- Gordon Price, PriceTags, Vancouver, Canada
It has taken a century of
building almost exclusively for the car to get us to our current dilemma. It will take some time to achieve long-term solutions. Ultimately, they can only be found in the way we build our cities. We will have to establish virtuous cycles to offset the vicious ones, where success leads to more success. There is no single solution. Top-down planning can never be comprehensive enough or flexible enough. Give people enough transportation options and they can by and large work out their own solutions. That in turn is dependent on the design and integration of land-use and transportation choices.
Ideally, people should have at least five choices - feet, bike, transit, taxi/carsharing and personal vehicle - and the ability to mix and match them appropriate to the kind of trip and the circumstances faced. The combinations and the mix make it all work.
The trip is only a few blocks? Walking is best. It's raining? Grab a taxi. The trip is around five kilometers? Cycling may be the faster alternative. Going to a town centre in the suburbs? Try transit.
Heading out of town? Train, perhaps - or car. Yes, the car is perfectly appropriate for many trips, but not all. Once the car is used less frequently, needs may be met more affordability by a car sharing or the occasional rental, with considerable savings.
Of course, the provision of alternatives assumes a city designed around more than the car - and a citizenry comfortable with the choices. In the end, the answers are found in the plans we have to implement. Concentrate growth. Build complete communities. Provide transportation choice.
But to do so, we will first have to be aware of the impediments to success, rooted in the unrealistic beliefs and assumptions we have associated with the success of the car.
Gordon Price, pricetags@shaw.ca
Director of the City Program, Simon Fraser University, http://www.pricetags.ca/
Vancouver, Canada
Contribution to World Streets and the collaborative project “Messages for America: Worldwide experience, ideas, counsel, proposals and good wishes for transportation reform under the Obama administration”. See www.messages.newmobility.org for latest version of this report of the New Mobility Agenda.
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Most of this I fully agree with.
ReplyDeleteIf people are to take taxis when it is raining, these taxis and their drivers will be unemployed when it is not raining. Can these taxis and their drivers find alternative employment depending on the weather? If you are to meet peak demand for taxis and car share, then you have to have the capacity, which is, then unemployed when demand is low, but still has costs to cover.
If we all move over to car sharing, and the car industry loses its subsidies, many economies of scale will be lost. Will this actually make motoring more expensive than we imagine? As more cars invaded our streets, the numbers of accidents per mile driven decreased. If we reduce the miles driven by cars and people become less afraid of being on our streets, will accident rates increase to the extent that the use of private motorised vehicles is hugely unpopular?
Perhaps trams will mostly move goods to people, rather than people to goods. Those travelling further will take the train, but it will not be an everyday occurrence and people will be unwilling or unable to spend more than an hour commuting to work, as they have to attend to the food they grow for themselves.
In a sustainable world, would a person’s “town centre”/shopping/community centre be further from their home than they can reasonably cycle?
, however, if people only take a taxi when it is raining, these taxis will