To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net
While
the workshop is hosted by South Pasadena, it is open to
anyone who would like to attend.
This is an excellent opportunity to gather information
for your comment letters on the Draft EIR/EIS, which
are due July 6.
Attached is the Draft Agenda for the SR-710 Community Workshop
Cities around the world are coming to the same conclusion: they’d be
better off with far fewer cars. So what’s behind this seismic shift in
our urban lifestyles? Stephen Moss goes on an epic (car-free) journey to
find out
London’s Oxford Street in 1965, when city planning was dominated by a desire to accommodate the car.
Gilles Vesco calls it the “new mobility”. It’s a vision of cities in
which residents no longer rely on their cars but on public transport,
shared cars and bikes and, above all, on real-time data on their
smartphones. He anticipates a revolution which will transform not just
transport but the cities themselves. “The goal is to rebalance the
public space and create a city for people,” he says. “There will be less
pollution, less noise, less stress; it will be a more walkable city.”
Vesco, the politician responsible for sustainable transport in Lyon, played a leading role in introducing the city’s Vélo’v bike-sharing
scheme a decade ago. It has since been replicated in cities all over
the world. Now, though, he is convinced that digital technology has
changed the rules of the game, and will make possible the move away from
cars that was unimaginable when Vélo’v launched in May 2005. “Digital
information is the fuel of mobility,” he says. “Some transport
sociologists say that information about mobility is 50% of mobility. The
car will become an accessory to the smartphone.”
Vesco is nothing if not an evangelist. “Sharing is the new paradigm
of urban mobility. Tomorrow, you will judge a city according to what it
is adding to sharing. The more that we have people sharing
transportation modes, public space, information and new services, the
more attractive the city will be.”
The Vélo’v scheme is being extended, car clubs that use electric
vehicles are being encouraged, and what Vesco calls a “collaborative
platform” has been built to encourage ride-sharing by matching drivers
with people seeking lifts. There is, he says, no longer any need for
residents of Lyon to own a car. And he practises what he preaches – he
doesn’t own one himself.
Pedestrian-friendly central Lyon, on the banks of the River Rhône.
The number of cars entering the city has fallen by 20% over the past
decade, without even a congestion-charging scheme (Vesco says it would
impose a disproportionate burden on the less well-off, who tend to drive
higher-polluting vehicles). And even though Lyon’s population is
expected to rise by more than 10% over the next decade, he is targeting a
further 20% drop in car use. The car parks that used to run alongside
the banks of Lyon’s two rivers have already been removed, and human
parks opened in their place. Vesco says someone returning to Lyon for
the first time in a decade would barely recognise the city.
Birmingham, which vies with Manchester for the title of England’s
second city, has been following the experience of Lyon and other
European cities closely, and is now embarking on its own 20-year plan
called Birmingham Connected,
to reduce dependence on cars. For a city so associated in the public
mind with car manufacturing, this is quite a step. The initiative is
being driven by the veteran leader of Birmingham city council, Sir
Albert Bore, who talks airily about imposing a three-dimensional
transport plan on the two-dimensional geography of the city: “French and
German cities all have an infrastructure which has a far better
understanding of how you need to map the city with layers of travel.”
“Multi-modal” and “interconnectivity” are now the words on every
urban planner’s lips. In Munich, says Bore, planners told him that the
city dwellers of the future would no longer need cars. Bikes and more
efficient public transport would be the norm; for occasional trips out
of the city, they could hire a car or join a car club that facilitated
inter-city travel. The statistic everyone trots out is that your car
sits outside, idle and depreciating, for 96% of its life. There has to
be a more efficient way to provide for the average of seven hours a week
when you want it.
Smallbrook Ringway, part of Birmingham’s original, road-dominated Bull Ring development.
Car clubs offer a second statistic. Whereas a personally owned car
caters for an individual or a family, a car-club car can service 60
people. As I type this I look at the VW Golf sitting outside my window,
which I last drove a fortnight ago. Private cars are wasteful and
expensive.
Bore recognises that his plan to transform his city will not be easy,
and will require a healthy dose of public education. “Birmingham was
seen as the champion of the car,” he says, “and as a result it didn’t
develop an underground or the tram network you see in major cities
across Europe. There’s been a failure to develop those systems because
there’s been no longer-term vision.” Birmingham now has a long-term plan
– but what it doesn’t have is the money. It needs £4bn; so far it has
raised only £1.2bn. Central government, private-sector developers and
local businesses are going to have be convinced it’s worth it.
Anne Shaw, Birmingham’s head of transportation services, walks me
round the centre of the city to show me the changes already taking
place. The single tram line, which runs from Wolverhampton, is being
extended; the gyratory road which cuts off many of the municipal
buildings is being taken out and traffic re-routed; forbidding concrete
subways are being removed; cycle lanes are being put in, and a fast bus
service is planned.
One day, perhaps, Birmingham will even have its own underground
system, though that is many years and millions of pounds away. Commuting
into Birmingham is currently split 50-50 between car and public
transport; that, too, has to change – in London, only 15% of commuters
use a car. In Birmingham, the district in the centre which houses
Symphony Hall and the new state-of-the-art library is called Paradise.
One day, Bore hopes it will live up to its name.
The planners in Birmingham accept they are late to the party. London,
which has pioneered congestion charging and has a well-integrated
system of public transport, has led the move away from cars over the
past decade, during which time 9% of car commuters have switched to
other forms of transport. “People in London have a lot of options and
there’s been huge growth across all modes,” says Isabel Dedring, the
American-born deputy mayor for transport in the capital. “There’s been a
massive increase in investment in public transport.”
London’s Piccadilly Circus in 1969, when car parking was still free in
most of the capital.
Dedring says London has always been progressive in terms of public
transport – its narrow, twisting roads were never conducive to the
automotive domination that occurred in many US and European cities in
the 1960s and 70s, when the car was king. But from the turn of the
millennium, there has been a concerted attempt to encourage switching to
other modes of transport, and the past decade has seen a 30% reduction
in traffic in central London.
“Traffic levels have gone down massively,” says Dedring, “partly
because of the congestion charge, but also because we are taking away
space from private vehicles and giving it to buses through bus lanes and
to people through public realm [developments].” And now to cyclists,
too, with the planned “cycle superhighways” and cycle-friendly neighbourhoods being trialled in three London boroughs.
In Waltham Forest, which is running one of those pilot schemes
(tagged “mini-Holland”), I go cycling with councillor Clyde Loakes,
deputy leader of the council and the cabinet member responsible for the
environment. What used to be rat runs in the area now known as
Walthamstow Village have been closed to through-traffic, and at a stroke
the number of vehicles using the area has dropped by more than 20%. The
area is remarkably quiet and relaxed when we cycle around one weekday
afternoon; indeed it comes as quite a shock when we leave the confines
of the village and are suddenly pitched back into the noise and traffic
as we head to the town hall.
Loakes says the trial is an attempt to alter behaviour and the feel
of the area, but is also a recognition that change is already occurring.
“In Waltham Forest, we have an increasing number of households without a
car. Public transport is getting better; we have an increasingly young
demographic; and in many of the developments being built car parking is
not a priority, so car ownership is not an option.”
To put it more bluntly: many city developments are now predicated on
there being no car spaces for residents. Developers worried about this
initially, but have come to realise it doesn’t pose a problem for the
young professionals likely to be buying their flats, so have accepted
the demands of council planning departments.
Walthamstow Village has seen a 20% drop in vehicle numbers since
trialling its cycle-friendly neighbourhood scheme.
The inner-London borough of Hackney,
which prides itself on being the greenest council in London, tells a
similar story. “We are trying to create a more liveable environment,”
says councillor Feryal Demirci, the cabinet member for neighbourhoods,
“and car-free developments are one way of doing that.” She says almost
90% of the developments currently under way are completely car-free,
with the council guaranteeing alternatives to personally owned cars,
including a commitment that every resident will live within three
minutes of a car-club bay.
The
statistic Hackney is proudest of is that more than 15% of its residents
commute to work by bike. “It’s about creating an environment where it’s
easier for people to cycle or take the bus, so they’re not relying on
cars,” Demirci says. Car ownership in the borough has dropped over the
past 10 years: whereas a decade ago 56% of households did not own a car,
that figure now stands at 65%. Hackney, which is not on the underground
network, also claims the highest level of bus usage in London. Though
the population has risen by 45,000, the number of cars owned by people
in the area has fallen by 3,000. These are trends that urban planners
elsewhere would kill for.
This model of denser, less car-dependent cities is becoming the
accepted wisdom across the developed world. “The height [of buildings]
is going up; density is going up; borough policies and London plan
policies are all about intensification and densification of land uses,”
explains Ben Kennedy, Hackney’s principal transport planner. “We’re
probably going the way of Manhattan. People live very close and they
don’t travel at all because everything is on their doorstep; the
population in one block is so high, it can support all the amenities you
could ever want. We’re slowly going in that direction in London.”
According to the Helsinki Times, most future residents of the city will not own a car.
A revolution is coming, but it costs money
Rikhard
Manninen is another man with a plan – a very large plan, which is laid
out on a table in his office in the centre of Helsinki. Manninen is
director of the city’s strategic urban planning division. The project is
a vision of how the city will look in 2050. It will have a lot more
people – the population is projected to rise by 50% – but with much less dependence on cars.
The city’s population density will be increased; many of the new
high-rise apartment blocks will not have residents’ car parking; key
arteries into the city will be replaced by boulevards; more and more
space will be given over to cycle lanes. A report on the plan in the Helsinki Times last year confidently predicted: “The future resident of Helsinki will not own a car.”
“Agglomeration” is the buzzword that planners such as Manninen like
to use, and the benefits which derive from it are driving the vision of a
new city. “When you are located quite close, businesses can interact
more easily; people can walk to work and use public transport. It’s more
efficient.”
In many cities, the era of the suburban commuter, along with the era
of the car, is drawing to a close. Manninen no longer wants a city with a
single centre; he envisages a multi-polar city with half-a-dozen hubs
where people live, work, shop and play. This will reduce transport
congestion and generate a series of vibrant, efficiently organised,
semi-autonomous units – that’s the plan, anyway.
Though Finland is seen as a pioneer in sustainable transport, the
reality is rather different. Because the country came late to
urbanisation and there was a huge amount of development in the 1950s and
60s, commuting by car is more entrenched than in some older cities.
Finns have tended to live in the suburbs, driving to the centre of Helsinki
to work and to their beloved country cottages at weekends. But Manninen
echoes Vesco in Lyon in his view that attitudes are changing: “The
younger generation are no longer car dependent. They are less likely to
have a driving licence than previous generations.”
Generation Y, the so-called millennials now in their 20s and early
30s who have come of age in the digital era, seem less wedded to
possessions than their baby boomer predecessors. Surveys show that the
one object that is prized is the smartphone, and the future of transport
is likely to be based not on individually owned cars but on “mobility
as a service” – a phrase supposedly coined by another Finn, Sampo
Hietanen, chief executive of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS)
Finland. Consumers will, so the theory goes, use their smartphones to
check ultra-detailed travel news, locate car-club cars or bikes, check
for parking spaces, call up Uber drivers, and arrange shared rides. Who needs a personally owned car?
While in Helsinki, I meet a delegation from the city’s Regional Transport
Authority. I’m struck not just by their commitment to sustainable
transport, but their willingness to engage with the public. They send
staff into schools and workplaces to try to win converts to walking,
cycling and public transport, and take their message to older people,
who are usually the most resistant to abandoning their cars.
Helsinki’s Baana bicycle corridor opened to the public in 2012.
One of the initiatives they are proudest of is their Kutsuplus (“Call
plus”) bus service – a fleet of nine-seater minibuses whose routes are
determined by the bookings they get on any given day. It’s a great idea,
and I book a bus to take me from their offices into town. It arrives
quickly, picks me up at a bus stop just 100 metres away, and costs €5
for the two-mile trip. The problem is that, so far, Helsinki only has 15
buses, and doesn’t have the funding for any more. Like many of the
schemes currently under way, it’s at the pilot stage. There’s a
revolution coming, but revolutions cost money.
“We are not making a car-free Helsinki – that is not possible,” says
Reetta Putkonen, director of the transport and traffic planning
division, who I meet for lunch at an exhibition space devoted to the
city’s vision of the future. “But we are going to take control of where
the cars are and how they are used, so that we will have places where
it’s really nice to walk, it’s very fast and easy to bike, and public
transport is highly efficient. Walkers will be the kings, and the
cyclists will have their own paths. We will still have cars – people
need them for carrying goods – but their speeds will be very low and
there won’t be so many of them. Our planning shouldn’t be based on cars
and on parking. It will be a balanced system.”
After lunch, I meet another Reetta – not all Finnish women are called
Reetta, they assure me. Reetta Keisanen is the city’s cycling
coordinator, and she has brought two of the department’s pool bikes for
us to undertake a tour of the city. She takes me first along a cycle
path that used to be a rail track, linking the town centre with the
harbour. Halfway along the route, there is an electronic register
counting the cycles as they pass – I am the 54,672nd so far this year.
Reetta II tells me that 96% of the residents of Helsinki are
pro-cycling, though Reetta I had cautioned that the figure might be
lower if motorists realised how much of their road space was being eaten
into.
There are only three gears on the bike and I am not dressed for this
sudden spasm of activity – instead of shorts, I am wearing thick
trousers and jacket – so it is a struggle, especially on the gritty
areas near the seafront. It is, though, pleasant when we eventually get
there, and sit in the spring sunshine in the garden of the Regatta, a
tiny wooden café which is one of Helsinki’s best-loved attractions.
Keisanen, who is in her mid-20s and committed to the sustainability
cause, is convinced a major change is afoot. “We’ve got lots of work to
do because many Finns still own cars,” she says, “but in cities it is
now possible to live without a car, and young people are buying fewer
cars than older people.” Cycling in Helsinki has doubled since 1997, and
Keisanen predicts further increases as the cycling network expands. I
suggest to her that not all cyclists behave well – I am thinking of the
ones I see in London who whizz along pavements and go in the wrong
direction down one-way streets – but she has a good answer. “Cities get
the cyclists they deserve. If you have good infrastructure, you will get
good cyclists. It’s the same with drivers and pedestrians.”
Cars line up to enter the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel heading into Mahattan
during New York’s first full-scale transit strike in 1966.
To drive or not to drive: have we reached ‘peak car’?
All the trends in cities appear to be moving in the direction
favoured by environmentalists, so do they think they are finally
winning? “We’re at a stage now in history where people, especially young
people, want to have the choice whether to drive or not to drive,” says
Jason Torrance, policy director at sustainable transport group
Sustrans. “We’ve seen a huge change over the past five years around an
ownership model. You now have Spotify and other on-demand services. My
entire record collection is in the loft. We have everything on iTunes
and Spotify and my son, who is six, only vaguely knows what a CD is.”
Torrance says the appetite is there for alternatives to the car, and
that some cities – both in Europe and in the developing world, notably
China – are responding to the challenge. The pro-car attitude which was
dominant in the UK from the 1960s through to the end of the Conservative
Thatcher era has certainly declined but, he says: “We have a poverty of
ambition in the UK in our relationship with cars, and our city leaders
should be a lot bolder.”
Sustrans’ response to what it sees as government inertia is to get involved in grassroots projects such as its DIY Streets scheme,
where it works with local councils and residents to reduce the way cars
affect their streets. The aim is to let the residents decide what they
want in terms of traffic flow and number of parking spaces. “We find
residents on DIY streets drive much less, there is a significant
increase in the number of kids playing on the street, and there is a lot
more cycling,” he says.
Torrance believes we are still wedded to the car as a status symbol,
but others disagree. Stephen Bayley, who has written several books on
car design, is convinced the age of the car is coming to an end. “It’s
five minutes to midnight for the private car,” he says. “It’s no longer
rational to use cars in cities like London.” Cars were invented as
agents of freedom, but to drive (and, worse, to have to park) one in a
city is tantamount to punishment.
Bayley also believes the arrival of driverless cars
will further undermine the driving experience. Sex, beauty, status,
freedom – all the words which advertisers have tried to associate with
cars over the past 50 years – have been replaced by mere functionality.
“There was some research a year or so ago which interviewed people in
their 20s and 30s,” he says. “The great majority said they would rather
give up their car than their smartphone, and in their list of cool
brands, no car manufacturer appeared in the top 20. That’s a very
significant change. Twenty years ago, if you’d asked young people, BMW
and other car brands would certainly have featured.”
Citroen DS cars on display on the Champs-Elysées in Paris in the mid-60s.
Bayley draws my attention to the French philosopher Roland Barthes’
homage to the Citroën DS, which appeared in his 1957 book Mythologies.
“I believe that the automobile is, today, the almost exact equivalent of
the great Gothic cathedrals,” wrote Barthes. “I mean, a great creation
of the period, passionately conceived by unknown artists, consumed in
its image, if not its use, by an entire populace which appropriates in
it an entirely magical object.” These days, cars all look the same and
pretty soon, if the manufacturers have their way, we won’t even have to
drive them.
Christian Wolmar, the transport analyst who is seeking the Labour
nomination for the London mayoralty in 2016, welcomes this
demystification of the car. “Attitudes have changed,” he says. “My
stepson didn’t bother passing his driving test till he was 27. None of
my kids are car-oriented in the way that we were. When I was a teenager
[he is now 65], we lived in Kensington and I used to borrow my mother’s
car, drive into the centre in the evening, park it somewhere, go to the
cinema and a nightclub, then drive home again. That is inconceivable
today with drink-driving laws, parking and the general hassle of it all.
We have begun to shift away from cars. On trains, people can use their
mobile devices; ‘peak car’ seems to have been reached in America, with
young people favouring what they call transit; and there is a trend of
younger people no longer seeing the car as central to their lives.”
Peak car. This is a phrase I hear again and again. The question of
whether there is now an irreversible move away from cars towards other
forms of transport is central to the cars-in-cities debate. Glenn Lyons,
founder of the Centre for Transport and Society at the University of
the West of England, is in no doubt that something fundamental is
happening. “For the past decade, predating the global economic downturn,
car traffic has been flatlining. This is true not only of the UK but of
a number of other developed economies around the world.”
According to Lyons: “Young people have stood out particularly. Car
licence acquisition has been going down among younger age groups, and
there are strong suspicions that the digital age is contributing to why
people now have less reliance on physical mobility. We are in the midst
of a fundamental regime transition in society. We are increasingly
seeing the car as a functional technology to get from A to B, rather
than the much more symbolic representation it had in defining society in
previous generations. That is not to suggest the car is done and
finished with, but I believe it will become a background technology.”
David Metz, former chief scientist at the Department for Transport
and now visiting professor at University College London’s Centre for
Transport Studies, published a book last year called Peak Car, in which
he argued that “car use in developed economies has reached a maximum”
and that “we have come to the end of an era in which we have steadily
travelled more”. “Car use per capita in most of the developed economies
has stopped growing,” he tells me, “and stopped growing well before the
recession. If you look at the UK data, you see a long-term rise in car
travel which came to a stop in the late 1990s.”
Personal Rapid Transport cars on display at the Institute of Science and
Technology in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi.
Holding out against what is rapidly becoming the orthodoxy is Stephen
Glaister, former professor of transport at Imperial College and about
to retire as director of the Royal Automobile Club Foundation: “Until
the 2008 recession, broadly speaking there was continued growth [in car
travel],” he insists. “Then the young age group were very badly hit
economically, so it’s not surprising their take-up of driving licences
is falling. To what extent that’s also to do with some fundamental
change in attitudes remains to be seen. Let’s see what happens when they
get to 30 and have a family.”
Glaister points out that the Department for Transport is still
assuming an overall increase in traffic of more than 25% by 2040. “You
can make different assumptions about oil prices and demographic
effects,” he says, “but whichever way you look at it, you’re going to
get substantial traffic growth.” Stephen Joseph, executive director of
the Campaign for Better Transport, counters that the DfT is hooked on
out-of-date thinking: “What we are still battling with is a bunch of
policies, design manuals and ways of thinking that are driven by 1989;
that where we’re going to end up is Los Angeles and that’s the natural
order of things. But that’s not true. It’s not even true worldwide:
there are examples, particularly in parts of Latin America, of cities
that have been built around buses rather than cars. The idea that the
natural end of development is Los Angeles – even Los Angeles doesn’t
think that now.”
So where does this leave car manufacturers? At a conference on
driverless cars organised by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and
Traders (SMMT), I buttonhole BMW executive Glenn Schmidt, who is giving a
talk on what this future generation of cars means for a manufacturer
such as BMW, which has traditionally put great emphasis on the driving
experience. In his talk, he admits we are now seeing “a shift from
ownership to accessing mobility”, and that young people are less likely
to own cars than previously. Hence BMW’s backing for DriveNow, a car
club which has established itself in Germany, the US and, more recently,
central London.
“There is a fundamental change taking place,” Schmidt tells me, “and
if you look at dense urban environments with traffic jams, the solution
can’t be to stuff more cars into that environment.” So BMW will sell
fewer cars? “We obviously have the cars in DriveNow; usually younger
people choose to use these, and later they will move into buying cars.
DriveNow is a mechanism to attract young people. It gives us an edge by
attracting younger people and bringing them to our brands, and later on
they will be interested in buying our vehicles.” That, at least, is what
car manufacturers are hoping.
Jean-Philippe Hermine, vice-president of strategic environmental
planning at Renault, which has pioneered electric cars, accepts that
vehicles are now regarded differently. “The relationship with the car is
changing,” he says. “You can question the need to own a car. Some
people are looking for more functionality. With our electric cars, where
customers can rent the battery, we are to some extent selling mobility
and mileage more than a product.”
A Google driverless car on a test drive in Mountain View, California.
Disruption is coming – especially if Google and Apple bring their
experiments with driverless cars to fruition – and there are sure to be
casualties, but for the moment the manufacturers are citing the old
adage that every crisis is an opportunity. No one wants to be left
behind – Autolib’ is poised to come into London
with a fleet of electric cars, and will also take over the running of
the charging infrastructure in the capital – but eventually
consolidation in the car-club market seems inevitable, with a few
national players dominating, as with mobile phones. This is an industry
in which scale will be everything.
“We’re going to see a very different state of play over the next
couple of decades,” says Richard Brown, manager of Ford’s advanced
product group, “and the car is clearly going to be part of the internet of things
that everybody is talking about. You have to be prepared to embrace the
potential disruption and be excited by the challenges that lie ahead.
We’ve seen over the past five or 10 years a number of companies that
didn’t recognise the changes that were happening around them – and they
don’t exist any more. Look at the Kodaks and Nokias of this world. We
don’t want to allow ourselves to become a Nokia.”
“People think we love our cars, but do we?” Sampo Hietanen asks me,
following a seminar staged by the thinktank Nesta to discuss
mobility-as-a-service. “If you get a good enough service-level offer,
you will switch,” he says. “If I offer £100 of free use of taxis and
guarantee you can do all your trips by taxi, people will say, ‘what do I
need a car for?’”
Hietanen argues that in the future, instead of buying cars, we will
have a monthly contract with a supplier which meets all our mobility
needs. So how long will it be before we see these mobility service
providers, as he calls them, start to appear? “I’m expecting the first
services at the start of next year,” says Hietanen. “It won’t be long
before someone is providing this in London.”
Transport consultant George Hazel, another of the speakers at the
seminar, cites a report which anticipates 16 major mobility providers
entering the global market. “The idea is that a supplier understands my
needs, constantly learns about my profile, and gives me a package
according to what I’m prepared to pay.” For mobility suppliers, he says,
the attraction will be that once they have you as a customer, they will
be able to offer you a range of services in addition to transport.
Hazel’s vision reminds me of a technology consultant I talked to at the SMMTconference,
who said that in the future, the car that people drive (or that drives
them) will be less valuable than the data derived about the person from
the vehicle’s connectivity – where they travel, what they listen to or
watch as their driverless vehicle ferries them around, where they take
their holidays, even how they sit in the car. He anticipated a time when
connected, autonomous cars were given away, just so suppliers could add
the recipient to their customer base and access that data. The car as
loss leader.
The masterplan for Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, which keeps cars out of the centre.
Cities of the future – without cars?
On a sparkling spring morning, I meet David Nelson, head of design at
architects Foster and Partners, and Bruno Moser, who heads its urban
planning division. Increasingly, Foster and Partners is interested in
designing whole cities, and in trying to take the sustainability message
to the developing world. In Abu Dhabi, it has spent the past 10 years
creating Masdar City, an environmentally friendly community which will
eventually grow to 100,000 people and in which cars are kept out of the
centre, and walking and cycling encouraged.
“We were trying out zero-carbon, zero-waste thinking, and mobility
plays a key part in that,” says Nelson. What he calls “carbon cars” are
kept at the perimeter, and in the centre Foster and Partners have
designed a personal rapid-transit system similar to the pods used at
Heathrow’s Terminal 5. The crash of 2007-8 slowed the development of
Masdar, and so far only the first two phases have been completed, but
Nelson insists the project has been a success, despite criticisms of the slow rate of progress and a lack of affordable housing that means many workers have to commute to the city, undermining some of its key goals.
Foster and Partners is more interested in the way cities are evolving
in the developing world than in Europe. Moser thinks the battle against
the car has been more-or-less won in the west, where car ownership in
cities is lower than in suburban and rural areas. But in the developing
world, the opposite is true: city dwellers are wealthier and more likely
to own cars, and unless the public can be educated in the merits of
sustainability and cities are created that aren’t car-dependent, there
will be exponential growth in car ownership and usage.
“If cities in the developing world go through the same cycle that we
have in the past 50 years, we have a problem,” says Moser. Nelson
believes there is a “great opportunity” for radical new solutions, but
worries that “the desire for the middle-class lifestyle, which includes a
big car” will get in the way. “If you start out planning with cars in
mind, everybody learns from the US, so in the middle of cities you’ll
get six-lane roads. The car becomes king and you design for that, and
everybody forgets about everything else. That is still happening a lot
in Asia, and when we get a project we try to convince everyone that’s
not the right thing to do.”
Even in a traffic-clogged, car-fixated megacity
such as Mumbai, however, there are glimmers that the anti-car lobby is
gaining some traction. Last October, the Equal Streets movement began closing one four-mile stretch of main road
there each Sunday morning so that residents of a city desperately short
of public space could walk, cycle and play freely. And despite Mumbai
politicians’ penchant for building new flyovers, the sheer crowdedness
of street life and poor state of the roads are surely a disincentive to
owning an expensive “status symbol” car.
Mumbai’s hectic rush hour.
The final stop on my car journey is the Future Cities Catapult, which I visit on its first day in new offices
on the edge of the City of London – so new the smell of fresh paint is
overwhelming. The government has set up these trendily named catapults
in a number of key areas – energy, transport, cell therapy, the digital
economy – to encourage innovation and act as a bridge between academia
and industry. Here, surely, they will have a vision of where we are
heading.
“I hope we are at peak car,” says Dan Hill, executive director of
futures and best practice, when we settle down to talk in their
showroom-cum-lounge. What, even in the developing world? “They have an
opportunity to leapfrog and not make the same mistakes we have over the
past 50 years,” he says optimistically.
“If the 20th-century approach to solving a mobility problem, just
like solving a housing problem, was to build some roads or add some
rail, in the 21st century we have to adopt a non-building approach,
optimising the existing built-fabric we have,” Hill says. “That’s where
the possibility of, say, a shared, autonomous, self-driving car service
could radically transform the way people move around a city without
building a single road – just as we are already seeing companies like
Airbnb transforming the approach to accommodation without building a
single hotel. They don’t own any buildings at all, they write code, but
they’ve changed the way the fabric of the city is working. Uber doesn’t
own any cars, but they’re changing the nature of mobility.”
The mobility revolution is already happening, according to Hill, and
can only accelerate. He believes Hietanen’s notion of mobility service
providers is likely to become a reality, and agrees with Bayley’s
contention that the era of the car is nearly over. “The idea that we use
privately owned cars to shift the massive bulk of people around a city
seems utterly absurd to me. What a crazy thing to do.”
London’s Edgware Road flyover at its opening in 1967
But what’s the timescale? Hill offers a qualified answer. “It depends
on the city. Cities like Helsinki, Copenhagen, Zurich, those small
cores with a 2 million exterior [population]; in the next five years I
think we’ll be seeing really coherent mobility-as-service offers.
They’re already halfway there – they’ve got Zipcar and Uber, really good
public transport systems, are very walkable and bikeable, and have a
strong public policy on carbon emissions and making a safer city. So I
can’t see why in five years we wouldn’t have reached a significant
transition point.”
Those, though, are the easy ones. “With somewhere like London, which
is 15 Copenhagens in size, it’s really difficult to say. It depends on
the decisions that Transport for London makes, and on manufacturers like
Ford and BMW extending their mobility experiments. Then with cities
like Sydney and San Diego, you are maybe talking 20 or 30 years before
you get significant modal shift from private car ownership.
“Once you’ve built all those highways and car parks, it takes a lot
of money and time to unpick them. They placed a big bet on cars in the
late-1950s, and it’s a long time before you get a chance to make another
bet. A city like London, which is a couple of thousand years old and
contains many different histories, ends up with a tapestry of multiple
side-bets rather than one overweening vision. That’s actually more
interesting and more malleable.”
What is evident is that the cities of tomorrow are likely, in effect,
to revert to the cities of yesterday: denser, more neighbourhood-based,
with everything you need for work and leisure in one district. There
will be less separation of functions, less commuting, less travel
generally.
“To me, this last 50 or 60 years feels like an anomaly,” says Hill.
“If you haven’t already guessed, I’m a non-driver. I think we will look
back on this time and say, ‘Wasn’t it odd that we drove ourselves
around?’ In the 1920s and 30s, you’d have gone to the butcher on your
high street, and a grocery boy (it would have been a boy then) would
have delivered the goods to your home on a bike – and they’d have been
there by the time you got back.”
In Hill’s view, that age and those services will return.
Neighbourhoods and self-sufficient communities will make a comeback in a
new era that will be dominated not by the car, but by the smartphone
and the network. The commuter is dead. Long live the hipster.
Governor's executive order on greenhouse gas emissions evokes controversy
By Gary Brodeur, May 8, 2015
PALM DESERT — A few tweaks will have to be made in a
long-range plan being fashioned by regional transportation planners —
and it's because of a controversial environmental order issued last
week.
In draft development, Southern California
Association of Governments' "2016-2040 Regional Transportation
Plan/Sustainable Communities Strategy Scenarios and Performance
Outcomes" now requires some modifications to conform to Gov. Jerry
Brown's Executive Order on greenhouse gas reduction, a local official
said. Issued by Brown April 29, its goal is to reach a carbon-emissions
target of 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.
The
executive order is touted by the governor's office as "the most
aggressive benchmark enacted by any government in North America to
reduce dangerous carbon emissions over the next decade and a half."
"With
this order, California sets a very high bar for itself and other states
and nations, but it's one that must be reached — for this generation
and generations to come," Brown said in issuing the order.
But
those attending a panel discussion Friday on the regional draft plan at
SCAG's annual conference heard builders say the governor's order is the
worst thing ever to happen to the state, while environmentalists say it
is the best thing, Victorville Councilman and SCAG Regional Council
member Ryan McEachron said.
"There is a huge disconnect between the two sides," he said.
SCAG
obviously plans to respond, McEachron said, but it will come as part of
the RTP/SCS process. He said the executive order should not delay
development of the draft plan.
The Southern
California regional plan, last updated in 2012, includes three
"promising" proposals that follow a value-pricing concept for managing
regional transit. The proposals "can improve travel conditions in the
region and provide associated economic and public health benefits," SCAG
says on its website.
SCAG says prospective
transportation elements include a network of express lanes, which
connects and expands express lanes already in place or in progress and
that can accommodate growing inter-county travel; cordons in areas where
there is dense, mixed-use development and transit capacity, and a
mileage-based motorist fee to establish a solid funding source for
taking care of aging infrastructure and expanding travel options.
Another
Friday morning segment of the 50th anniversary conference also included
a roundtable panel presentation by the association's three permanent
executive directors, present Executive Director Hasan Ikhrata and former
directors Ray Remy and Mark Pisano. They retraced steps taken by SCAG
in the past and looked at how the association hopes to contribute to the
Southern California lifestyle in the future, McEachron said.
The conference was held at JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa.
The
draft 2016-40 RTP/SCS is scheduled for release in the fall; information
about it can be found at www.scag.ca.gov and searching for "2016 RTP
Development." A schedule of public workshops on the draft plan will be
announced later.
The terminus of the 710 Freeway at Valley Blvd. in Alhambra on Thursday, Jauary 28, 2010.
Accommodating the traffic demands of a population that has swelled
beyond the load limit of LA’s freeway systems is proving to be a
zero-sum game — at least in the case of the 710 Freeway extension
project.
On Wednesday, 126 residents attended a public hearing at
La Cañada High School to share their viewpoints on alternatives being
considered by the California Department of Transportation and the
Metropolitan Transportation Authority for connecting, or addressing the
problems of, a 4.5-mile gap between the 710’s two end points in Alhambra
and Pasadena.
While discussion about the
undoubtable need for a regional solution to traffic woes was hearty, no
single answer or plan rose over another, with each alternative
presenting problems to different stakeholder groups.
The hearing
was the third of five planned, so far, by Metro officials, who recently
scheduled the fifth to be held sometime in June. Residents are asked to
weigh in on any of the five options being analyzed in a draft
environmental impact report — a 26,625-page document with appendices —
before the public comment period ends July 6.
Producing the
report and holding hearings throughout the study area cost about $42.5
million, according to Metro spokesman Paul Gonzales.
The
alternatives range from a “no-build” option to variations of a 4.5-mile
double-decker tunnel estimated to cost between $3.15 billion and $5.65
billion.
In between are options for bolstering traffic signals, creating a rapid bus line and making light-rail infrastructure upgrades.
The
majority of the comments came from Glendale, La Crescenta and La Cañada
residents who largely oppose the tunnel plans because of the potential
environmental, health and economic burdens they would bring to the area.
That
camp questioned Metro’s findings that tunnels would improve air quality
and commute times without posing a significant risk to community
health, and they demanded a cost-benefit analysis for the alternatives,
which was promised but has yet to be delivered.
Glendale Mayor
Ara Najarian asked why the executive director of the Southern California
Assn. of Governments, which was to provide unbiased traffic flow data
crucial to the EIR’s estimations, has spoken publicly in support of a
tunnel option.
“How wrong is that?” he asked. “If I can’t get an
answer from Metro, I think we have to convene a civil grand jury to find
out what’s going on here.”
Some commenters envisioned a better, cleaner solution not reliant on mass automobile transit.
“It’s
time that we built a project the entire region could embrace and
support,” said former La Cañada City Councilman Don Voss. “Let’s build
something that will make our grandchildren proud, not sick.”
Residents
from other affected areas, including East Los Angeles, Monterey Park
and Alhambra, discussed the pros and cons of tunnels, light-rail system
build-outs and bus-line improvements and how each would impact health,
commute times and economics in their neighborhoods.
“Extending
any above-ground rail anywhere will destroy more neighborhoods and
displace businesses,” said Matt Williams of Monterey Park. “So, at this
point, it has to be a tunnel. Why are these 5 miles we’re fighting over
so exceptional? No one should be exempt from the transit burden.”
Some
East L.A. residents warned the audience that any building projects in
their neighborhood would be detrimental to an already over-burdened
populace.
“We live in pollution and sickness, and Caltrans and
Metro have for a long time violated our human rights,” said East L.A.
resident Martha Sandoval-Hernandez, adding that she and both her
grandchildren suffer from asthma.
“Every time you talk about
putting another project in East L.A., you’re talking about lives. I’m
asking for your mercy,” she said.
