Campo Santa Margherita, Venice
2005

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At 200 mph, the Bugatti Veyron pounds a beautiful, howling hole in the sweltering haze hanging over the motorway.

In 53 mind-blowing seconds, the Veyron reaches its marquee speed: 253 mph.

At that speed, the tires would begin to soften in about half an hour. Fortunately, at top speed, it runs out of gas in 12 minutes.

News Bits

Carfree Breakthrough in Motor City

But hope springs eternal. City Street Celebration (CSC) did happen, which would not have been possible if there had not also been an active base of support. Organizers, participants, festival-goers and supporters coalesced around the issues of auto-dependency and alternative transportation. The festival provided a platform for discovering common ground and building local networks. Many of the participants are currently working on other alternative transportation/pro-carfree projects.

Both personal and practical connections were born from this festival. Though challenges will continue to confront CSC organizers, the first year of such projects is always the most difficult. The knowledge we gained will provide a basis for future activities and events.

People directly experienced two important changes in the daily routine. First, many people commented on how delightful, and strange, it was to use the whole street for walking, bicycling, and other types of non-motorized vehicles, which greatly increases social interaction. Second, traffic on the two arterial roads that fenced in the celebration (Riverside Drive and Wyandotte Street) was backed up for hours, illustrating the effect that such events can have. The usual rush hour backups were worse than usual.

Planning will begin in January for the second annual CSC, with the hope of making it an annual event.

Cashing in the Family Car

No provision appears to have been made for those who never burdened the public by owning a car. This is akin to the American position on these matters: proposals are often made to pay people for buying a less-polluting or more-efficient car, but never for not owning one at all.

Smashing the O'Toole Paper

Those who fervently wish for car-free cities should take a closer look at New Orleans. The tragedy of New Orleans isn't primarily due to racism or government incompetence, though both played a role. The real cause is automobility - or more precisely to the lack of it.

"The white people got out," declared the New York Times today. But, as a chart in the Times article makes clear, the people who got out were those with automobiles. Those who stayed, regardless of color, were those who lacked autos.

O'Toole blathers on:

Numerous commentators have legitimately criticized the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other government agencies for failing to foresee the need for evacuation, failing to secure enough buses or other means of evacuation, and failing to get those buses to people who needed evacuation. But people who owned autos didn't need to rely on the competence of government planners to be safe from Katrina and flooding. They were able to save themselves by driving away.

Shhhh! Venice Is Thinking

. . . Venice is very much a city of the present and the future. The absence of cars could, in itself, be seen as somewhat futuristic; I'm sure many cities will ban cars from their central areas within the next hundred years, and, like Venice, become places where the loudest sound you hear is the sound of happy human voices. Venice lives by charisma, communication and creativity.

Don't Even Think About It

The mayor attributes the basic problem to the location of the school. It was built on the edge of town, where cheap land could be found for the vast parking lots required by American high schools. And so it was built next to a busy highway.

This is not an isolated situation. In suburban DeKalb County, Georgia, 57% of school principals rated their school's environs as "moderately to extremely dangerous for kids on foot or bicycle."

This isn't the only problem. Evidence increasingly suggests that large, impersonal schools isolated on the edge of town are not good for kids. There is a "small schools" movement brewing, and Smart Growth proponents are supporting it. Lower drop-out rates and higher test scores are observed in smaller schools.

Beijing Traffic

• Continue the "bus first" policy. By 2010, 90% of riders should be walking less than 8 minutes to their halts.

• The capacity of rail systems will be increased from the current 1,300,000 daily passengers to 4,000,000 or more by 2010.

• By 2010, 13 large park & ride lots will be built along the Fifth Ring to support rail and high-capacity bus lines.

• Six new north-south routes will be built. (The article does not specify whether these are road or rail.)

Deep Green

We need an ecological tax reform

This whole program must be integrated into a complete overhaul of the conventional tax system which makes raw materials available at dumping prices due to high subsidies - and makes labor expensive. As long as automobile transport avoids the truth about the costs, as long as the deficits are made up by tax subsidies - bus and rail transport will not have a real chance.

The costs of automobile traffic are immense if we include the consequential costs such as in-validity, hospital and work absenteeism costs, reduced rent, damage to facade of cultural monuments, and so on. Every automobile in Germany is subsidized with 3,000 dollars per year from tax. And this calculation does not include global effects such as climate disaster and the gap in the ozone layer.
. . .

The Federal Office of the Environment, the Green party - and even the boss of Shell Europe - agree that an internalization of the external costs of automobile transport would lead to a gas price of 15 dollars per gallon.

Tram Freight

It is expected that the inner city would be safer and more accessible if there were fewer trucks, and wear and tear on the city's rather fragile brick streets would be appreciably reduced. Finally, the plan would yield €125 million through improved efficiency, at the same time that 1200 new jobs would be created (although this may not include the number of truck drivers who would be laid off). The plan might include stringent limitations on the admission of trucks to the city.

Noise and Heart Attacks

General environmental noise, such as traffic, increased the risk of heart attack by nearly 50% percent for men and 200% for women. Workplace noise raised heart attack risks for men by nearly a third but did not affect women's risk. The subjective reaction of annoyance to environmental noise correlated only slightly with the incidence of heart attack risk; the increase seems to be associated with actual sound levels.

The current exposure limit of 85 dB is too high, and levels nearer 65 or 75 dB are thought more reasonable (and even this is a lot of noise).

Passive Driving

Every year, some 39,000 deaths in the UK are caused or hastened by air pollution, most from vehicular sources. The greatest risk is to the heart, not to the lungs. While the effect is not understood, a strong correlation between air pollutants and deaths due to cardiovascular causes does exist.

Part of the problem is that catalytic converters are far less effective than usually supposed. In the laboratory, modern converters show an efficiency of 99%, but the real-world value is 72-75%. The EU has not taken a tough stance regarding the fine particulates that are probably the most important cause. Monbiot says,

The government has been arguing that to do something about this would not be "cost effective." But as the National Society for Clean Air points out, if it had acted when it had to, the rules would have cost far less. The idea that laws can be broken when it makes financial sense has interesting implications for the criminal justice system.

As a cyclist, these failures drive me berserk. I refuse to own a car, partly because I believe it is wrong to fill other people's lungs with carcinogens. And so, while the drivers breathe their filtered air, I have to sit behind their tailpipes, drawing their excretions - for I am exerting myself - deep into my chest.
. . .

Is it so hard for a government . . . to stand up to a handful of motor manufacturers who no longer even operate here? Or must we believe that public health in the UK takes second place to the profits of foreign corporations?

"Bio-Fuels" Worse Than Petroleum

Like most environmentalists, I have been as blind to the constraints affecting our energy supply as my opponents have been to climate change. I now realise that I have entertained a belief in magic.

And at least one substitute is worse than the fossil-fuel burning it replaces.

The last time I drew attention to the hazards of making diesel fuel from vegetable oils, I received as much abuse as I have ever been sent for my stance on the Iraq war. The bio-diesel missionaries, I discovered, are as vociferous in their denial as the executives of Exxon. I am now prepared to admit that my previous column was wrong. But they're not going to like it. I was wrong because I underestimated the fuel's destructive impact.

When I wrote about it last year, I thought that the biggest problem caused by bio-diesel was that it set up a competition for land use. Arable land that would otherwise have been used to grow food would instead be used to grow fuel. But now I find that something even worse is happening. The bio-diesel industry has accidentally invented the world's most carbon-intensive fuel.

In promoting bio-diesel - as the EU, the British and US governments and thousands of environmental campaigners do - you might imagine that you are creating a market for old chip fat, or rapeseed oil, or oil from algae grown in desert ponds. In reality you are creating a market for the most destructive crop on earth.

Great forests are levelled to plant the palms, releasing huge quantities of CO2 as they are burned. When swamps are converted to plantations, the underlying peat dries and oxidizes, releasing even more CO2 than the felling of forests. "In terms of its impact on both the local and global environments, palm bio-diesel is more destructive than crude oil from Nigeria."

The UK government has decided to go ahead anyway.

It is prepared to sacrifice the south-east Asian rain forests in order to be seen to be doing something, and to allow motorists to feel better about themselves.

Expensive Oil Jolting the World's Poor

"We are all facing a grave situation," Guatemalan Economy Secretary Marcio Cuevas said of the region. "We have to take the appropriate measures. If not, we will have crisis, not just in the short term, but in the long term." Rising oil prices hurt Guatemala because 60% of the nation's electricity is oil-based. Nicaragua generates 85% of its electricity from fuel oil, and President Enrique Bolanos has announced rationing measures.

Luis Gomez, vice president of a large transport cooperative in Guatemala City, ordered a hold on vehicle repairs to reduce costs. The cooperative may hike fares, even though past increases have sparked violent protests. "A country without public transportation is a country that's ungovernable," he said. "Will there be violence? Will people die if fares are increased? Maybe. But without a doubt there will be chaos if things don't change."

China to Build Eco-Cities

The Dongtan development, on an island in the Yangtze River near Shanghai, will build a city nearly as large as Manhattan by 2040. The first phase, home to 50,000 people, is to open for the Shanghai Expo trade fair in 2010.

The agreement signals a new awareness of environmental issues on the part of the Chinese government. China, with its growing population and economy, must start to address pollution and resource consumption. These eco-cities are meant to be self-sufficient in energy, water, and most food. The goal for transport systems is zero emissions of greenhouse gases.

External Costs

We conducted scenario analyses and found that fuel-based strategies produced emission reduction costs ranging from US$148 per tonne of CO2 (hybrid-electric vehicles) to US$3,570 per tonne of CO2 (fuel-cell vehicles). By contrast, mode switching scenarios produced emission reduction costs ranging from US$14 per tonne of CO2 (mode shift to NMT) to US$66 per tonne of CO2 (mode shift to BRT). The best result in terms of producing large emission reductions at a competitive cost was a package of BRT and NMT measures.

So, we have approaches that work (and are cheap) and approaches that don't work well and are expensive. (I question whether fuel-cell vehicles actually have any positive impact at all, given the energy-intensity of hydrogen production.)

Faced with this choice, Bush has chosen to subsidize hydrogen (of course).

Climate Chaos?

Abrupt switching mechanisms in the climate system - such as relatively small changes in ocean salinity - are augmented by causal loops that act as amplifiers. Perhaps the most famous example is sea-ice albedo: The vast expanses of white, frozen Arctic Ocean ice reflect heat back into space, thus providing positive feedback for cooling trends; alternatively, shrinking sea-ice increases heat absorption, accelerating both its own further melting and planetary warming.

Thresholds, switches, amplifiers, chaos - contemporary geophysics assumes that earth history is inherently revolutionary. This is why many prominent researchers - especially those who study topics like ice-sheet stability and North Atlantic circulation - have always had qualms about the consensus projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world authority on global warming.

In contrast to Bushite flat-Earthers and shills for the oil industry, their skepticism has been founded on fears that the IPCC models fail to adequately allow for catastrophic nonlinearities like the Younger Dryas. Where other researchers model the late 21st-century climate that our children will live with upon the precedents of the Altithermal (the hottest phase of the current Holocene period, 8000 years ago) or the Eemian (the previous, even warmer interglacial episode, 120,000 years ago), growing numbers of geophysicists toy with the possibilities of runaway warming returning the earth to the torrid chaos of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM: 55 million years ago) when the extreme and rapid heating of the oceans led to massive extinctions.

Dramatic new evidence has emerged recently that we may be headed, if not back to the dread, almost inconceivable PETM, then to a much harder landing than envisioned by the IPCC.

Get the Cars Out

It appears that the city will reduce traffic and the number of parking spaces in the inner city. Even now, the center is regarded as car-lite, although you might not know it to see it. (It is much better than in US cities, however.) Residents will be required to park in garages near the ring highway, which is likely to discourage car use and encourage rail travel. There will be even less free parking. If the measures are not adopted, Amsterdam is unlikely to meet air quality standards that come into force in 2010.

Big Boxes for Holland

Carfree Heart for Amsterdam?

Obituary

Henry L. Lennard, 1923-2005

Social Psychologist, Urban Planner

At UC San Francisco he founded and directed the Family Study Station, which studied family interaction and developed theories of family dynamics. He criticized the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry for excessive promotion of psychotropic drugs as a treatment for depression, schizophrenia, and other mental illness. He showed that the drug Thorazine, widely used to treat schizophrenia and other psychoses in the 1950s and 60s, caused incurable Tardive dyskinesia (resembling Parkinson's disease) after long-term use. He warned that the widespread use of these drugs did nothing to address the underlying causes of misery and, ultimately, made these problems worse. History has certainly justified his concerns.

In his later years, his work on cities came to the fore, and he was instrumental in the founding of International Making Cities Livable. He focused on ways to alter the built environment to foster better human interaction. "His interest was always in the quality of the human interaction in cities," Suzanne Crowhurst Lennard, his second wife said. "Most recently, he was very concerned about children and how growing up in North American suburbs doesn't allow for the social and intellectual development of children the way it does in the best European cities."

He fled his native Austria for New York 1939 following the Nazi invasion. He was a scholar from a young age and published his first academic article at age 19, while still a student. He earned several advanced degrees and eventually published some 14 books.

He died of heart failure during the 20th anniversary of the IMCL conferences in Venice. He wife has vowed to continue the series that they started together, a fitting tribute to a remarkable and productive life.

Editorial: Irritation

During the ten years in which I devoted my life to this idea, everything has gone from very bad to much worse. It is becoming apparent that sustainable energy is going to be scarcer and more expensive than we had thought. Climate change may already have passed a threshold, with who-knows-what to come. Millions of people are still dying every year in car collisions, and millions more from the pollutants that cars emit.

It sometimes seems to me that every solution but carfree cities will be tried until everyone finally admits that the carfree city is the only approach that stands even a chance of getting us out of the hole we've dug. So why is this idea so rarely on the table when solutions are considered? Why are we determined to make every possible mistake before considering an approach that not only saves the physical environment but offers a chance to save ourselves as well? Are we really so dumb? I hope not, but I'm getting irritated. And worried.
 

Books

TransUrban Published every two months from September 2006 €50.00/year

TransUrban is to be the only English-language magazine focusing on all forms of urban public transport ­ heavy rail, metro, tramways, trolley buses, and buses. The philosophy is to be the same as Railvolution, an important European rail transport and technology magazine. The same high production values are to be maintained in the new magazine. As with Railvolution, about 90% of the contents will focus on Europe, which reflects the geographical area of circulation.

The first regular issue of TransUrban will appear in September at the start of InnoTrans 2006 in Berlin. (An interesting pilot issue has already been released.) From early 2007 TransUrban will be published every two months.

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"Carparks & Pedestrian Mobility - an Integrated Vision" [PDF!]
(more details on SMRrTRAM)

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