This entry is offered here as a sort of movable feast. Rough and ready at this point, it can be greatly improved, both here and in the Wikipedia entry which I hope you will junp in on to do your bit. (Image may be subject to copyright.)
Some selected Streets references:
To win the war of new mobility, sustainable development and social justice, we need to change to vocabulary which, heavily encumbered with the luggage of the past, conspires to lock us in to the old way of thinking, speaking, and ultimately doing things.If we are to be up to the sustainability challenges and the behavior changes that necessarily go with them of this difficult 21st century turning point, we are going to have to redraw the lines of the court and develop a vocabulary that reflects the necessary lucidity of thinking needed to break the impasses. Otherwise for sure are going to find ourselves once again in a lose/lose situation.
Here then is one word which I have been proposing and using, largely without success, the better part of a decade and I put it before you with a certain pride: slowth. About two years ago I created a Wikipedia entry for it, however I have been challenged because the entry lacks references and hence is subject to eventual removal, The gamekeepers over there suggest that “the best way to address this concern is to reference published, third-party sources about the subject”. Fair enough.
So my question to you is that, if you have a feel for the concept, can you possibly take the time to go in and make it a more solid reference? You can either work directly ohn the WP site, or alternatively ship your corrections, additions here and we will do the rest. The text presently reads like this:
Slowth (From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowth)
Slowth is a transport planning concept, usually deployed in congested urban environments, where transport is calibrated for lower top speeds, but the result is shorter overall travel times across the entire system.[1]
The concept of slowth is sometimes compared to the story of The Tortoise and the Hare; the paradoxical notion that slowing the top speeds of transport will when properly engineered allow more people to get to their destinations more quickly. An example is that where there is sufficient traffic congestion, a bicycle may get to its destination more quickly than say a Ferrari. When a city adopts a policy of slowth, the top speeds will be lower, but congestion decreases because the slower speeds result in steadier traffic flow.[1]
This is a powerful model which urban planners and traffic engineers, with a few notable exceptions, are only recently starting to take seriously. An important new mobility concept, it is also referred to as "slow transport".
In the report "Speed Control and Transport Policy" (Chapter 10, on speed limits in towns, Policy Studies Institute, 1996) Mayer Hillman and Stephen Plowden describe an experiment in Växjö, a Swedish town of 70,000, which showed very small time penalties arising from some fairly substantial speed reductions at 20 junctions. The Swedish researchers used the results to simulate what would happen if similar speed-reducing measures were introduced at 111 junctions throughout the town and concluded that there would probably be a small net time saving. [2]
In recent years it has gotten steadily increasing attention both in the literature but above all as part of the on-street sustainable transport strategies of a growing number of leading programs and projects around the world (See listing below).
1 Proponents
• John Adams, United Kingdom.
• Donald Appleyard, United States.
• Eric Britton, France
• Dan Burden, USA
• David Engwicht, Australia
• Jan Gehl, Denmark
• Ben Hamilton-Baillie, United Kingdom.
• Mayer Hillman, United Kingdom
• Hans Monderman, The Netherlands
• Peter Newman. Australia
• Stephen Plowden, United Kingdom
2. See also
• Cittaslow (Slow cities movement, in English)
• Home zones
• Livable Streets
• New Mobility Agenda
• Pedestrian#Pedestrianisation
• Public space management
• Road traffic control
• Shared space
• Slow movement
• Street hierarchy
• Sustainable transportation
• Traffic calming
• Walkability
• Walking
• Woonerf
• World Streets
3 References
• Disappearing traffic? the story so far. London: Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Municipal Engineer, Paper 1272, March
• The paradox of congestion., Wood, K (2007). In IPENZ Transportation Group Conference, Tauranga, New Zealand 10-10-2007
• Speed Control and Transport Policy, Policy Studies Institute, London, 1966. Mayer Hillman and Stephen Plowden
• Gutman, Manisha (2008-02-03). "The Greening of Paris" (in English). The Hindu. http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/02/03/stories/2008020350050400.htm. Retrieved on 2008-03-08.
• Effekten av Generell Hastighetsdampningt i Tatort - C Hyden, K Odelid, and A Varhelyi. Lund Institutionen for Trafikteknik, Pub: 1992
4 External links
• Wolmar, Christian, "Power to the pedestrian," The Independent, (London), Jun 17, 1996 Print this article
Posts
Bicycle safety and infrastructure
ReplyDeleteThe following commentary was made yesterday in response to a discussion on www.LivableStreets.com which was looking at different approaches to providing cycle paths and other forms of street architecture modifications, major and minor, to protect the cyclist. The discussants were partially looking at this in the context of New York’s vigorous efforts to develop a major cycling program after many years of neglect.
A couple of comments from an international perspective on this exchange:
For starters, I think it is important that we not get too comfortable too fast. By that I mean I am not sure that the best approach to safe cycling is to start by shopping around for the most attractive cycle path designs to be put in your city's streets here or there. I can understand the temptation but we have here a systemic problem which requires more than occasional attractive street architecture.
Once you start to break the ice to the point where provision of cycling facilities even starts to be an issue, it is probably best to think of the city and the street network as a learning system. And learning of course takes place over time, and if you are lucky leads to a continuous stream of adjustments as you go along.
There may be a bit of comfort in that, if you are patient enough, because what it definitely means is that any cycling improvements you can conceivably come up with today has to be thought of not as a solution but as the start of the path. This is very definitely process oriented planning.
Safe cycling is based on the existence of networks which provide a safe travel environment over the areas and routes most taken by cyclists. By which I mean to say that a lovely cycle facility here and there does not by itself promote safe cycling (in fact conceivably it can make cycling even more dangerous). What is needed from the beginning is without letting up to drive toward that basic network. To accomplish this, it means targeting a solution set that is pretty pervasive, far more so than most plans today even dare aim for.
What do you do when what you need to do definitely outstrips the resources, approaches and plans that are traditionally available to you? The only way to do this is to change the rules. That happens in four main parts.
Speed reductions: The first is to slow down the traffic on EVERY street in the city. I do not say this lightly and I understand the extent to which this runs against long-standing practices and what people regard as their fair interest. But there is no longer any mystery about this at the leading edge. I do not imagine that there is a traffic planner who will argue for top speeds in excess of 30 mph in the city. 30 mph is terrific, and though too fast for safe cycling is something which we can reasonably target for the Main Avenue's and thoroughfares.
Reclaim street space: The second product the strategy is that the creation of a safe network requires taking over at least portions of a quite large number of streets in the city. The most popular, parking out/bikes in, often works very nicely when the cycle lanes work against the flow of traffic. In these cases top speeds on the side streets drop to something like 10 to 15 mph, with 10 leading better than 15. Again for most cross-town traffic in Manhattan this should not be a problem.
“Occuper le terrain”: French for safety in numbers. You are seeing that in New York already, though I have to guess you are not yet at the tipping point on that. But the more people you get out on the street on their bicycles every day, the more that everybody involved moves up a couple of notches day after day in the learning process. The cyclists learn how to behave better to protect themselves in traffic, drivers get accustomed to looking out for those small wavering frail figures, the police learn how to play their part in this learning process, and the system they have today learns and adapts.
“Street code”: I know you are looking at this for New York and based on your experience thus far what works is that if a law gullibility or an accident is automatically assigned to the heavier faster vehicle. This means that the driver who hits a cyclist has to prove his innocence, as opposed to today where the cyclist must prove the driver’s guilt. This is not quite as good as John Adams’ magnificent formulation whereby every steering wheel of every car , truck and bus would be equipped with a large sharp nail aimed directly at the driver’s heart but it can at least help getting things moving in the right direction.
So we really do know what to do, and we do know that it requires a combination of guile and pragmatic planning from the beginning. Moreover there is plenty of international experience which backs this up. Paris is an example of one that I live with and cycle in every day over a period of steady adaptation and change. Only a few years ago it was a city that was planning almost exclusively for cars and yet over the past decade has gradually began to build up a network for safe cycling. Perhaps not so much safe as safer, and the role of the planners here is to use the full cookbook of approaches in a dynamic organic manner so that each day things get a little bit better. Because all this has become part of the culture, the mainstream culture, it is no longer a big deal and so do the good works are able to go on there today.
Of course if cycling is your game it would be great to be able to import whole hog those terrific physical infrastructures that are found in Dutch and Danish cities. But this takes decades and I do not see it happening overnight in most US cities, New York among them. What is interesting about the Paris example, and we are certainly not the only one, is the manner in which safe cycling infrastructure is being built up step by step and day by day. We are not yet at the point at which we can feel comfortable with Gil Penalosa’s 8 to 80 rule, remember, where cycling is safe for your eight-year-old daughter and your 80-year-old grandfather. But give us a time and we will get there, and I hope you will too.
Eric Britton
World Streets at www.worldstreets.org
re: "30mph is terrific":
ReplyDelete30mph/50kph motor vehicle speed limits give too much of an advantage over slower and/or sustainable forms of transport, e.g. bicycles or buses/trams, for the latter especially those not on dedicated infrastructure.
Moreover, this separated infrastructure costs a lot, and very often in the case of cycling, takes space away from pedestrians.
Also, 30/50 gets exceeded quite often and threatens the life of soft users of a street who dare to or accidentally intrude upon the fast part of a street.
I live on a 50kph street in Berlin. Two lanes in either direction. The car traffic flows quickly most of the time. The cycle lane is on former pedestrian space. The pedestrian space is on former gardens, right below balconies made unusable by the 50kph car traffic.
While 35mph or higher is really bad, 30/50 is still Old Mobility, and it dominates the spaces it touches. It is not terrific, but terrifying.
Dear Eric
ReplyDeleteA possible way forward: slowth is two different things.
-- A concept of lower traffic speeds: part of the toolbox but not the Swiss Army knife. Here the wikikeepers have a point.
-- A short and snappy name, absorbing 'growth' into 'slow', for a new paradigm to get cities out of their unsustainable rut.
The new paradigm is still being developed but it is likely to include most of these:
A new paradigm of slowing traffic
Quality of life, wider choice
Balanced emphasis on all modes
Convenience for all (but not at the expense of inconvenience for others)
A hierarchy of modes tailored to the city and area: walking, disabled access, bike, deliveries and so on
Work on transit: maximising door-to-door trip speed is the main objective
Visionary/tough political support
Traffic evaporation
Realistic economic evaluation
A much lower priority for on-street car parks
Public health benefits (pollution, exercise, crashes, noise)
Reassign road space (increases people-carrying capacity)
Safe use of all modes: walk, cycle, transit, car, truck
Limit vehicle access at peak-people hours
Response to climate change and oil scarcity
Identifying car dependence
Public levies on commercial parking
Public bikes
Planning, consultation and promotion
Some questions for World Transporters
Are you willing to adopt slowth?
Does your spell-checker recognise it?
Will you put it in the key-words of your next paper, on any of the topics above?
A parallel approach is to re-write the wiki entry to cover some of these points, with references to each.
Kerry Wood
Australia