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The Books

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Open Source Carfree Software Project

Photo Contest

World Carfree Network

CNU 17

Sustainable Urban Design

Districts Sited

Evolution of a Carfree District

The book also proposes new on-site design methods that are intended to replicate the evolved character and response to human needs that characterize medieval urban areas. However, the tempo is shortened from centuries to weeks. The method is low-tech in the extreme: it relies mainly on string and people. I have illustrated this issue with some of the drawings from the new book. The captions give a brief explanation of the changes from the previous design state. For reasons of space, about half of the drawings have had to be omitted here.

Quotable

Many say that a reduction in air pollution would make the single biggest difference to their quality of life.

News Bits

Radial Street Terminations & Major Uses

Apocalypse Now?

Top UK climate scientists sat in stunned silence as Anderson showed that carbon emissions since 2000 have risen much faster than anyone had thought possible. Coal is the major culprit. CO2 levels are now likely to rise to 650 parts per million (ppm) from today's 380 ppm. Most governments want to limit the rise to 450 ppm.

At 650 ppm, the world faces a catastrophic 4C average temperature rise. And even that bleak future can only be achieved if rich countries adopt "draconian emission reductions within a decade". Even the current economic crisis won't help much.

Many scientists, politicians, and campaigners now admit privately that 2C is a lost cause. 650 ppm is now viewed as a more likely outcome than 450 ppm. Hitting the 450 ppm target is now seen as "unbelievably difficult."

To limit CO2 to 450 ppm, rich nations would have to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 5% a year over the next decade. Britain's Climate Change Act 2008, is the world's most ambitious legislation, and it calls for reductions of 3% a year for 40 years.

Preliminary Arrangement of Major Radial Streets

Kids See the Light

The phenomenon is common enough that Japanese car makers have coined a term for it: "kuruma banare" ("demotorization"). Many in this generation do not regard cars as status symbols.

"Young people's interest is shifting from cars to communication tools like personal computers, mobile phones and services," said Yoichiro Ichimaru, chief of domestic sales for Toyota. The Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association predicts auto sales in Japan will fall to 4.86 million in 2009, the first time sales would fall below 5 million in more than three decades, down from a peak of 7.78 million during the 1990 bubble.

The manufacturers haven't given up. Nissan Chief Operating Officer Toshiyuki Shiga said, "The change in young people's attitude toward cars didn't happen overnight. So we have to keep convincing them cars are great."

I predict that it's going to be a hard sell.

Envelope for Major Radial Streets

Your Brain on Cars

One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard.

Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy thoroughfare like Newbury Street [Boston]. There are the crowded sidewalks full of distracted pedestrians who have to be avoided; the hazardous crosswalks that require the brain to monitor the flow of traffic.

A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception - we are telling the mind what to pay attention to - takes energy and effort.

Imagine a walk around Walden Pond, in Concord. The woods surrounding the pond are filled with pitch pine and hickory trees. Chickadees and red-tailed hawks nest in the branches; squirrels and rabbits skirmish in the berry bushes. Natural settings are full of objects that automatically capture our attention, yet without triggering a negative emotional response - unlike, say, a backfiring car. The mental machinery that directs attention can relax deeply, replenishing itself.

Major Radial Streets Defined

Sprawling Europe

Just as in the USA, people are disenchanted by Corbusier-inspired large-scale housing blocks. They want a return to the scale and density that gave each European city, town, and village its own distinctive character. They hope for a return to cities where business, industry, shops, and residences share meandering streets suitable for walking and biking, with nearby public transport. In short, they want a return to cities with a sense of place that celebrates local history, climate, ecology, and vernacular architecture.

Until now they have been labeled nostalgic. Even in densely-populated Europe, land outside cities was comparatively plentiful and cheap. Buyers seemed to want large American-style single-family houses.

Now that sustainability is on the table, Europe is reexamining the advantages of older urban patterns. Freiburg, Germany, committed to preserving its medieval city center by keeping sprawl at bay. The 5000 dwellings of its new Vauban district are one result. This compact, largely carfree project is energy efficient, and only 15% of households own a car. Most travel is by foot or bike.

The conference stressed new data that shows how energy consumption and CO2 emissions are inversely proportional to population density. Low-density construction is the worst of all. And Europe has seen accelerating sprawl across the continent.

Green buildings alone are not the answer. Stephen Platt of Cambridge Architectural Research said, "Everyone gets seduced by the 'green bling.' Making the houses energy-efficient is the easy bit. The key problem is making this a long-term socially acceptable place where people will want to live and prosper." We must create places like Vauban that encourage people to change their unsustainable behaviors.

A key challenge is seen to be the creation not of "cities in the country" but places that connect to the existing heritage. Regardless of whether these new towns are carfree or car-lite, they must have tight linkages to the historic city centers.

Radial Streets Refined

Masdar

TreeHugger (TH): How is Masdar City different from other projects you have worked on in the past?

Jay Witherspoon (JW): It's unique in that most of the projects I have worked on in the past have focused on a single issue, solving a problem like drought, for example. . . . This project integrates the whole range of issues, right across the board, including water scarcity issues, renewable energy, waste management, and so on.

TH: The plans for Masdar look like a very high-tech, modern version of the traditional Middle Eastern city.

JW: Exactly. Masdar will follow the format of the traditional Arabic town. There will be shadowing, demonstration plantings, maybe even a vertical farm. . . .

TH: What kind of people will live in Masdar?

JW: We're going for diversity. If you look at the population makeup in a place like Silicon Valley, where you have a mix of all types of people, that's what we need to make our city work. I think a lot of the tenants will be associated with the large, hi-tech firms, of course. But there will also be diversity. There will be children in Masdar as well.

TH: How will Masdar change the future of city design? Is this a special case, or a prototype that could be reproduced elsewhere?

JW: I really think it can be a model for the rest of the world. Some of the techniques we are using here date back thousands of years. The traditional Arabic city layout, the way it is positioned, the tightness of the streets; we even have it situated so that the sea breezes will come in and clean out the air in the city. So a lot of what we're doing is common sense.

Until now these things have only been done on a smaller scale, in small communities, on the scale of three or four blocks. When you do it on the city level, it really helps move things forward. . . . [T]hat's what I think Masdar City as a catalyst will do. The Masdar Initiative will then push it forward so that it can be a model for existing cities. But a lot of the things we are doing are common sense, and all of these things can be implemented anywhere, right now.

TH: Would it be fair to describe PRT as a system of transportation which combines the sustainability of a light rail with the convenience of the private car?

Luca Guala (LG): The PRT system in Masdar City will be a complementary system to the light rail, which will cross the city. PRT is not a system that can move huge masses of people, for that you need a light rail or a metro. A metro can move 60,000 passengers per hour - that's equal to about 20 lanes of highway.

Generally we foresee no more than a three minutes wait for passengers at a [PRT] station, but there may be special occasions when the wait time is longer.

The PRT vehicles will travel at speeds of approximately 7 meters per second, with the longest routes in the city being perhaps 2.5 km. So let's say you reach a station, wait maybe 1.5 minutes for your car to arrive, travel for 5 minutes if your destination is relatively far away, and then exit the station, which will take around a minute. So the longest trips in the city will be around 7, perhaps 10 minutes long.

PRT cars will move along rights of way, approximately 6 meters under street level.

We decided not to build elevated tracks in Masdar. Elevated tracks would put the cars between the first and second floors of buildings, and no one wants to see cars, even silent ones, zooming past their window. Plus a spaghetti grid network might not be so nice to look at from below, and could become a real visual issue in the city's narrow streets.

TH: What will it be like to travel on the PRT system in Masdar?

LG: Passengers would descend a flight of stairs or an elevator to the station.

You will swipe a smart card through a machine, and a welcome message will appear. One option is that the system will recognize you and greet you personally: "Good morning, where do you want to go today?" . . . . [T]he system will say something like, "Your car is arriving in 2 minutes at platform number 3."

Initially, the system will be very simple, with only a couple of stations. During this period, the system will function kind of like an elevator - you press a button and go to the third floor. Think of it as a horizontal lift. Later on it will be more sophisticated, and passengers will be able to get within 100 meters of any destination.

The cars will not run on tracks, but will operate within a kind of grid network, and take the shortest paths to get where they need to be. The cars will have wheels, and will be battery powered.

TH: How was the system planned out?

LG: . . . [S]omething like a conference center, which attracts a lot of people all at once, could become a local generator of congestion. So we said: let's move it slightly to the side. The end result is a large patchwork of land uses, with none of the city's districts clearly defined by a single use, like offices, residential and so on. That is ideal from a transit perspective, because it diffuses demand.

In Masdar, you will be able to live very close to where you work. The districts will be in use at all hours. There will be nodes of activity at the intersections of routes, but the trick is that each node does not serve people doing the same thing and traveling at the same time - thus no traffic [congestion] is created.

TH: How did the specific cultural context in Abu Dhabi affect the planning?

LG: Well, I am Italian. I bring with me a certain cultural model - namely the good parts of the Italian city. I think it is possible to apply the Italian city model in Abu Dhabi to a certain extent. But you can't just transplant something to another culture and make it work.

The classic Arabic city has many similarities to the Italian city. There was a common way of living in the Mediterranean Basin, in Christian as well as Muslim areas. From a town planner's perspective, the classic Arabic "medina" [dense Middle Eastern city with narrow streets] and Venice are similar. Masdar City takes its inspiration more from the Arabic medina than from the Italian city.

There are other cultural preferences involved here as well. People in Europe are used to taking public transport. It's not necessarily like that here. Plus there is more sensitivity here to the privacy of the family, which led us to suggest a different kind of system, more suited to the local cultural context.

TH: Is PRT cost-efficient?

LG: This will be an expensive system. It has to be that way, because it's a prototype. From an energy perspective it's extremely cost-efficient, which is what Masdar [the Masdar Initiative is the corporate body that is building Masdar City] wants. The maintenance of a system like this is more expensive than that of a system based on buses, but the level of service is absolutely unreachable by other forms of public transportation.

The huge advantage of PRT is that it is "on demand," including during off-peak hours. During peak hours, PRT is less efficient than public transport. But PRT is a 24-hour service, just as available during off- peak hours as it is during peak hours. This is much more efficient than running empty buses all night. There are advantages in terms of personal security as well - no long waits in the middle of the night, for example.

I don't really know about the financial aspects in detail, it's not really part of our job as planners. It is technically possible to cover costs with ticket fees. A fee roughly equivalent to the cost of a taxi ride would cover the costs of the system. There is a huge investment cost in a system like this, but after it is prototyped, the costs will come down. The actual cost of PRT is lower than the costs for a light rail of the same capacity.

I have been watching Masdar with great interest. Although the city is not likely to be duplicated, due to the high costs that are involved and its location in an extremely hot climate, it will be an important prototype for sustainable carfree cities.

Neighborhood Under Design

Fazilka

Implementation began when the market area was made carfree. Motorized four-wheeled vehicles and heavy vehicles are not allowed to drive in this zone during 12 daytime hours. The town had already undertaken activities to promote non-motorized transport.

The change has not just improved the quality of social life but also improved law and order and the environment. Reduced air pollution, a better economy, and improved road safety have been noted. Communities that are friendly to walking and biking are being seen as places with a high quality of life.

Municipal Council President Anil Sethi sees the carfree zone as a way to promote non-motorized transport and to build connections between the wealthy parts of town and the poorer parts. He opposes the construction of new overpasses within the city, which is a courageous position in Indian politics today.

Eco-cab (Dial-a-Rickshaw) has also been introduced, using the latest intelligent transport tools.

Preliminary Definition of Blocks

Carfree 42nd Street

The Institute for Rational Urban Mobility unveiled its Vision42 in 1999. The group has given hundreds of presentations, commissioned technical studies, and presented its ideas at community meetings. In the most recent report, Roxanne Warren, the architect who chairs the Vision42 initiative, and George Haikalis, an engineer who presides over the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility, summarized the studies.

The line would cost $411.3 million to $582.3 million in 2007 dollars. It would generate $704.9 million in annual economic benefits, and yield $175.4 million a year in additional fiscal benefits to the city and state. (Notice that the capital costs are one-time, and the benefits recur each year.) Property values would rise by $1 billion. Retail business would increase by 35%.

Freight has received serious attention. It turns out that most large office buildings along 42nd Street receive their freight on 41st or 43rd Streets. The study also shows that closing 42nd Street to traffic would not shift congestion to other streets.

The project could be completed in just two years and financed from the increased tax revenues. Alternatively, a transit-benefit-improvement district could shift the cost to property owners, who would be net beneficiaries.

Mayor Bloomberg does not yet support the plan, despite his generally forward-thinking views regarding the balance between pedestrian and car space allocations. Officials at the Metropolitan Transportation Administration (which runs the subways) have expressed an interest.

Block Composition Adjusted

The USA Saves Railroads. . . For Later

The Charlotte-Atlanta system is projected to make a profit if it captures as little as 2% of total trips. This, however, may be difficult given that the end-to-end times will probably not compare favorably with cars for most real-world trips. In Europe and Japan, real high-speed rail projects are taking a lot of traffic away from the airlines. When the first line, from Paris to Lyon, opened about 25 years ago, air traffic on that route all but disappeared. Similarly, Spain's new high-speed lines have captured large numbers of airline passengers and considerably reduced CO2 emissions.

High-speed rail has lost out in the economic recovery package. This is probably because "shovel-ready" projects are lacking. But China is going on a rail-building spree. The New York Times has reported that the country "has already built as many miles of high-speed passenger rail lines in the last four years as Europe has in two decades." Rail is a major component of China's recovery plan. Included are $17.6 billion for a passenger line across deserts, $22 billion for freight lines, and $24 billion for high-speed Beijing-Guangzhou passenger service.

In my Interstate Rail proposal, I found 100 MPH service to be fast enough to be useful. It has the further advantage of greater energy efficiency than true high-speed service. One part of my proposal would be lowering the speeds for road vehicles to about 50 MPH from the current de-facto 70 MPH. This, of course, improves the competitive position of medium-speed rail while slashing the energy consumption of highway vehicles.

Initial Block Arrangement

Wireless Trams, Maybe

Now Bombardier, the world's biggest tram builder, has introduced a prototype tram that obtains its energy through induction, without any direct contact. The method is to be found, on a much smaller scale, in many households with electric toothbrushes and razors. The tram inductors are only energized when a tram is above. Bombardier claims an efficiency of 98%. The trams would be 20-30% more expensive, but the pay-back is 6-10 years because the cost of maintaining overhead wires and pantographs is considerable.

The fly in the ointment is the cost of laying the in-ground inductors, which will themselves require some level of maintenance. The very strong induced currents are likely, in my estimation, to cause a number of problems that can't readily be solved. So, I continue to favor my original proposal, which is simple and cheap.

Blocks Adjusted

Open-Source Urban Planning

Gorton wants to put planning tools in the hands of citizen planners. Until now, the expensive and cantankerous software used by transit agencies to do route analysis has only been available to planning and transport professionals.

The new software saw its first serious application in Portland, Oregon, which used it to optimize bus routes. The next target is San Francisco, where proprietary software has caused major headaches. One of the ironies of open-source software is that the support is often better than for expensive proprietary software.

Gorton sees the following next steps for the livable cities movement:

• More sophisticated open-source city models that will add land use data to help ensure that zoning matches transport.
• Federal funding for bike lanes, public space reclamation, traffic calming, and possibly open-source urban planning projects.
• Blogs and videos along the lines of two social websites Gorton has established. One is Streetsblog.org, which covers the livable streets movement. The other is Streetfilms.org, which documents innovative traffic solutions around the world.
• Continued improvements in bus systems along the lines pioneered in Curitiba, including pre-paid fares, elevated platforms, multiple doors, and dedicated lanes.
• Better para-transit systems that use open-source software to optimize on-the-fly routing.
• Greatly expanded traffic-calming measures that carve out more space for pedestrians and bicyclists

Editorial

Blocks Refined

Don't Give Up the Ship

J.H. Crawford

Take, for instance, the lead article, which I entitled Apocalypse Now. Yes, it all sounds bad, and CO2 at 650 ppm probably is the end of "life as we know it." But life as we know it hasn't been with us for very long. People born in the 1930s know a completely different reality, one not based on massive consumption but on thrift and durable goods designed to last a lifetime. We must choose between attempting to keep the economy on the same track we have followed since 1945 and averting a catastrophic rise in CO2 levels.

The climate scientists see no hope of achieving the 5%-per-year emission reductions they believe are necessary to hold CO2 to a limit of 450 ppm. But is the reality really so bleak? I see it as a purely political question. If we say to the world's 6.5 billion people, "We have to cut emissions 5% each year or your children and your grandchildren will probably die young and perhaps horribly," what is the chance that people would choose real change? Can we achieve what I believe to be a relatively modest reduction in CO2 emissions?

Really, the question is, "Given what we know, how can we fail to achieve the necessary reductions?" How many people really are willing to accept massive disruption of the climate? What would we actually have to give up to prevent it?

A 5% annual reduction, compounded annually for 10 years gives a net reduction to 63% in ten years and to 38% in 20 years. (It's not clear from the source article that they really mean for the reduction to be calculated in this manner - the reduction could actually be to 50% in ten years, depending on how the math is done. If it's done that way, it means a reduction to zero in 20 years, so I don't think that's what they mean.)

Now, those are the global numbers. That means that if life is to continue to improve for people whose standard of living is still very low, those of us in the rich nations are going to have to cut even more deeply. That's fair, because we are the ones who caused the problem in the first place. So, what would that mean to us?

Let's proceed from the assumption that the rich nations have to cut their emissions of CO2 in half in 10 years. How does that work out?

Electricity	Replace all lamps with high-efficiency lamps. Reduce street lighting. Use air conditioning half as much. Use fans. Turn your computer off at night.
Gasoline	Drive half as many miles.
Kerosene	Fly half as far.
Diesel fuel	Get your food from half the present distance. Eat chicken instead of beef.
Natural gas	Double-insulate your house. Set the thermostat back a few degrees. Get a 30% smaller house.

This analysis is extremely simplistic and is intended to be so. But put it another way: would you be willing to make sacrifices like these so that your children would survive? Put that way, it's almost silly even to ask the question. . . except that nobody is putting it that way.

All of this leaves aside the possibility of developing genuinely renewable sources of energy. It leaves aside the possibility of having cars that use half as much fuel (and cars that use 90% less fuel were built a decade ago). It leaves aside the possibility of more efficient airliners, better air conditioning, more efficient tractors, agriculture based on natural rather than chemical methods, and so forth.

If this is the worst that happens in order to save the planet for future generations, do we really even need to stop and think about it?

Ask your grandparents how it was back then. Yell at your governments. It's time to stop hand wringing and start demanding real action. Push for carfree cities, which make the single greatest contribution to energy savings of any proposed approach. Get off your ass. Do it today. Your kid's life is at stake.

Final Arrangement

Hot New Links

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Poundbury by Francis King

Emergent Urbanism blog

MITRAC Energy Saver [PDF!] (super-capacitors for rail vehicles) from Bombardier

Good practices in Design for Environment: 15 years of experiences at Bombardier Transportation [PDF!]