Tag Archives: transportation

“a single, supple mesh of mobility”

I wrote recently about European cities considering a complete ban on private cars by 2050, and I said that didn’t sound so ambitious. Well, according to The Guardian, Helsinki has a plan “to transform its existing public transport network into a comprehensive, point-to-point “mobility on demand” system by 2025 – one that, in theory, would be so good nobody would have any reason to own a car.”

Helsinki aims to transcend conventional public transport by allowing people to purchase mobility in real time, straight from their smartphones. The hope is to furnish riders with an array of options so cheap, flexible and well-coordinated that it becomes competitive with private car ownership not merely on cost, but on convenience and ease of use.

Subscribers would specify an origin and a destination, and perhaps a few preferences. The app would then function as both journey planner and universal payment platform, knitting everything from driverless cars and nimble little buses to shared bikes and ferries into a single, supple mesh of mobility. Imagine the popular transit planner Citymapper fused to a cycle hire service and a taxi app such as Hailo or Uber, with only one payment required, and the whole thing run as a public utility, and you begin to understand the scale of ambition here.

Now, that’s ambitious! I love the vision. It’s not just about transportation – imagine, if all these transit vehicles are in motion, they won’t be parked. When they do park, they can do it in small, out-of-the-way spaces. If they are autonomous, they won’t need so much space to maneuver around each other and around people. If this is the city of the future, what are we going to do with all the extra space?

So it looks like the race to develop the most sustainable transportation vision is a race to the Finnish! Sorry.

protected bike lanes

Continuing on my recent transportation theme, this article on Alternet has some really good statistics on protected bike lanes. I am convinced that biking (a.k.a. cycling) is just a more practical way to get around urban areas than cars – it gets more people from point A to point B with less infrastructure, less cost, less wasted space, and no pollution. Plus, it promotes a more healthful, active lifestyle and urban design that supports that.

But for all this to happen, we have to build cycling infrastructure that is truly safe, and the U.S. just hasn’t fully committed to that. There are signs of hope, however – here are some of the statistics I’m talking about:

  • 27% of all trips in the Netherlands are made on bicycles. The Dutch designs are not secret but are available here (although their manual costs 90 Euros and it is not clear to me whether an English version is available).
  • The “pioneering” American city in protected bike lanes is…Montreal with over 30 miles (I just remembered, Canada shares our North American continent). But New York City has caught up and surpassed them with 43 miles. Other cities are Chicago (23 miles), San Francisco (12 miles), Austin (9 miles), and D.C. (7 miles). (Here in my native Philadelphia, we have not built protected bike lanes but have closed some lanes to traffic and painted some new stripes on the streets that would allow us to eventually separate them. Philadelphia has a burgeoning cycling culture and I think eventually it will happen. We don’t like to do anything first, we always sit back and watch what New York is doing for a few years before we build up the courage to try something new.)
  • Studies are finding that bike infrastructure boosts retail sales – 49% for a street in New York, 24% in Portland – and 65% of merchants surveyed reporting positive effects in San Francisco. (I’m not surprised by this – there is less space wasted on car travel lanes and parking, less time wasted circling around looking for parking, less money spent on parking, more room for trees and fountains and sidewalk cafes – you have more people in a given space, yet less crowding, with more time and money on their hands and a nicer environment where they want to hang around.)
  • And…duh…protected bike lanes are safer for everyone, and add more capacity to move more people at much lower cost compared to new traffic lanes.

The article also links to this fantastic collection of articles and data on protected bike lanes from “peopleforbikes“.

parking design

ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking

As I mentioned recently, I will return frequently to urban design and urban infrastructure issues because I think these are key to long-term sustainability – and I am talking about sustainability in the dictionary sense of a system (in this case, our human civilization here on Earth) that is built to last. I think of urban sustainability as having two major sides, which are obviously intertwined. The first is green infrastructure, which I am convinced is the answer to managing water and ecosystems. The second is the built environment – buildings and the manmade infrastructure we need to move people and stuff around (roads, rail, pipes, electric lines, and so on).

In the short term, we might think of land use as driving the type of transportation systems we build. But in the longer term, it is really a chicken and egg problem – the way we choose to get around will have a big effect on how urban areas are built. Parking is a big part of this, because currently most cars sit idle most of the time and take up enormous amounts of space that is then taken out of the picture for any other kind of use. Not only that, but car parking takes up so much space that we then need to use cars just to cross the distances taken up by other cars – stuff is just so far apart that walking is not as practical, not to mention hot, dangerous, and deadly boring.

So on that note, here is a new book about parking. Here is the Amazon description:

There are an estimated 600,000,000 passenger cars in the world, and that number is increasing every day. So too is Earth’s supply of parking spaces. In some cities, parking lots cover more than one-third of the metropolitan footprint. It’s official: we have paved paradise and put up a parking lot. In ReThinking a Lot, Eran Ben-Joseph shares a different vision for parking’s future. Parking lots, he writes, are ripe for transformation. After all, as he points out, their design and function has not been rethought since the 1950s. With this book, Ben-Joseph pushes the parking lot into the twenty-first century.

Can’t parking lots be aesthetically pleasing, environmentally and architecturally responsible? Used for something other than car storage? Ben-Joseph shows us that they can. He provides a visual history of this often ignored urban space, introducing us to some of the many alternative and nonparking purposes that parking lots have served–from RV campgrounds to stages for “Shakespeare in the Parking Lot.” He shows us parking lots that are not concrete wastelands but lushly planted with trees and flowers and beautifully integrated with the rest of the built environment. With purposeful design, Ben-Joseph argues, parking lots could be significant public places, contributing as much to their communities as great boulevards, parks, or plazas. For all the acreage they cover, parking lots have received scant attention. It’s time to change that; it’s time to rethink the lot.

 

the future of urban transportation

I like the vision of future urban transportation laid out in this article from Atlantic CityLab:

My utopian vision of how this could play out is to rededicate a lot of space in cities that was de facto applied to cars in the 1950s, after the death of the streetcars and the explosion of expressways, over to active transportation. Cars entering city limits would have to be autonomous or switched to driverless mode, as these will be deemed safe for all users of the transportation system and will operate in much less road space than drivers need now. (As a reference point, auto accidents are the leading killer of young people worldwide.) Parking needs could decrease dramatically, too, as most autonomous vehicles will be on-demand and active, compared to the 95 percent of time that current cars sit parked. We would have a transit backbone consisting of heavy and light rail/streetcars, and regional/arterial buses. The rest of the network and space would be slanted towards walking, bike-share, and other alternative modes.

I don’t necessarily think this is a “utopian vision”. I think a lot of it is just going to happen and is already happening. Enormous amounts of space that have been devoted to car maneuvering and parking are going to be available for other uses. The question is, are we just going to let all the space sit there or have a good plan for what to do with it? Some of it can be used for housing and economic activity, some for parks, wildlife habitat and movement corridors, and food growing, and some for managing water or harvesting solar energy. And of course, combinations of these are possible. But we do need to have a vision and a plan, which some can call “utopian” if they so choose.

EU considering ban on gasoline and diesel powered cars

According to Wired, the EU is floating the idea of a complete ban on gasoline and diesel powered cars in European city centers by 2050.

An ambitious set of goals, laid out in the document “Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area” (PDF), calls for a gradual phase-out of gas-guzzling vehicles in favour of electric vehicles and improved rail networks. The EU wants to “halve the use of conventionally-fuelled cars in urban transport by 2030” before getting rid of them entirely by 2050.

This doesn’t strike me as all that ambitious. We can and will switch to electric, natural gas, and propane powered vehicles a lot faster than that if the economics begin to favor it. And they will if, for example, distributed solar energy comes online in a big way. And I expect to see that in decade, not four decades. However, just the fact that most people and governments see it as ambitious illustrates exactly why it is good to get it out there and in peoples’ minds – it may be more likely to happen that way.