Jan 17
2011
We know that cars are bad — they clog streets, demand giant parking lots, foster sprawl, ravage the environment, keep us in thrall to foreign oil, and cause small houses to sprout monstrous garages. But we sure love them, don’t we? So what’s the future of cars in our cities, given the limitations of public transit and pedestrianization?
How can architects, designers, and urbanists help modify our automotive culture, other than by trying vainly to stamp it out?
Jarrett gave the final word
If we aim to create communities where the car is one among many road users, where reasonable efforts are made to protect and expedite each mode according to its ability to use space efficiently, and where we are not preferring one mode through vast hidden subsidies, then as far as I’m concerned we’ve done our job, which is to help create a free society where people are expected to bear both the costs and benefits of their choices. In such a future, communities will be designed with attention on multiple modes, for example, not because we planners have decreed it, but because more and more people will insist on living in places where they have modal options, and the market will respond to that.
Thursday, January 20 at 5:49pm
Robert, thank you for getting us started! I do often wonder whether the car hasn’t become the urbanists’ scapegoat – we rail (pardon the expression) against what they are instead of imagining what they could be. But I’ve also been fascinated by articles, including one by David Owen in the New Yorker (only the abstract is available on the website: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/20/101220fa_fact_owen) pointing out the “efficiency dilemma”: making cars fuel efficient is, economically speaking, the same as making fuel cheaper, which encourages people to consume more, not less fuel. I’m no expert, and I can’t evaluate that reasoning, but it seems to me that we’re talking about two different issues: cars in dense central cities and cars outside of them. To start with the first, I am interested in the measures that cities are taking now to deal with the traffic we have today. In New York, new bike lanes and the pedestrianization of Times Square and other former traffic knots have created something of a backlash among drivers. Is conflict inevitable?
Monday, January 17 at 1:54pm
I agree. It’s relatively easy to say “let’s do away with cars.” The challenge is to figure out how create inter-modal centers that integrate varied forms of transportation that are places that people want to use.
Right now, I am particularly interested in the idea of shared streets — which is proving to be hugely successful all over Holland. These are streets that have no curbs — where vehicles and pedestrians both use the space. This forces cars to slow down. In Amsterdam, this includes dedicated lanes for trams and bikes. It makes downtowns more walkable and appealing. I’d be excited to try something like this on Jamaica Avenue in Queens.
Monday, January 17 at 8:31pm
I was impressed with Bill Ford’s thinking in a recent article in the Automotive News. He said that his family, the historical enablers of the car culture, has given him the mandate to consider the urbanizing future.
In the article, he is quoted as wondering, “What comes after the car for the millions who will live in the big cities set to emerge over the next 30 years? ‘They’re not going to have garages. And they certainly won’t have two cars or even a car? But how can we at Ford make their lives better?’”
If there is authenticity in this statement, perhaps we are seeing the solution already emerging as a car company begins, apparently, to consider how it might undo some of what it has done.
In other words, is there something in the increasing urbanization of the world that has its own regulatory mechanism, creating a context that is unresolvable through conventional urban planning and building terms, and presents a problem that can only be resolved in the remaking of other institutions – by redefining a “car company” into a “transportation company” or even a “quality of life company,” for example?
Tuesday, January 18 at 7:47am
St. Louis County is revamping zoning codes in an attempt to move away from car-centered planning.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/article_e1da0f2c-0051-5a52-8b4b-bdcc182a771d.html
Comments, anyone?
Tuesday, January 18 at 10:34am
Quick observations on two strong stories. First, the emergence of new hybrid market-policy frameworks shaped by empowered cities as we shift into an era of ‘smart infrastructure’(e.g. regulating parking, pay-per-use markets). Second, ‘mobility service’ innovation and software-enabled business model design for a broader mobility industry. Service innovation has reached Transit agencies who are starting to leverage open data frameworks. Automakers are tapping software-facilitated decision tools beyond the vehicle (e.g. GM OnStar phone app). And insurers are rolling out ‘pay as you drive’ policies that might shift cost structure. Longer term, I find a more semi-autonomous ‘mobility as a service’ vision to be the most compelling for urban settings. On-demand, point-to-point service solutions around situationally-aware platforms such as GM’s EN-V could help shift attitudes from ownership to access. Short term, I think the test ground might be in rethinking service innovation around existing Fleets (e.g. Uber cab and ‘Dollar Vans’ are notables to watch)
Tuesday, January 18 at 1:45pm
Never has a mode of transportation been as prevalent as the automobile. Streets are lined with them, and they affect any movement regardless of being on foot or bicycle. Cars must account for our single greatest non-disease health hazard. This is not just another inconvenience of society, but an environmental disaster. To break this phenomenon is not to reduce our reliance on the automobile, but to reduce our love affair with it. Can there be an index of our automotive requirements that we can compare to our automotive usage? Is it socially acceptable to commute to the neighborhood train station in an 8-cylinder pick-up truck? Automobiles were the economic revolution of the 20th century with every adult having an auto loan, and reasons abounded as to why we needed more, bigger, faster, and better. The trend continues. Moving forward in this crisis is to use the car culture for our transportation, and not for our identity. It is not necessary to return to the “volkswagen”, but we must engender more humility and respect in a product that affects us and our environment as much as the automobile. Being a designer, I cannot help but to mentally solve the mass transportation in our cities with conceptual and far-reaching solutions; but all rely on a more practical and realistic attitude of how we approach transportation.
Tuesday, January 18 at 2:15pm
As a transit planner, I’m not trying to stamp out the car. I just want its costs accurately priced so that people can make smarter choices about when to use it. I also want them to have a suite of options — transit, cycling, walking, carsharing — that they can choose among for each trip. In liberal democracies, freedom of choice has to be the key, and we need to be much more forceful about insisting that in cities, non-car modes can also be instruments of freedom.
We’re seeing evidence that the next generation wants to live in more walkable and urban communities. There’ve been some interesting comment threads on this here …
http://www.humantransit.org/2010/10/bulletin-young-adults-dont-all-want-cars.html
… and here …
Once you’ve chosen to live at a certain density, the basic suite mobility alternatives, including transit and carsharing, can easily help you sell your car, or at least share one car within a couple. A great deal can be accomplished by just listening to this market, and serving it. No “vain” struggles to “stamp out” cars is required.
There are still struggles. You have to fight for accurate pricing, you have to push back gently against the view that only motorists count as real citizens, or real customers. But we’re not trying to stamp out cars, and certainly not coercing anyone.
Thursday, January 20 at 8:32am
The conversation about how to balance different modes of transportation tends to break down along several lines.
1) economic incentives: turn the hidden, collective costs of driving (road subsidies, pollution) into costs that individuals must bear, and driving will naturally find a new equilibrium. This can take the form of a gas tax (which has the double disadvantage of being regressive and, at the moment, a political pipe dream), higher parking costs (higher than zero, anyway, which is what most people pay), and congestion pricing.
2) Encourage more efficient means of transportation. Redesign streets to accommodate bike lanes and wider sidewalks, subsidize public transit, rapid bus lanes, high-speed rail, light rail, etc.
3) Encourage density through the above, plus zoning regulations and tax incentives for developers.
4) Invent: smarter parking meters, self-driving cars, car-sharing iPhone apps, and so on.
What’s missing from this list is a sense that communities everywhere have to adapt in synch, on a scale and at a level of detail that they did to the automobile. All over the world, they built new roads and paved old ones, adopted rules and developed standard signage. Most important, everyone accepted a terrible but fundamental tradeoff: mobility versus the high rates of death and maiming that were part of the car’s history from the beginning. Since there are no radically new technologies of transportation, all currently feasible ideas have to do with rebalancing the relationship between old — very old!—modes of travel. The car is part of that mix. The question is what, specifically, is the most forward-thinking strategy planners and designers could adopt right now to help get the balance right?
Thursday, January 20 at 2:05pm
Jarrett gave the Final Word
I’m not sure that “getting the balance right” is the best way to frame the planner’s task, because for some it conjures the image of planners as social engineers in some sinister control room, turning dials that crush people’s freedom. That’s why I insist that the only the market can “get the balance right.” And of course, that balance will continue to be a shifting equilibrium as prices and technologies and human desires change.
If we aim to create communities where the car is one among many road users, where reasonable efforts are made to protect and expedite each mode according to its ability to use space efficiently, and where we are not preferring one mode through vast hidden subsidies, then as far as I’m concerned we’ve done our job, which is to help create a free society where people are expected to bear both the costs and benefits of their choices. In such a future, communities will be designed with attention on multiple modes, for example, not because we planners have decreed it, but because more and more people will insist on living in places where they have modal options, and the market will respond to that.
Our job is not to get the balance right. It’s to liberate people to be free adult actors, responsible for their own choices.
Sorry if I sound like a libertarian. I’m just a left-wing utopian radical who knows that any credible utopia must be a site of freedom, even though that means the utopia unstable and ever-changing, and that there’s no master control room where planners “get the balance right.”
Thursday, January 20 at 5:49pm
One perspective that hasn’t been put on the table is the comfort aspect. In a recent article by Bruce Mau, he compares the user experience between a car and a bus:
“Why does my minivan have 17 cup holders —but my bus has none? Why is my bus shelter not heated, but I can start my car remotely and let it warm up? Why is my bus uncomfortable and noisy, when I can listen to Beethoven in my car in relative silence? My bus is a design failure.”
http://glimmersite.com/2009/08/21/bruce-mau-on-yes-is-more/bruce-mau/
When we shift the conversation from automotive culture to personal mobility and pay closer attention to the types of experiences available, the car is the obvious winner.
Masdar City in Abu Dhabi has been testing their “Personal Rapid Transit” system allowing passengers to move in small driverless electric pods around the city. Tracks aren’t even needed. By the looks of it, it could be a very enjoyable experience. See video on link below:
http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/01/personal-rapid-transit-masdar-city/
This transit system is still under development but perhaps it gives us a glimpse of a type of personal mobility that doesn’t sacrifice personal comfort for the sake of protecting the environment.
Friday, January 21 at 1:16am
I am convinced that a push for financial literacy around transportation must be a key component of this effort—and not just because as a teacher of high school students, the graduation of new drivers and consumers into our car culture is continually in my view.
Young or old, many Americans have little idea of the true financial cost of car ownership. While rent or mortgage dominates the average household budget, transportation is a close second — and in some zip codes even exceeds housing. Because our system is so car-dependent, transportation swallows one out of every five dollars earned by the average American family, double the bite it took in 1960. This alone could account for much of the drop over that period in the household savings rate, which by the aughts had skidded close to zero.
The average purchase price of a new vehicle, more than 90% of which is financed, exceeds $27,000. And that’s just the cost to buy; the cost to own and operate a midsize SUV like the Toyota Highlander can total $45,000 over five years. A middle class American family with two or more cars could easily pour almost $1 million in vehicles over a lifetime. And these numbers exclude the externalized costs mentioned above.
Once car owners become aware of their total and cumulative costs, which are stowed in various, separate line items in their budgets, they are more easily motivated to explore other transportation options and become invested in their expansion.
Friday, January 21 at 10:10am
At the risk of merely repeating what others have said, and being pressed for time, I had posted a few thoughts on the car and the city in World Policy Journal:
http://www.worldpolicy.org/blog/2010/12/10/future-city-smaller-slower-shared-car
One other thought relates to the idea of the “American love affair with the car” and the futility, as Justin notes, of ‘trying to stamp it out.’ As a driver myself, I obviously have no immediate stake in getting rid of the car, but one idea that interests me is that it would be socially useful to merely try to get back some kind of more desirable equilibrium, in which the car is considered a transportation tool (among many), not a vehicle for dependency. Over the past two decades, the average number of miles driven by each American has soared by 160%, with an attendant host of accompanying shifts that have happened merely since my childhood; e.g., where most children walked to school when I was growing up, now hardly any do (it is in fact illegal in a few cases); or the McDonald’s drive-through, which didn’t exist during the first part of my life, now accounts for the bulk of the company’s sales. There are signs everywhere that freedom of choice has turned into a hegemony of restriction: Without a car you’re nobody, without a car you can’t get where you need to go. As an old joke goes, the love affair turned into a marriage (and a dysfunctional one at that). Addressing this situation will take dedicated and significant political capital, for few efforts against the vehicular landscape have been easy or seemed like the prevailing wisdom at the time — from the ‘freeway revolts’ of the 1960s to the majority opinion, for half of the 20th century in New York City, that the idea of paying for on-street parking, in the form of meters, was not only wrong but would never happen. We saw how that turned out.
To quote the nice chain of social change progression theorized by Lant Pritchett (and which seems to apply in any number of cases, including New York City’s current streetscape rethink): Silly, Controversial, Progressive, Then Obvious.
Here’s hoping we get to obvious.
Friday, January 21 at 12:35pm
Keywords
Selected list of words appearing in this and other conversations.
Robert Bruegmann
Professor Emeritus of Art History, Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago
3
From my point of view the crusade against the automobile is misguided. From the horse-drawn carriage to the railroad train, every new form of mass transportation has been disruptive to the existing urban pattern and environmentally damaging. The worst thing we can do, it seems to me, is to try to fight the automobile, turn back the clock and reduce individual mobility and choice by forcing people into less flexible transportation modes. The real goal should be to reduce the negative by-products of the automobile or, even better, try to envision systems of transportation that have all of the flexibility of the automobile without its drawbacks. The great auto vs transit debate is, from my point of view, a distraction. After all, the automobile, like the train, is a 19th century technology conceived at a time when our urban patterns and personal expectations were very different from what they are today. There is no reason we couldn’t have small individual vehicles that go directly from any point A to point B like the car and that run safely on guideways on, under or over the ground, at very high speed using non-polluting fuels.
Monday, January 17 at 10:53am