Piazza Galuppi, Burano, Venice
©2005 J.Crawford

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Towards Carfree Cities VII (Istanbul)

At the plenary session, Ole Thorson explained how to build a sustainable future based on pedestrian-friendly streets and public spaces. Erhan Öncü showed how we now "make cars free" and why this must change. Haluk Gerçek explained the present traffic situation in Istanbul and proposed how to overcome economic, cultural, and political resistance.

More than 50 presentations, workshops, and discussions, all focusing on various aspects of the carfree concept, were organized. (Many of them can be downloaded from www.worldcarfree.net/conference/). A large parking lot was briefly converted into a park with artificial grass, exercise equipment, art exhibition, and a yoga space. Istanbul was also explored at length.

A special treat was the excursion to Büyükada Island, the largest of the five carfree Prince's Islands. This included a meeting with the mayor, who promised that, no matter how fast the car industry develops, this island will remain carfree.

The next issue of CarBusters will include a detailed account of the conference.

Towards Carfree Cities VIII (Portland, 2008)

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The Larger Squares of Venice

Piazza San Marco deserves an issue of its own, which it will get some day. Despite having hundreds of photographs of it, I do not have enough good ones. I have never really come to terms with this huge and wonderful square. I do not know how to represent it properly.

News Bits

World Carfree Day

• Lisbon: Central areas of Lisbon were designated carfree, for the first time in six years. The streets filled with pedestrians, cyclists, and skaters.
• China: Gridlock as usual. This is the first year that China has participated officially, with 107 Chinese cities staging a nominal Carfree Day. Participation was voluntary, and traffic was little affected.
• Israel: Carfree Day and Yom Kippur coincided this year. There was virtually no traffic except for emergency vehicles.
• Hamilton, Ontario: Free bike repairs, banners, music, chess, triple PARKing space party, bicycle-in movie, Critical Mass ride. More.
• São Paulo: The largest Critical Mass ever. Zen meditation, music, video exhibitions, and a street party. More.
• Budapest: Critical Mass had 35,000 riders. Vice mayor Miklós Hagyó promised that the number of bike paths in Budapest would double by 2015. More, in Hungarian
• Brussels: Carfree Day was taken seriously and the city became a place for people. The only car was a negative-emissions car from Auto-nomie. The engine space and interior were filled with soil and strawberry plants.
• Cork: The "Rebel Pedal Parade 2007" was promoted as Cork's biggest bicycle parade ever. The event was well received by citizens and partially funded by the Cork City Council.
• Manila: Cyclists distributed flyers promoting cycling as a mode of transportation.
• Prague: Over 2500 cyclists gathered in central Prague to celebrate largest-ever Critical Mass in the city. A riverside street was closed to traffic, and concerts were held after the ride. More.
• Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina: Traffic was closed for four hours on September 22nd. A a round-table discussion was held on "Sustainable Transport for the Future".
• Germany: The German Green Youth used mobility week to call for free public transport, citing the example of Hasselt, Belgium. They also called for carfree cities. Stakeholders in Erfurt will consider free public transport as a permanent measure in the future.

Carfree Games

Not on My Roads You Don't. . . Yet

The city's roads are controlled by the state, and the Premier vowed that a carfree day would not be allowed. "I don't think the city would cope," he said.

Nicholas Low, on the faculty of Architecture, Building, and Planning at the University of Melbourne, responded in an article entitled, "A car-free city centre by 2030:"

Cities worldwide are ending their reliance on cars to remake their centres into beautiful environments for living, playing, working and shopping.

September 22 is World Car-free Day, when people around the world reclaim the streets of great cities. Melbourne could become a car-free city by 2030. The question is, how?

Cars kill city life. They make the places they invade unpleasant, noisy, dangerous and smelly. But, of course, they deliver mobility.

Making the city car free does not mean making car access impossible. But it does mean keeping cars out of central areas and making the public transport network more effective.

Cities are taking the car-free challenge not just to save the environment, but to compete with other cities in creating places where people will want to work, live and spend. In this century, economic success comes with environmental quality.

Venice, one of the world's most admired cities, is of course car free. In England, even the city of Birmingham, in the heart of the car industry, has turned its central area over to people on foot. London is taming the car with a congestion charge. Montpellier in the south of France has made its central retail and entertainment district a place for walking. These are examples of a movement that has swept Europe in the past 30 years and is catching on in the US.

The first Australian city to go car free will gain a huge competitive advantage. Melbourne should not be looking for a single iconic building to win fame. Its whole central grid of streets and lanes is its icon.

Watch out, Mr Brumby. Somebody is gaining on you. He's probably on a bike.

PARK(ing)
Photo by greencitywaba

PARK(ing) Day

To rethink the way streets are used, call attention to the need for urban parks, and improve the quality of urban human habitat. . . . at least until the meter runs out!

I find this kind of low-budget, high-imagination project to be just what we need. If this were to be done on a fairly large scale, it would have at least as much impact as carfree days. And it looks like fun!

Paved Paradise

The reaction of locals to this news? "Are you crazy? I can never find parking where I'm going!" The Salon.com article continues:

That's the paradox of parking. No matter how much land we pave for our idle cars, it always seems as if there isn't enough. That's America. We're all about speed and convenience. We don't want to walk more than two blocks, if that. . . .

Despite all the environmental evils blamed on the car and its enablers - General Motors, the Department of Transportation, Porsche, Robert Moses, suburban developers - parking has slipped under the radar. Yet much of America's urban sprawl, its geography of nowhere, stems from the need to provide places for our cars to chill. In the past few years, a host of forward-looking city planners have introduced plans to combat the parking scourge. This year, some are making real progress.

To Donald Shoup, of UCLA, parking requirements are a "bane of the country." He said, "Parking requirements create great harm: they subsidize cars, distort transportation choices, warp urban form, increase housing costs, burden low income households, debase urban design, damage the economy, and degrade the environment," he wrote in The High Cost of Free Parking. (Read review.) Maybe he never noticed how ugly it was, too.

The costs of free parking are large. The city of Oakland started requiring apartments to have one parking space per apartment in 1961. The cost of an apartment promptly increased by 18%. Urban density declined by 30%. Downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, devotes more land to parking than all other land uses combined. Olympia, Washington, discovered that parking and driveways occupied twice as much land as the buildings that they served.

And it's not just the costs or the land take. Patrick Siegman, a transportation planner, said:

Americans love traditional American small towns, main streets and historic districts.

But largely because of minimum parking requirements, it's completely illegal to build anything like that again in most American cities. It's really hard to build anything where anyone would want to walk from one building to the next.

Shoup's preferred solution is market pricing. Demand in congested areas would be reduced by the high price. The good old-fashioned parking meter may enjoy a comeback, but the rates are not going to be a nickel an hour. They will have to be rebuilt to accept dollar coins. Shoup gets the last word:

I think that we've done things wrong for so long that it takes a while to break all our bad habits of wanting to be freeloaders.

We know that land is fabulously valuable and housing is expensive, but somehow we think we can park for free. We can't.

Longer Life in New York City, More Money in Portland

In Portland, Oregon, residents save $2.6 billion a year because they drive 20% less than other Americans. Most of the savings are thought to be spent locally on housing, entertainment, and food. Portland residents walk more than average and presumably enjoy a similar health benefit to New Yorkers. They live in compact communities, closer to work and home, so commuting, by whatever means, takes less time. They have a reasonably good public transport system.

Health, Energy, and Transport

• Although emissions from US cars scarcely increased between 1990 and 2003, emissions from light trucks rose 51% and heavier trucks by 57%
• The number of cars and SUVs in China could increase 15-fold over the next 30 years
• Flying may already be a greater per-capita cause of emissions than driving in some societies
• Per vehicle-kilometer, heavy-goods vehicles (trucks) are twice as likely to be involved in fatal crashes as cars
• 34% of deaths of children in the EU due to injury are caused by road crashes, with wide ranges of variability from country to country
• Food-energy intake has not decreased as much as physical activity, with an obesity epidemic the result
• "Harms are created through too much mobility and too little access."
• Transport infrastructure construction in China will displace 3.7 million farmers between 2004 and 2020

• Avoid the need for vehicle trips - access, not mobility
• Increase energy efficiency and renewable sources
• Shorten trip lengths and shift to low-impact modes
• Greater use of "active transport" (mainly walking and biking)

There Are No Green Cars

A Toyota advertisement for the Prius had described the gasoline-electric hybrid as "the world's most environmentally friendly car." "If someone says their car is more 'green' or 'environmentally friendly' than others then they would have to be able to document it in every aspect from production, to emissions, to energy use, to recycling," she said. "In practice that can't be done."

Carmakers risk fines if they use the words. They may only give information that can be documented.

Peak Oil, Coming to a Planet Near You, Now

Leo Drollas, who leads oil and gas market analysis at the Center for Global Energy Studies in London, claims that there are plenty of supplies and no looming crisis. He called the report "scaremongering." He admits that production could slow some day, but only because new reserves will be considered too difficult or expensive to extract. "Oil could be left in the ground and we could move on to another fuel in the future, not because we're running out of oil but because, economically speaking, it is not worth extracting the oil."

I am unclear about "another fuel." Close to press time, crude oil was trading near $96/barrel, the highest level in history even when adjusted for inflation, itself largely a result of 35 years of rising oil prices.

A Streetcar I Desire

I have been searching for ways to rapidly install street-running rail systems. The greatest barrier, and one of the greatest costs, has been the installation of the overhead power system, which is also a blot on the face of the city. I had earlier proposed fuel-cell trams (Japan is already testing fuel-cell rail vehicles), and short-wire trams, which resemble the battery-powered trams in most respects, except that my proposal called for super-capacitors instead of batteries. I still think that this may be a more efficient solution, as capacitors are well suited to the very high charge and discharge rates needed for short-haul, street-running trams. I am gratified that others think this problem needs a solution, and I am now confident that one will emerge. It will revolutionize urban transport.

Editorial

Carfree in America? Surely You're Joking!

By J.H. Crawford

Americans must find the entire idea of carfree life a near impossibility. Take the example of the Livingston (New Jersey) Town Center. This is a reasonable (if incredibly expensive) New Urbanist project in the center of Livingston. (I use "center" advisedly - the town has no real center; the project is at the intersection of two of the most important streets in the town.) This is a mixed-use development, but mixed only if you need gourmet popcorn or pricey kitchen equipment. There is no grocery store or hardware store, or anything that you might really need. Life there would be exceptionally difficult without a car. A few buses come along now and then, but the town is so spread out and so lacking in focus that to meet one's daily needs using only a bus or by walking would be all but impossible. (Traffic is so heavy and fast that I would fear to cycle, although some people do.)

The situation is much the same across the USA. Single-use zoning, low-density development, and space-hogging automobile infrastructure make life without driving seem a fanciful notion. Everything is far from everything else, so walking is impractical. The infrastructure is so oriented to serving car drivers that cycling is made unreasonably difficult and dangerous, and once again the distances are daunting. Everything is so spread out that decent public transport is essentially impossible to provide.

If we are going to make progress in the USA, we will have to build some demonstration projects, or else take the cars out of New York City, which would actually be a fairly simple task, given New York's density, the penchant of its citizens to walk, and the reasonably good public transport already in place. Americans will have to experience life without cars before they will believe that it is possible. Let's get to work on those demonstration projects.

Books & Films

 

Visualizing Density Julie Campoli and Alex S. MacLean Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2007 152 pages Softcover (includes CD-Rom) US$ 39.95 ISBN 9781558441712

This excellent book measures density using a different approach from the method presented on Carfree.com. While I prefer my own method, it is time consuming to prepare, and I have only ten examples. This book is a very useful extension, although its scope is limited to the USA. It begins with an excellent general discussion of density issues and strategies.

Condensed from the Abstract:

The American Dream of a single-family home on its own expanse of yard still captures the imagination. But with 100 million more people expected in the United States by 2050, rising energy and transportation costs, disappearing farmland and open space, and the clear need for greater energy efficiency and reduced global warming emissions, the future built environment must include more density.

Consumer demand for more walkable, mixed-use, and concentrated neighborhoods is already on the rise among some demographic groups. But for others, density continues to have negative connotations. In many established urban neighborhoods, concerns about traffic congestion and parking, and strains on infrastructure, schools, and parks have led to resistance to more concentrated settlement patterns. Campoli and MacLean have joined with the Lincoln Institute to create a full-color, richly-illustrated book to help planners, designers, public officials, and citizens better understand and communicate the concept of density as it applies to the residential environment.

Visualizing Density includes an essay on the density challenge, an illustrated manual on planning and designing for "good" density, and a catalog of 250 diverse neighborhoods across the country. Density for each neighborhood is given as dwelling units per acre. Photographs of each location are included. Plan views are also included.

Campoli stated at a recent conference, "We don’t have a density problem. We have a design problem."

The Myths of Biofuels Sutro Tower Video San Francisco, 2007 89 minutes DVD US$ 7.50 (cost of duplicating & shipping) Buy here

This is the best single explanation of the problems with biofuels I have seen. The short and simple answer is that biofuels are no answer to our energy and emissions problems. In fact, they generally make things worse. Sorry.

It gets a bit schmaltzy in a couple of places, but you can fast-forward.

Hot New Links

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How to Build a Village by Claude Lewenz

The Humanitarian Impact of Urbanisation

The Task Force for Child Survival and Development

Ideas for 7 October, Radio New Zealand (includes an interview with J.H. Crawford) [ASX file!]

Efficient Vehicles Versus Efficient Transportation: Comparing Transportation Energy Conservation Strategies from VTPI [PDF!]

Carfree.com is wholly owned by Joel Crawford, the legal name of author J.H. Crawford. Its operation is financed by J.H. Crawford, with the help of some generous donors since 2004. It generates no revenues directly but does help support sales of Carfree Cities. Carfree.com accepts review copies of books but makes no commitment to review them. J.H. Crawford receives no commissions from the sale of books mentioned on Carfree.com.

The views expressed at Carfree.com are those of J.H. Crawford, except for articles, letters, and editorials that carry the names of other authors. The inclusion of these signed texts is at the sole discretion of J.H. Crawford, who does not necessarily agree with the views expressed. All other content, except quoted material, is written by J.H. Crawford.

E-mail announcements of new issues of Carfree Times are mailed to approximately 800 subscribers. A rough estimate of first-year circulation for each new issue is 5000. All the issues ever published are still being read.