Downtown Cascais, Portugal
 
1999

News at Carfree.com

Carfree Cities Paperback Edition

The paperback edition of Carfree Cities has been printed and is now being shipped to distributors for release in October or November. The paperback differs from the hardcover first edition only by a handful of minor corrections and updates. The paper is thinner but of the same type, and the illustrations are reproduced nearly as well as in the hardcover edition. The binding is once again sewn, so the book still opens easily. The paperback edition costs US$17.95. Amazon.com is accepting advance orders. Those outside North America and the UK can already buy the book, direct from the publisher.

The hardcover edition of Carfree Cities will continue to be available for some time. Barnes and Noble usually offers a 20% discount and prompt shipment.

Fire at Carfree.com

Conference: Towards Car-Free Cities III

Five years after Car Busters was launched at the first Towards Car-Free Cities conference, in Lyon, we are again putting out a call for the international car-free movement to come together, this time at the Toulcuv Dvur Ekologicke Centrum in Prague. Above all we will share information and experience and develop visions and practicalities for building car-free cities of the future. Time will also be set aside for discussion and feedback on the Car Busters network, its current projects, and its future direction. The precise program will be determined in the coming months by the input of those attending - but we assure you it will be fun as well as interesting and productive.

So far €12,000 out of a €20,000 budget has been raised for the conference. Donations to fill the funding gap are more than welcome (please write to carbusters@ecn.cz). Two as-yet-unselected people will work full-time from January through March organizing the conference and will receive a volunteer-level wage as well as the glory, acclaim, and satisfaction of it all; applicants should contact Car Busters at the above e-mail address. Anyone interested in attending the conference should let us know and also sign up on-line to receive the Car Busters Monthly E-Bulletin, where updates will be posted. Looking forward to hearing from you. . .

Your editor attended the 1997 Lyon conference and regards it as the single most useful conference he has attended. He'll be in Prague.

International Making Cities Livable Conference

Carfree.com in Sticker Fraud

World News Notes & Comment

Paris Beach

In its four weeks of existence, two million people visited the beach, which consisted of some sand and a few palm trees. The success can probably be attributed in part to the street entertainers who were encouraged to perform. The beach was crowded day and night, and very few unpleasant incidents occurred. Yvan Hinemann, who managed the inexpensive project, said, "There has been a real sense of people mingling together, in an atmosphere of total mutual respect."

While the beach was preceded by a political row, it now seems set to become an annual rite and is expected to lead to other pedestrian-oriented experiments. Former right-wing politicians, recently ousted by Delanoe, attacked the idea as a waste of money and a public safety hazard. The right immediately realized that the stakes were high and that a success might erode the position of drivers in Paris. The beach was built at a symbolic loacation, a stretch of the Seine that Pompidou turned into an urban freeway in the 1970s. The project thus served to announce the dawn of a new political era in which pro-car policies are out.

The mayor intends to pedestrianize the freeways along both sides of the river by 2007, but expect the struggle with the pro-car lobby to raise some dust.

Ah, Paris, without the cars. Magnifique!

Carfree Area for Montreal?

Mainville cited projects in the USA and Europe that are now 20 years old. "Go and ask the business owners to bring the cars back. Hah! You will get a demonstration. Now they understand that it's not the car that comes to buy, it's the people." There is temperate opposition from some merchants, with calls for more study rather than outright rejection. On the other hand, Margaret Cameron, manager of a café in the area, welcomed the idea. "I don't think there would be one merchant who would be against this."

Cold weather certainly is an issue in Montreal, as I know from direct experience. However, in areas with cold winters and short summers, people are all the more anxious to make the best use of good weather.

Housing for All

According to Peirce, local, state, and federal governments will soon come under intense pressure to provide affordable housing. For working-class families (those with annual household incomes below $54,000), housing is now the hottest issue. Health care has dropped to second place.

Middle-class Americans are not much interested in the issue - they have long had government-subsidized mortgage-guarantee programs and tax subsidies, and most own their houses. However, Peirce thinks the landscape is shifting. The price of housing, both rental and purchase, has risen so dramatically that many Americans are concerned about keeping a roof over their heads. Some 28 million Americans spend more than 30% of their income on housing, and minority groups have considerably lower rates of home ownership. House prices have been rising rapidly for seven years and this trend continued even in the cooling economy.

The upshot is that US cities have a predominance of housing-deprived families. "Rack up another evil, if you will, to 'sprawl' development," says Peirce. "Even if we could somehow justify sprawl as an inevitable American phenomenon, we know the American Dream is in peril of turning sour when growing millions of us can’t afford decent shelter - even with a full-time job." Peirce concludes, "But if the pollsters are right, this is an American crisis whose solution can’t be postponed much longer."

Sprawl is, of course, the most expensive and resource-intensive means of housing ever devised. I doubt that the problem can be tackled except by providing high-quality carfree urban areas, which require so much less land for streets and parking. The cost of infrastructure is greatly reduced, and most residents would no longer need to maintain a car, making more money available for better housing.

Sprawl and the Johannesburg Summit

The UN predicts that by 2030, nearly 5 billion people will live in urban areas, with most of the growth occurring in poor countries with limited infrastructure. David Harvey, a US urban planner, said, "The qualities of urban living in the 21st century will define the qualities of civilization." He thinks that unless the present condition of cities is improved, people may not find the coming civilization particularly congenial. A mix of grinding poverty, social strife, violence, wasteful consumerism, and crumbling infrastructure may become "a dystopian nightmare in which all that is judged worst in the fatally flawed character of humanity collects together in some hell-hole of despair."

To keep up with urban growth, 3000 cities of one million inhabitants will have to be built over the next 40 years. If the North America model of single-family homes and malls is followed, vast areas of farmland will be consumed by sprawl. British architect Richard Rogers believes that sustainable cities cannot be based on auto-centric suburban sprawl, but must instead be "compact, polycentric, ecologically aware, and based on walking." Rogers feels that, above all, cities must promote social inclusion. "This is no utopian vision. Cities that are beautiful, safe, and equitable are within our grasp."

Questions for the Johannesburg summit:

• Is there a better models for urban development than sprawl?
• Can new cities in regions painfully short of resources and cash develop waste disposal systems quickly enough to avert epidemics?
• Is there hope of finding work for urban youth and bringing an end to frustration and poverty?
• How can governments ensure that the expansion of cities is an orderly process?

Will the "Leader" of the Free World Attend?
The Suspense Is Killing Us

ExxonMobil is apparently an important source of funding for some of the "think" tanks that signed the letter. That's doubtless why the letter says "the least important global environmental issue is potential global warming, and we hope that your negotiators at Johannesburg can keep it off the table and out of the spotlight." Just so you'll know, the signatories funded by ExxonMobil are:

• Fred Smith and Myron Ebell, Competitive Enterprise Institute
• Craig Rucker, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow
• Steven Hayward, American Enterprise Institute
• Terrence Scanlon, Capital Research Center
• Joseph Bast, Heartland Institute
• Deroy Murdock, Atlas Economic Research Foundation
• H. Stirling Burnett, National Center for Policy Analysis

Bought, paid for, and delivered. And the suspense is over - Secretary of State Colin Powell will lead the US delegation.

Bush Bucks Public Sentiment

Bush & Co. have proposed a plan requiring cuts in SO2, NOx, and mercury emissions by 2018 (!), but reductions of CO2 emissions would be voluntary. By contrast, the Senate has proposed deeper cuts that would include CO2 and take effect by 2008.

"This poll shows that the president's head-in-the-sand stance on global warming is also distancing himself from the public," said Alden Meyer, a lobbyist for UCS. The poll also shows that 78% of Americans believe global warming is a serious problem now or will be in the future, but Bush & Co. has rejected any cap on CO2 emissions because it would cost his rich friends too much money.

It seems to me that Bush is putting a loaded gun to his head - it's rare to find this level of agreement on anything. People understand, at a gut level, the risks posed by large-scale climate change, and they want action on this issue. Watch the mid-term elections for a sign on this and other issues where the Bush & Co. free-market fanaticism is colliding with common sense and the will of the people.

Broad Support for Rail Services in the USA

Suggestions have been made to re-examine Amtrak, the quasi-governmental corporation that consolidated failing privately-operated passenger rail service 30 years ago. The history of Amtrak is dotted with incompetence, unworkable agreements with both freight railroads and operating unions, and conflicting and unreasonable political objectives.

The real issue here is the broader question of transport subsidies, which are almost universal. The real pig at the trough is, of course, the private automobile.

Another "Transit Failure"

New Yorkers are again relying on public transport systems the way they did decades ago, before Robert Moses rammed cars into the city. Bruce Schaller, a transport consultant, examined the census data. "What has happened here is that the transit system has essentially been reincorporated back into people's life outside of work," he said. "You would have to look back to the 40's and 50's, I think, to find the last time it was like that."

Mr. Schaller believes that the MetroCard, introduced in 1994 and improved in 1998, had a great deal to do with the change. The Unlimited version of the card allows unrestricted travel for a fixed price, and he believes that its widespread use has changed the mental calculus regarding the cost of transport, especially for discretionary trips. Mr. Schaller said, "It's always hard to find a seat on the subway during the rush, but now it can be hard to find one on Sunday mornings, literally."

Of course, the streets of Manhattan are just as congested as ever, so I suppose some transit "experts" would claim that public transport in New York was a failure, since it had failed to relieve road congestion.

This is one more lesson in the importance of convenience in attracting riders to public transport.

Clean Air and Your Heart

Heart disease patients exposed to fine particulates were three times more likely to have ischemia (decreased blood flow to the heart) when exercising after exposure to such pollution than when they had been breathing cleaner air.

Researchers studied 45 heart disease patients living in Helsinki. Twice a week for six weeks the volunteers took an exercise test. The results were plotted against levels of extremely fine particles. Two days after breathing polluted air, the volunteers had "significantly elevated" levels of ischemia. The pollutants may be causing clumps of artery-clogging plaque break off, causing heart attacks and strokes, or may be causing dangerous heart rhythms, or both. The pulse rate also increased after exposure to pollution, from 61 to 90.

Dr. Murray Mittleman, director of cardiovascular epidemiology at Harvard University, cited studies which showed that health risks from particle-laden air were found not only in heavily polluted cities such as Los Angeles and Houston, but even in cities with comparatively clean air.

When inhaled, fine particles can stay in the system for hours and disrupt the heart's activity, interfering with its rhythm and tightening arteries. Many people should exercise indoors on bad-air days.

The only way I can get myself to exercise is to go outdoors - I tried a stationary bike, but it's just no fun. Let's agree that air should be safe to breathe, and do something about fine particulates.

Sick Fat Kids

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in its first examination of why children seldom walk to school, asked parents why they do not send their children to school on foot. The leading concerns are: distance, traffic, weather, and crime.

The CDC called the lack of exercise worrisome. The number of overweight teenagers has tripled since 1980, and in 1999 some 13% of children and teenagers were overweight. A kind of diabetes once rare in adolescents is increasing dramatically.

The CDC wants to see at least 50% of children living within a mile of school walking or biking by 2010. To achieve this goal, safe routes to school are required. Today, even students who live less than a mile from school usually arrive by car, with only 31% walking or biking in an average week.

My recent observations in the USA would indicate that the prevalence of fat kids is much higher than 13%.

Feature Article

Vision 42

By Roxanne Warren, AIA, Chair, and George Haikalis, ASCE, Co-chair

The Proposal

Precedents and their Components

The System

Traffic Diversion and Merchants' Deliveries

Cost and Funding Issues

The operating cost of light rail would be substantially less than the bus service it would replace. While the original proposal called for a private franchise with farebox and advertising revenues covering operating and capital costs, this may not be necessary today, as the MTA is now considering system expansion projects funded from its capital program.

The 42nd Street light rail line would be an integral part of the City's transportation system, every bit as vital as the Second Avenue subway and the LIRR access to Grand Central, and in fact, complementary to these two projects. Given its far lower cost and substantial user base, the project should compete well for federal and local transportation funds. A package of funds are possible - some from the MTA, some from tax increment financing (a mechanism proposed for funding the #7 subway extension), and some from highway resources to cover the cost of pedestrian amenities. For a high quality of design and maintenance, amenities may need to be underwritten with supplemental private funds to achieve a sufficient level of excellence.

Potential for Future Extensions of the System

Further Steps

More details can be found on the group's website at www.vision42.org

Book Reviews

Space Is the Machine: A Configurational Theory of Architecture Bill Hillier Cambridge University Press, 1996 475 pages $85.00 hardcover $27.95 softcover ISBN 052156039X

This book by a British architecture professor proceeds from the idea that the urban street pattern is a "mechanism for generating contact." Cities have evolved to ensure that trips from an origin to a destination take one past outward-facing blocks along the way, thereby generating additional contacts between people and putting the movement people need to make in a city to use.

Hillier posits that some street patterns are pathological in that they are segregated from the rest of the city, especially ones developed in the last century such as those generated by the doctrine of 'separation of uses' (the segregation of residential and commercial zones), and low density development. He calls these 'disurbanism', and actually traces these to responses to industrialization in the 19th Century. These 19th Century ideas, he points out, are alive and well.

Hillier proposes quantitative measures of local connectivity, and presents the results of studies that observe pedestrian density, showing that they are positively correlated with his measures of connectivity, and that crime is negatively correlated with it. He gives color maps of his measures applied to several street grids, including all of Greater London.

Other chapters talk of the "intelligibility" of street patterns, proposing that good patterns are ones in which local visible properties of part of the grid give some indication of the connectivity of that part to the rest of the city, although this principle is not very clearly presented.

There is a strong emphasis on straight lines ('axes') in street patterns, and much of the analysis is done after simplifying a street patterns into a network of straight lines, with connectivity defined using a distance measure of the minimum number of the longest straight line segments one needs to traverse to get from one point to another. This simplification implicitly assumes a model of human movement (which is not stated), and seems to ignore the benefits of enclosed views and "positive outdoor space" as shown by Christopher Alexander. Hillier's methodology would be more applicable with a better model of human movement.

The book has a tendency toward imprecise language, especially in the sections not described here; in this it is no different from other books presenting "theories" of architecture, but it sometimes clashes with its quantitative aspects. Nevertheless, since it provides potential tools for evaluating the properties of street patterns, it merits evaluation by those designing new urban areas.

A summary of part of the book is available at Hillier's research group's web page, and information on obtaining their software is also available.

This suggests an interesting formulation: pedestrian traffic works best when it is concentrated; vehicular movement works best when it is dispersed. Ed.

Hot New Links

Katarxis 02/1 On Architecture and Urbanism

"Car Crazy A Word from Richard Risemberg," in the New Colonist, August 2002

"Our Neighborhood," Russell Turpin in the New Colonist, about a walkable urban area and the benefits it offers

carfree living - autofrei wohnen carfree development in Germany

Radical Urban Theory, an on-line journal.

Le Piazze d'Italia glorious Italian Piazzas, some despoiled by cars, but all worth looking at.

"China's Carfree Town: Gulangyu" in The New Colonist

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