[sustran] Negative thoughts on metro in general (and on from there)

[eric.britton at ecoplan.org]

Ain't this a grand discussion? If you take the time to pull out and review
the entire range of comments thus far received, as I have, you will I think
find a number of interesting and useful insights, and questions, on which to
build and hone your own views and choices on these matters.  And since the
people on these lists are among the most important sources in the world of
advance thinking, counsel and decision support on the issues, this is, I
believe, a useful exercise indeed.

And if we are in fact moving toward a new paradigm of transport in cities
(which is where I think this is going), I guess it would not be out of place
if I chip in with a few more observations, building in part on the
communications that have thus far come in:

1. One of the more interesting points been made here is the call for
understanding our mobility options in cities as not some sort of
archi-limited bipolar choice ("public" vs. "private' transport or nothing),
but that we need instead to think in terms of the full "mobility spectrum",
behind which in turn there are a wide range of institutions, ownership and
entrepreneurial matters. Indeed, if we look around we can see that in many
places one of the main enemies of better transport in cities has been the
doctrinaire insistence that the only alternative to the private car is what
roughly amounts to soviet-style (read rudimentary, costly and uncompetitive)
"administered, deficitory public transport". May I suggest that as we take
apart the results of the Bogotá Car Free Day experiment, and then try to
piece it back together again via this collective process, we will see some
pretty important evidence in support of the idea of getting a lot better at
"in between" transport, such as new uses of "taxis", colectivos, vans,
shared vehicles of many kinds, etc.

2. And may I insist on the importance of the new technology vector here?
Most of us who have been educated to the transport field in the past tend to
think in terms of boxes on wheels and their associated physical
infrastructure.  But transport in cities in the future is going to be, above
all, an information-led sector which, in fact, is the only way that we are
ever gong to be able to make our systems sustainable. However, when we begin
to take that into consideration our whole original frame of reference
collapses and an entire new range of issues and choices emerge.  Thank God!

3. I hope that we are pretty much agreed that the basic argument here is not
that we need to close down the London or Hong Kong metros, but rather to be
sure that we are 100% rational, informed and unbiased when it comes to
understanding how best to spent the NEXT BILLION DOLLARS that we may be able
to get our hands on in City X.  If you can make the argument for spending
that on a metro over the counter arguments that the smartest and best
informed of the people on this list, well then bravo!  Do it!  (But you
won't be able to. It's that simple.  So, as we say so demurely: "Goodbye to
(new) metros.")

4. "Cooking the numbers:" We would certainly like to thank Duarte for
reminding us about this important point.  When it comes to mega transport
projects, especially those which are to be funded one way or another by
public sector institutions and their main partners and sources of counsel
(who, let us remind ourselves, are by and large playing with someone else's
money), there is a lot of cooking and recooking that goes on.  Nor is this
always in the interest of truth or the public interest.  Caveat emptor.

5. If not metros, what then?  Since we now know (a) that cars do not work in
cities, including foremost among other grounds for simple reasons of
geometry, (b) that Parkinson's Law of Transport in Cities will see to it
that demand will always expand first to fill and then to overfill the supply
of available infrastructure (until such time that the city just finally
gives up and dies, that is), and (c) that even if we spend that billion
dollars on our new metro that the Law will continue to prevail on the
streets of the city, it strikes me that the first step is to decide to face
the problems where they exist today, rather than try to run away from this
cruel and unrelenting reality and try to bury them somehow, for what we know
will be a few years at best.

6. This means that we have to face the facts and learn to work better, much
better, with what we have by way of our (transport's) share of the total
urban real estate in each place. Now, if such a challenge may come as
something of a disappointment to people and institutions who have long
believed that the correct course was to try to build your way out of the
problem, it nonetheless opens up a huge range of areas of innovation and
management which are new, exciting, different and potentially enormously
powerful tools in the interest of sustainability.  Perhaps the most
difficult challenge comes at the very beginning here, as people and
institutions who have been trained to think and act in one way need to learn
to readjust their sights and tools.  Fortunately their analytic and other
skills are going to be critical to the conversion process, so it's not like
being a 50 year old coal miner with no apparent place in the economy to go.
All those good traffic engineering and planning skills are gong to be even
more important, and more challenged, in our new transportation environment
of the 2000's.

For those of us who are concerned with matters of sustainability and
transport in cities, these are hugely exciting times.  Unless of course we
choose to continue to burrow our way out of the sunlight and reason.

Yours in ready compromise,

Eric Britton


P.S. SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT REFERENDUM IN SWITZERLAND: Tomorrow, March 12, is
the day of the vote. The call is for government and its agencies there to do
whatever is needed to decrease motorized vehicle kms in the region by 50%
over the course of the next ten years. The target area is the entire Swiss
Confederation, the cantos, and the communes.  For details see
http://www.actif-trafic.ch/.  Whether this public initiative makes it or not
(Light a candle!), we propose that the results be carefully scrutinized in
these various discussions groups and fora, in the hope that we can learn the
lessons of this important experience in activist democracy (as opposed to
the administered brand that so many seem to prefer... see de Tocqueville for
further clarification on this one).




ecopl at n ___  technology, economy, society  ___
Le Frene, 8/10 rue Joseph Bara, 75006 Paris, France
Eric.Britton at ecoplan.org     URL www.ecoplan.org
Voice/Videoconference +331.4441.6340 (1-4)
Voicemail/Fax hotline: Europe +331 5301 2896
Voicemail/Fax hotline: North America +1 888 522 6419 (toll free)