March 28, 2024
Global Renewable News

Are We There Yet?
Volume 6, Issue 13

April 1, 2015

Proper urban planning and design - urbanism - must include all issues surrounding transportation if the architecture is to be used to its max. At the same time, it is essential that urbanism be conceived with deference to the much larger-scale environment called planet earth.

I found an interesting story about a theoretical urban design project for the reconstruction of the centre of the small pre-auto-age town of Mount Vernon, New York and would like to share it with you.

In the development of a programme of space allocation for new office, retail, and residential facilities it immediately became clear that the area that had to be dedicated to automobiles dominated all other human functions. It was a foregone conclusion that, if typical standards for roadways and parking were applied, the result would be an imposing concrete superstructure - a monument to the automobile. Such a structure would sacrifice all possibility of restoring the urban centre to one that would be commensurate with real human activity. On top of this, most of the centre's existing parks and green parcels of land would fall to the bulldozer.1

Several years ago, my family and I lived in a 400-year-old town in Southeast England. This town was obviously never designed with the automobile in mind. Fortunately, we lived within walking distance of the town centre, which was providential because there was literally no place to park once you got there. I used to walk to do the family grocery shopping, which was ideal on two fronts - my own as the exercise kept my weight in check and it eliminated the frustration of trying to park the car. There was a huge multi-storey car park close to the centre but it ruined the ambience of the place and only encouraged people to drive. If you were lucky enough to find a parking spot not on the double-yellow lines' invariably it was only a metre bigger than the car. Fitting into that spot was like pushing a truck up a hill with a rope. It took more than a few attempts.

Our street dead-ended at a park and there were at least twice the number of cars as there were parking places. It was an unwritten rule that double-parking was allowed but you had to be on good terms with your neighbours so you could have them move their wheels if you were blocked in next to the curb and vice versa. Life with an automobile in England is certainly an experience - driving from one traffic jam to another, never finding that perfect' parking spot, and paying well over the odds for fuel. A healthy sense of humour was a must to keep one's sanity in check while driving.

Any heavy-duty' shopping for clothes and such was done in London. It was easy getting there because we were a five-minute walk from the British Rail station and, depending on the service, were only 30 minutes, or so, into Bromley or Waterloo East Station.

As for the auto, the late historian and thinker Tony Judt saw it this way, "In the US and UK, we too readily assume that the defining feature of modernity is the individual: the non-reducible subject, the free-standing person, the unbound self, the un-beholden citizen.2

Any way the impact of the automobile was viewed showed an undesirable element - either traffic congestion or a massive concrete edifice. These two things are among the most common reasons that help drive people from city-centres and eventually lead to the obsolescence and gradual abandonment of the idea in the first place. This outcome is tragic as it wastes older urban areas, consumes virgin land for new development, and leads to an enormous increase in the demand for petroleum products. Between 2007 and 2011, oil consumption cost the United States two trillion dollars, according to researcher David Greene at the Oak Ridge, National Laboratory. Together with increases in air travel, they contribute heavily to climate change, having surpassed such important issues as ground-level ozone and photo-chemical smog. Transportation is the single largest contributor to the nation's carbon footprint, causing more damage than industry, homes, or commercial buildings.3 Land use strategist and developer Christopher Leinberger notes that households that are vehicle-dependent emit three times the volume of climate change gases as those in walkable, transit-related communities.4

A study that had begun with one small town broadened to encompass the larger issue of reconciling urban growth with local and global environmental concerns. This prompted a focus on alternative urban planning practices and technologies that could be suited to today's needs.

The clear alternative to widespread reliance on private motoring is a comprehensive and well-coordinated network of public transportation. If this sounds to conservative ears a little too much like socialism,' it is because there is considerable confusion about the very meaning of socialism. A socialist society is one in which the means of production and distribution - industry, agriculture, banking, and commerce - have been deprivatized. In a democratic society, in contrast, a rise in the well-being of the public-at-large through smoothly functioning public transportation, good public health and education systems, and the like, equates to social well-being, not socialism - as shown in the Scandinavian countries, which are among the most civilized on Earth, despite being monarchies.5

According to experts, it's clear that truly meaningful measures to reduce the carbon emissions generated by transport need to be initiated in the U.S. With less than five percent of the planet's population, the country accounted for nearly twenty-five percent of the wold's petroleum consumption in the two decades between 1990 and 2010. The nation is also near the top among countries in miles driven per vehicle, and is near the bottom in fuel efficiency. Three-quarters of the petroleum used annually in the U.S. is spent on transportation and of that amount, approximately two-thirds is burned by motor vehicles.6 In recent years, large strides in North America towards more fuel-efficient vehicles are at play with a view to being competitive with even the most fuel-conscious nations.

Much excitement has been generated in the U.S. over proposed high-speed rail, with its huge potential for replacing domestic air travel and large numbers of personal vehicles on trips of up to 800 kilometres (500 miles) - saving much time and petroleum and greatly diminishing greenhouse gases, to say nothing for the easing of congestion as a side benefit. As with most centres, before such rail plans are realizable, transportation infrastructure will have to be upgraded in older regions and installed as part of new urban planning. The rail will have to be much better patronized for sufficient numbers of passengers to be rationally moved to high-speed rail stations. Otherwise, these stations will need to be surrounded by vast parking facilities, instead of compact, walkable urban development.

Before any of this can happen, however, what is first needed is a consensus and commitment from a sizable portion of the public that construction of transit and, in particular, the compact development that it will create are worthy goals. One must decide what type of society one wishes to live in and then discuss transportation.
 


1 Warren, Roxanne, Rail and the City-Shrinking Our Carbon Footprint While Reimagining Urban Space. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014, 4
2 Judt, Tony, Ill Fares the Land. New York: Penguin Press, 2010, 211, 215
3 Robert Puentes, "Transportation and Climate Change: the Perfect Storm," Brookings Institution, Metropolitan Policy Program (September 8, 2009):
4 Christopher B. Leinberger, Remarks at the Forum for Urban Design symposium at the Century Association. New York: July 7, 2010
5 Warren, Roxanne, Rail and the City-Shrinking Our Carbon Footprint While Reimagining Urban Space. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014, 5
6 US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Transportation Statistics Annual Report. Washington: D.C. U.S. DOT, 2008

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Terry Wildman

Terry Wildman
Senior Editor
terry@electricenergyonline.com
GlobalRenewableNews.com