare minimum a driver can do?

This whole Heads-Up! Campaign is a head-scratcher.

Here’s another puzzling aspect of this campaign: over and over again, studies show that signs don’t really work. Mostly, they’re ignored by drivers, and if drivers do notice the signs, soon they habituate to the image and drive just like they used to. And, according to Smart Growth America, Charleston’s streets remain among the deadliest in the nation, and they’re getting worse, not “much safer.”

But, you might say, I saw the Heads Up article and learned that nearly half of all incidents of bike and pedestrian collisions with automobiles were at fault of the person outside the car. Legally, I’m sure that’s true. But could at least one of the collisions where the pedestrian is at fault be attributed to the scenario sketched below?

In AI generated diagram above, the desired path of the pedestrian is the redline, and the legal path is the green one. Have you ever darted across the street because it felt absurd to walk so far out of your way to a crosswalk just to get to the other side?

I have. And other people do it, too. When it comes to a pedestrian’s route, could at least some of the blame be placed on the city’s design?

And let’s get back to those darned jawalking tourists, the ones who must be educated about road safety. Can you really inform every newcomer of the city’s rules? Is this really and truly a feasible objective? Perhaps the Charleston Visitor’s Bureau should slap neon stickers on those colorful maps of the peninsula, warning Charleston tourists: “Don’t look down at this map, you fool! Look up or you’ll be flattened! Look up! Look up!!”

Tour guides are in an especially tricky situation. One pointed out to me that to legally cross the street when she’s on the High Battery, her options are limited. She either has to double back all the way to the crosswalk at Hazel Parker Playground or to round the corner and cross the street once she reaches Murray Boulevard. Why do she and our economy-boosting tourists need to do the extra walking when the cruising pickup truck gets full reign of the road?

My initial thought was, well, we could fix that with more crosswalks. But now that I’ve been in Ghent for a month, I’m not sure sure. Maybe we don’t need any! Check out the video below to see the main intersection in the heart of Ghent. Y’all, thousands of people roam this spot daily, and there are no crosswalks, no stop signs, and not even traffic lights.

It’s a wildly different urban landscape, and yet—even without a city-wide campaign to teach newbies like me how to navigate the streets—it somehow all works.

How? I think it’s due to a recent cultural shift. In 2017, Ghent implemented a circulation plan that forced shared use of the streets so that today this European city looks a lot like how Charleston did in in the early 1900s. Nowadays, people who walk Ghent’s streets aren’t considered jawalkers, they’re just people being people.

Humans aren’t that different across time and space. Whether we’re a country bumpkin from the last century or a jet-setter landing in Belgium for the first time, we are awed by new surroundings, and—despite what the signs say—we generally prefer walking the shortest distance from where we are to where we want to be.

So, instead of trying to train social behavior around the automobile, perhaps Charleston can go back to the way our city once was: organically designed around the human.

Taking back space in the streets is not a new idea. Time and time again, research shows happy, vibrant, and economically sound cities put people first, so it makes me wonder, when it comes to how we think about Charleston’s future and our continued deference to the primacy of the automobile, who are the real jays?

Back home in Charleston, South Carolina, we have an average-size American refrigerator. Many of my friends have bigger ones. My parents have two refrigerators. The extra one is a holdover from their days when they had a full house. But after a Costco trip, those shelves fill, too. I am from the land of big fridges! Lots of fridges! How would we manage abroad?

Turns out, our fridge in Ghent is both small and has plenty of space. Not because our eating habits have changed (though, I will say the quality of food in Belgium is noticeably higher. For starters, I have yet to spy any bizarrely large apples.) The difference is—in Ghent—we shop more frequently, but we buy fewer items each trip. My grocery list is short; I go to the store every two-to-three days.

I think this has to do with the way the town is set up. By intentional design, the city of Ghent wants you to walk, bike, or take public transit. The medieval town squares that became parking lots were returned to being town squares. Driving is allowed, but inconvenient. Therefore, most of the people pouring in and out of the stores in the city center are entering from the street, not a parking lot.

A lot of these grocery stores are underground, beneath old stone buildings, and they’re all about the size of a Trader Joe’s (which I like). At the entrance are stacks of little blue bins on wheels, which make it easy to dart around the store quickly. People breeze through the aisles, buying a dozen items or so, and quickly pop out into the lively street to return home on foot or by bike.

Recently, after weeks of living here, I encountered my first metal grocery carts (similar to ours back home) in the Albert Heijn. The two women pushing them took up the whole aisle. I couldn’t nimbly reach around them or scoot between them to grab the hummus, so I had to walk backwards and wait so they could roll past. It wasn’t a huge inconvenience, but after a dozen trips without having to slow down at all, the aisle-blocking was noticeable.

Could there be a simple mobility metaphor here? That the grocery carts are the cars, and the little blue baskets are the pedestrians and bikers? When we travel smaller, it seems to me, there’s better flow. Movement is more efficient for everyone when we take up less space.

In fact, my posts all seem to be boiling down to that one idea: space.

We have more space in America: more space for big grocery carts, big grocery hauls, and big fridges. That space conditioned me to certain buying habits.

Our neighborhood store back in Charleston is Food Lion. To put it gently, shopping at Food Lion is not a pleasure. There lighting is harsh, the floors are dingy, and there are often long lines. For a long time, I called the Food Lion the Shitty Kitty. But this neighborhood grocery store also sells kombucha, and I’ll be darned if the avocado selection isn’t better than the one at Harris Teeter. So when my friend suggested I call it the Kitty, I made the switch.

Subscribe now

A typical trip to the Kitty involved me buying a weeks’ worth of groceries. Then I’d wheel my big metal grocery cart over to my car or cargo bike, load it up with stuffed bags, ride home, lug my bags into the kitchen, and then unpack all the groceries. I’d place my new yogurt next to the old one. I stack cheddar cheese like building blocks and shove a bag of kale next to an open one with leaves starting to turn slimy. I have bought extras of everything to prolong the time before I have to go back to the Kitty, shitty or not.

And the worst? After all that effort, I usually realize I forgot to put oat milk (or sandwich bread, or whatever) on the list. After all that effort, I don’t have what I want. Ugh. It suuuuuucks going back to the store. It’s so much work! But here in Ghent, grabbing one item is no biggie. Popping into the store is a breeze.

So is writing my grocery list: I know exactly what I need because my fridge and pantry are so parsed down that it’s easy to see what’s missing. This, at least for me, makes shopping a pleasure.

There seem to be other benefits to shopping frequently, too. First, we have little-to-no food waste in Ghent. Back home, where my fridge is fully stocked for the week, I need to revive the celery stalks in a glass of water, compost the slimy kale, and on rare occasion and with a heavy heart, toss expired meat. The bottom half of the freezer is a food time capsule, holding sub-par spanakopita that never got used for our holiday party two years ago and a bag of mixed berries that morphed into a block of purple ice. Is your fridge like this, too? On average, Americans throw away about 40% of their groceries. That’s a lot of wasted food. Could this statistic be tied to our bulk buying?

Second, I enjoy the new foods more often. Who doesn’t love pawing at a fresh carton of blueberries? But when that same fruit has been lurking in my fridge for four days, even when the blueberry carton is unopened, they’re not as appealing. Fresh food is better. And when you shop more frequently, you get it fresh more often.

I am guessing that Americans living in big cities like New York and San Francisco might have shopping habits similar to mine in Ghent, with the density supporting more stores. But Ghent doesn’t have sky scrapers. This town is wonderfully human-scale, like Charleston.

So, as we think about the future shape of our city, do we engineer the transportation of the Holy City around grocery shopping? I doubt that’s the answer. But I do think it’s a real part of the equation.

Why? Here is what I have learned while living in Ghent: physical movement through space affects us mentally. Going to work or the gym, to drop your child off at school or to pick up groceries… all of these everyday errands that fill up our days can be a sources of joy or stress. It’s up to us to decide which. The shape of the city shapes our lives. Design dictates our experience.

So, who dictates design? I believe it’s up to us, the people. You and me. We should think carefully about the way we want to move through our city, including how we want to grocery shop, and including my buddies in the ‘burbs! As our city evolves, we must be clear about what we want, whatever that is. Because if we don’t put what we want on the list, the thing we want gets forgotten.

We don’t have a car in Belgium. We haven’t needed one; the public transit in Ghent is fantastic, where you can get to just about anywhere and arrive on time. Like, down to the minute on time.

The tram line for this particular journey ended about a half mile from the Planet Group area, where the match was being held. If it were just me and Anthony, that walk wouldn’t be a problem, but because our kids were already cranky, we opted for a chartered bus organized by the Klijke Atletiek Associatie (the Royal Athletics Association) that would pick us up near the city’s center and drop us off right at the arena.

We had to wait a bit in the rain (it drizzles often here, and without much warning) for the bus to arrive. During that time, we had a chat with a fan of the opposing team. While we had some issues with the language barrier, I fully understood what he wanted me to know: he was not “a hooligan.”

A hooligan?

Before I had time to clarify, our bus arrived. It was clean and comfortable and its destination clearly marked. Nice, but not eye-popping.

So, what had me pressing my face against the glass, breathing hot air onto the bus’s window? It was the absolutely foreign (to me) scene that materialized as we inched closer to the arena.

Bikes! Hundreds of bikes! Thousands! Fans funneled in from across the city, masses of them on two wheels. I had never seen anything like it.

I hope you take a moment to watch the video above. Can you see the line of cars in front of us? While my videography didn’t capture the droves of bicycles anywhere near their peak, it can show the efficiency (or lack thereof) of two different modes of transportation. Because bikes are smaller and nimbler, cyclists can weave around each other at varying speeds while keeping the flow steady. So, when the biker in front slows or stops, it’s easy for the faster ones coming up from behind to scoot around it. (And, by the look of their body language, have fun doing it).

Vehicles don’t have this agility. When the road is congested, there is little extra room for cars to maneuver. They’re stuck. Because we were in a big honkn’ bus, we were stuck, too. In fact, even though we’d set out with plenty of time, we were getting dangerously close to missing the start of the game.

Thankfully, all those bikes meant fewer cars on the road, which meant less traffic for the rest of us. We eventually arrived with minutes to spare.

After some confusion about which gate to enter, we made it to our seats just before kick-off. We had a great view of the pitch, but my attention was immediately drawn to the plexiglass wall running the length of the stands next to me. What was that for? And who were all of those rowdy folks in black, banging on drums and chanting on the other side of the partition?

Oh. Right. The hooligans.

The fans of the opposing team from Brugge were intense. So intense, apparently, that they needed to be walled off. They yelled nonstop, and when their team scored a goal, they pulled faces and made lewd gestures at the Ghent fans. I found their fervor entertaining, though I’ll admit I was grateful for the plexiglass.

So why am I telling you about the hooligans? What does this have to do with transportation?

It’s this: if we weren’t taking public transit, I wouldn’t have had that conversation with a stranger in the rain. I wouldn’t have been primed to know about the hooligans.

Knowing about the hooligans wasn’t life-changing information, but it was useful. It gave me context, which helped me understand the culture surrounding this voetbal match. If we had arrived in a car, steeled-off from the outside world, I would not have had that conversation.

When we walk, bike, or take public transit, we interact more with others. It’s not perfect. Admittedly, there is the occasional stench of someones leftovers on the bus or maybe a loud drunk who stumbled on the tram. But in my experience, that’s the exception, not the rule. For the most part, people are kind and respectful. Gentlemen have offered me their seats. Once, when a toddler’s shoe fell off, she let me put it back on her foot. Most days, I share a smile with someone I’ve never seen before and will never see again.

Could cars be a bit like that plexiglass, separating us?

It makes me wonder if that partition escalated the fervor of the hooligans, and maybe the Ghent fans as well. The match intensified. The score was tied and the hooligans grew louder. They flicked off the Ghent fans. One even chucked an empty beer cup that landed on the shoulder of a girl in front of us. When Ghent scored second goal, they jeered right back at the hooligans. Would the behavior of the soccer fans be different if we were mixed together?

I don’t know, but I have found that the more I interact with the world, the more I am rewarded. People who are different from me seem less scary when I see them up close. Alternative forms of transit can offer spontaneous moments with others, and generally they are positive, even informative, perhaps giving us the chance to be a little less hooligan and a little more human.

Subscribe now

The walker gate is where people arriving any way other than a vehicle enter school. Picture this: young children wobbling on balance bikes, confident kindergarteners plowing past on scooters, older kids back-pedaling on mountain bikes, and parents pushing strollers with one hand and sipping coffee from a tumbler with the other. The whole morning felt wonderfully like Sesame Street.

Except for the cars.

There is another entry point for the school for those who arrive by car. It’s on the other side of the campus, off Huger Street. Yet a handful of car commuters repeatedly dropped their kids off at the walker gate. I understand why: the car-rider line takes longer. It’s a one lane, one-way loop. When there are cars, there are lines. And just sitting there, inching forward in your car while the seconds tick away, is frustrating. It’s natural to want to break free. By breaking the rules, a parent can shave off a few minutes each morning by pulling up to the walker gate. And when they did, drop off was a breeze!

But these drivers were inadvertently putting the parents and children who use the walker gate at risk. People on the street who are not inside cars are vulnerable road users. They are not protected by the metal body of the car. It’s a deadly situation, and it’s a real problem where we live. Did you know that Charleston is the 12th deadliest metro area for pedestrians in the country?

At the time, I didn’t know the statistic either, but it wasn’t hard to see the potential danger that occurs when mixing kids on razor scooters with a car commuter who is up against a 7:40 school-start time.

I reached out to school officials, who promptly reminded the community of its car-rider policy in an email.

As you can imagine, the email had little effect. The same parents continued whipping their cars past little kids with shark fin bike helmets and parents kissing their children goodbye.

I bugged the administration again.

Soon, the school police was stationed at the walker gate every morning. Finally! A win! But those same drivers were still whipping by, all while the school police officer sat in his car.

I was fuming. I wanted to knock on his window and tell him to ticket the offender. I even thought about making signs myself, holding a poster high above my head that read: “for the safety of our children, cars must use the car rider line!”

But here’s the dilemma: this is my community, too. Some of those repeat offenders were acquaintances, even friends. As much as I care about safety, I also care about keeping the peace.

And maybe that’s the crux of all of this: socially, cars are accepted as the norm. I am asking my community to go against a cultural norm. That creates social friction. I hate social friction. So, I shrugged, told myself I tried my best, and moved on.

The following year, our younger daughter followed our older one, moving from James Simons to Buist Academy, a county wide magnet located on Calhoun Street in downtown Charleston. We were no longer walking our children to school. Sending them on the bus was an option, but the bus was notoriously unreliable. (Charleston’s city buses have no priority over regular traffic, so it’s nearly impossible for them to be reliable). I was now driving a carpool. Each child in the carpool owned a bike and was able-bodied and their school was only two miles from our homes, but we carpooled because sending them off on two wheels to battlefield the Charleston traffic felt like child abuse. It was just too dangerous.

I’ll never forget the first morning last year when it was my turn to drive carpool. While waiting at the intersection of Rutledge Avenue and Moultrie Street (where the James Simons walker gate is), I saw that the entire street to the walker gate at James Simons had been blocked off.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Children zoomed on scooters, cutting figure eights with their friends. Parents tossed their heads back in laughter, at ease knowing they didn’t have to watch their children at every second so as to prevent them from being flattened by a car. I was looking at a small sliver of paradise. It was even better than Sesame Street. And there I was, slouched in my idling car, dumbstruck.

I do not know what the school did to take back that street for walkers, the bikers, the kids on scooters and the babies in the strollers, but it took guts. I have always loved James Simons Montessori, so it was hard to leave when my children decided to try a new school. But now, since my children both lost their seats at Buist (a magnet school) to come with me to Ghent, we will return to James Simons in January 2027.

It will be an honor.

Greetings from Ghent, Belgium, where I am working as a Fulbright Scholar to learn how an old European city recently said: enough with the car accidents! We’re putting people first. In this post, I’ll provide some background as to why I—a fiction writer—moved from Charleston, South Carolina to the land of waffles and Dutch bikes to study transportation. And I’ll share what I plan to do with my grant while living here.

My quest for sensible street design started back in 2013, when my husband and I purchased a home at the intersection of Ashley Avenue and Huger Street, which, as you Charlestonians know, is just south of Hampton Park and close to The Citadel. Not too long after, I noticed car wrecks happening with alarming frequency. There were smaller fender benders, but also far more serious ones, too, involving tow trucks and ambulances. I had wondered, is this just a particularly bad intersection? Or, is this normal?

The accidents kept happening. I’d be in my kitchen about to add oat milk to my coffee and then—boom!—I’d hear the familiar, ominous crunch of metal. I’d step outside to see stunned drivers, shattered glass, the fronts of cars smashed so they looked like accordions. At night, over the hum of my box fan, I’d hear a crunch or a loud pop, and know immediately it was another wreck. One morning, I woke to see a car had entirely flipped upside down directly across the street from my front door. This is crazy, I had thought. Someone needs to do something!

A couple of years—and many wrecks—later, I became a mother. Soon, I knew, my children would walk these streets. I was my nightmare that their precious bodies would collide with a vehicle going even the speed limit, let alone at the speeds fast enough to flip a car. That’s when the instincts kicked in. Damnit, I thought, if I want to protect my children, I’ll have to be that person who does something.

I began my activism like most people do: I started with my local neighborhood association. My neighbors shared my grievances and agreed that something should be done, but, as I eventually learned and will explain later in this Substack, making changes to Charleston’s transportation system is so extremely complicated and exhausting that it’s really difficult for community groups (or anyone!) to be effective.

I tried other avenues, asking police officers to monitor the intersection (they did and ticketed reckless drivers, but then soon left). I met with surveyors in bright green vests on hot summer days, hoping that if we could provide data on the speeding cars, we could at least get a speed hump. (Again, I’ll explain later why it’s more likely you’ll see a unicorn than a speed hump on a State-owned road.) I invited a city engineer to my house. I recall a bit of our conversation back then. When watching cars blow past stop lights from the shade of my porch, she said something to the effect of “wow, it is really bad here.”

I felt validated. And we did get started with plans for changes to the two intersections where Congress and Huger cross Ashely Avenue. Despite my best efforts, those plans, started about ten years ago, are still in the works.

In the meantime, the city has added signs. At first, I was stoked. Progress! But since then I’ve learned that signs actually don’t do much at all to influence driver behavior (if you want more info on signs, read this easy-to-follow article). Essentially, signs do a better job at placating concerned citizens than actually making the roads safer. So, in all practical measures, the intersections near my home have essentially remained the same. The drivers continued to fly past my house, and the wrecks continued to happen.

Why was real change taking so long in Charleston?

One things I did know was that I had to keep trying. Maybe, I thought, I can show people what I see, then they’ll hop into action. I began taking photos of wrecks I happened to witness. Here is just a sampling:

I shared these images with neighbors and city officials. Everyone agreed they’re alarming. And everyone agreed something must be done. And they all cheered me on. I continued my push to improve the two intersections at Ashley and Congress and Ashley and Huger, sending dozens of emails, following up with phone calls, and taking a crash course in transportation engineering. I also enthusiastically joined Charleston’s Bicycling & Pedestrian Advisory Committee, hoping to make streets all over my city as safe as I’d hope to make Ashley Avenue.

Subscribe now

But then Covid happened. The committee disbanded. The planned improvements to the intersection at Congress were shelved. Subsequently, when the city emerged from the pandemic, the funding that was secured for the intersection was no longer enough to pay for the improvements. At some point later, during a Zoom review for the Huger intersection, the engineer had accidentally posted old plans to the shared screen, and somehow that meant the review of the designs would be tabled for another time. And on and on…

I was defeated. Ten years of trying, all that effort, and still no significant changes to my corner.

Here’s what I’ve learned in my time advocating for safer streets: the engineers, city officials, and residents all want safer streets. It’s just that change is hard because we’re part of a complicated system that, as it seems to me, prioritizes the flow of cars through a neighborhood over the safety, wellbeing, and happiness of the people who live there.

Why do cars get unchecked authority? And why is it so difficult and demoralizing to make our streets safe for people outside of cars? Is there a better way? And what can I do about it?

To answer those questions, I’m living in Ghent, Belgium. This spectacular medieval town was a lot like Charleston ten years ago; it, too, had given cars given free reign. People here used to crowd the skinny sidewalks in deference to the vehicle. They tolerated the noise and the traffic and the danger just as most of us do in Charleston without much thought. That is, until they decided: Enough.

I am so excited to share with you what it’s like to live in a city that invites cars to be the guest, not the boss. It’s truly a lovely everyday, every moment experience.

So, how did the people of Ghent transform their city center into one that puts people first? And, more importantly to me is—what was that narrative for change? That’s what I’m here to discover. And that’s what I want to bring with me back home (and ultimately as a novel).

Why fiction? The tangle of Charleston’s bureaucracy is a huge hurdle to overcome, but I think our cultural attitude toward cars might be the bigger obstacle. Stories open up the imagination. They introduce us to new possibilities.

I hope you’ll continue to read my posts and perhaps share them with others in our community. If we can imagine a different way of moving through our city, I believe that together, united, we can create a safer, more joyful experience in Charleston for everyone.