planted city

The first three paragraphs of Peter Calthorpe’s recent article for Foreign Policy magazine, ‘Weapons of Mass Urban Destruction’. Calthorpe is a renowned San Francisco based urban planner and architect and a founding member of the Congress of New Urbanism. You can check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo source: Inhabitat)

From Greater Greater Washington:

The central fact about cars, from a planner’s perspective, is that they take up space. Lots of space. And this matters because space in cities (a.k.a real estate) is scarce and therefore expensive.

Cars take up space when they’re moving and they take up space when they’re parked, and even though they can’t be simultaneously moving and parked, you have to plan for both states and plan for peak demand; so you have to set aside some multiple of the real estate actually occupied by the car at any given time.

That’s just a practical observation about the spatial geometry of cities that doesn’t bow to my ideology or yours. And it would still remain true even if cars ran on nothing but recycled newspapers and emitted nothing but rainbows and unicorn tears.

In the past, our policy response has been to just set aside more and more space for cars: More freeways, more roads, more lanes on existing roads, more parking garages and surface lots. This approach hasn’t worked, and there are two very practical reasons why:

First, you can never build enough. There’s a phenomenon called “induced demand” that is very well understood by now. A new lane or a new freeway never reduces congestion in the long run: People respond to new capacity by driving more or by living or working in previously remote places, and you’re very quickly back where you started and have to build still more. The same phenomenon applies to increases in the supply of parking. It’s a game you can’t win.

Second, when you do make more space for cars you quickly start to crowd out any other potential mode of transportation, especially walking. All those parking lots and freeways and roads spread everything else out so that the distances become too great for walking. And the more you optimize any given space for cars the more hostile that space is for pedestrians. Very quickly you get to the point where it becomes impossible—or prohibitively depressing—to get things done on foot.

And this last fact has huge quality-of-life implications for human beings—not just because driving to a distant strip mall for a gallon of milk is less pleasant than walking to a corner store, but also because for many people driving simply isn’t an option.

Check out the rest of the article here. 

(Infographic source: Muenster Planning Office)

Getting Around, Safely: ‘Share the Road’ (PSA)

An encouraging sign of the times from the Canadian Automobile Association via their YouTube page. Who knows? Maybe one day they’ll just be known as the Canadian Mobility Association.

Related:

• ‘Bike-Car Relationship’ (CAA)
• ‘National conference brings bikers, motorists together’ (The Tyee)

(Source: youtube.com)

From CBC:

The average gas mileage of new cars and trucks in the U.S. will have to nearly double by 2025 under regulations that were finalized Tuesday by the Obama administration.

The new rules will require the fleet of new cars and trucks to average 54.5 miles per U.S. gallon (4.3 litres/100 km) in 13 years, up from 28.6 mpg (8.22 l/100 km) at the end of last year.

The regulations will bring dramatic changes to the cars and trucks in U.S. showrooms and drive automakers to introduce new technology to make vehicles cleaner and more efficient.

The Obama administration says the changes will save families more than $1.7 trillion US in fuel costs and bring an average savings of $8,000 over the lifetime of a new vehicle sold in 2025. The standards also are the biggest step the U.S. government has ever taken toward cutting greenhouse gas emissions, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said.

…

The 54.5 mpg standard came from the Obama administration’s quest to cut carbon dioxide emissions nearly in half by 2025. The gas mileage is what’s needed to make that cut.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Infographic source: NRDC)

My two bits: Building cities and towns where getting around by foot, bike, and transit is both easy and enjoyable is obviously a big piece of the puzzle. But, given that tens of millions of people currently depend on cars for transport this is a significant development. It’s also encouraging to see Obama putting forward an firm, demand-side solution to reduce both fossil fuel energy consumption and climate change pollution.

Getting Around: ‘What on Earth’ (Animated Short) 

From The NFB:

This animated short proposes what many earthlings have long feared – that the automobile has inherited the planet. When life on Earth is portrayed as one long, unending conga-line of cars, a crew of extra-terrestrial visitors understandably assume they are the dominant race. While humans, on the other hand, are merely parasites. An Oscar® nominee, this film serves as an entertaining case study.

Related:

• ‘We Are Approaching Peak Car Use’ (FastCoExist)
• ‘Surviving Two Billion Cars: China Must Lead the Way’ (yale e360)
• ‘For today’s youth, cars no longer represent freedom’ (Macleans)

Above are few paragraphs from bike injury lawyer David Hay’s recent op-ed in the Vancouver Sun, ‘The great debate over bike helmet laws’. There’s been quite a controversy stirred up over recent months here following news from that Vancouver will be joining more than 165 cities worldwide in getting a bike sharing system in 2013. The concern on the part of a lot of people here is that we have a provincial mandatory bike helmet law and in the two cities with bike shares and mandatory helmet use, Melbourne and Brisbane in Australia, the systems have not been very successful. Mexico City had a mandatory helmet law, but provided an exemption after the first year of their bike share system. There have been some workarounds proposed here in Vancouver, but nothing that seems like a sure thing at this point. That said, I think Hay makes a good point that the critical factors for improving safety for cyclists and making cycling a more mainstream way to get around is through better infrastructure and a change in thinking on part of drivers and cyclists alike. 

(Photo source: Open File)

From The Atlantic Cities:

It’s no secret that American cities are trying all kinds of things to encourage bike commuting. Some are building bike lanes even if it means taking space away from cars. Some have authorized bike-share programs. Some are requiring workplaces to designate bicycle parking or, failing that, compelling them to allow bikes inside the building.

All of these efforts have resulted in varying degrees of success. But there’s a hidden factor in some decisions to ride or not to ride to work — or, if not quite hidden, at least overlooked by most statistical analyses of bike commuting — and that’s the presence of office showers and changing facilities. In an upcoming issue of Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, Ralph Buehler of Virginia Tech quantifies just how important these seemingly small amenities can be.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo source: TransLink)

A quote from the Forbes article, ‘Pedaling to Prosperity: Biking Saves U.S. Riders Billions A Year’.

Related:

~ Bicycling Magazine’s new ranking of ‘America’s Top 50 Bike-Friendly Cities’.

(Photo credit: Bicycling Magazine)

From The Los Angeles Times:

Los Angeles held its first CicLAvia in October 2010, when 7.5 miles of streets were blocked off to motor vehicles from East Hollywood to Boyle Heights. Sunday, which marked the fourth version of the event, tested the city’s flexibility as cyclists invaded downtown, Dodgers fans attended a home game up the hill and the Lakers faithful poured into L.A. Live — all at roughly the same time. And somehow the city still seemed to function.

The idea of booting cars off the roads and turning the asphalt over to cyclists and pedestriansfirst took hold as a weekly ciclovía in Colombia more than 30 years ago and was later adopted by cities elsewhere in Latin America and in the United States.

The festival was an immediate hit in L.A. and quickly became the city’s marquee event for pedestrians and cyclists.

“Angelenos are aching for a day without a car. CicLAvia provides us one of those days,” Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Sunday before joining in the ride.

“But the change doesn’t have to be temporary, so we are taking steps to make it easier for Angelenos to get from point A to point B — with or without a car,” he said.

Villaraigosa used the platform Sunday to unveil a privately funded $16-million bike-share program that aims to put 4,000 rental bicycles at 400 kiosks across the city.

Check out the rest of the article and news video of the event here.

(Photo credit: Los Angeles Times)

From Atlantic Cities:

“Unfortunately for car companies,” Jordan Weissmann noted at TheAtlantic.com a couple weeks back, “today’s teens and twenty-somethings don’t seem all that interested in buying a set of wheels. They’re not even particularly keen on driving.”

Now a major new report from Benjamin Davis and Tony Dutzik at the Frontier Group and Phineas Baxandall, at the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, documents this unprecedented trend across a wide variety of indicators.

Their two big findings about young people and driving:

• The average annual number of vehicle miles traveled by young people (16 to 34-year-olds) in the U.S. decreased by 23 percent between 2001 and 2009, falling from 10,300 miles per capita to just 7,900 miles per capita in 2009.
• The share of 14 to 34-year-olds without a driver’s license increased by 5 percentage points, rising from 21 percent in 2000 to 26 percent in 2010, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

Young people are also making more use of transit, bikes, and foot power to get around. In 2009, 16 to 34-year-olds took 24 percent more bike trips than they took in 2001. They walked to their destinations 16 percent more often, while their passenger miles on transit jumped by 40 percent.

Check out the rest of the article to read about the factors driving this shift in getting around. 

(Photo credit: Atlantic Cities)