[sustran] Reducing number of cars on the road

[eric.britton at ecoplan.org]

Dear Debi, Dear Sustran Crew,

Quickly and further to my original forwarded note on this topic.

There is one possible terrific justification for an Odd/Even scheme of which
we should not lose sight (though it does not by any means blot out all the
pitfalls that others have made so clear in this discussion and that in most
cases have made them blunt swords indeed).

And that is... in cases where you can somehow get one up and running that is
not too awfully, visibly bad, that they can be used as a precursor for doing
something better. Take our latest Car Free Day in Bogotá for example. There
were a couple of precursors that helped lay the way for the Day, without
which it might have been an even tougher uphill struggle.  One such
precursor is of course the highly visible mess out on the streets that just
about everyone can see calls for radical action.  The second, in the case of
Bogotá, as the fact that they have spent a couple of years building up a
largely leisure, occasional cycle path program, that turned out to be a
terrific component of the solution package for that great day (the mayor's
office reports that a million and a half people used their bikes that day).

A third - and this gets us back to our subject here, and as we heard earlier
today from Tom Daggers - is the fact that they already had been
experimenting with an Odd/Even approach ("Pico y Placa"), which was
providing proof of an awareness of the problems on the one hand and a
willingness to try to do something about them on the other. If you want more
on that you can simply jump over to the @World Car Free Day site at
http://www.ecoplan.org/carfreeday/ , go to the Search button and pop in the
word "Pico" (or Placa) and you will get a full explanation of this in either
the original Spanish or a quick English translation. (Also, just in case you
prefer not to, I append the latter to this note).

So Odd/Even is not the worst measure in the world for trying to begin to
deal with the problems is addresses, but (a) it's very very hard to make it
work but (b) if you can do it without discrediting yourself in the process
(hard work!!!), it may be a wedge in to the real solution sets which others
are already bringing up in this fine forum of ours.

Note: Our friends in Manila are apparently looking at the idea of a Car Free
Day there.  Great idea! And there they have something that they call the
Unified Vehicular Volume Reduction Program (UVVRP). For more on that check
out http://www.mmda.gov.ph/traffic.html.


Eric Britton

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PICO Y PLACA

The idea of this project is to give Bogotá's citizens the opportunity to
share this city in the most pleasant possible way, with less stress and less
contamination. At the moment, there are entering between 60,000 and 70,000
additional cars per year to Bogotá. Car against car is an approximated
distance of 870 kms. If measures are not taken on the matter, in ten years
the speed average of a car in Bogotá could approximately be of 15 kms/hr.
The "Pico y Placa" project is a simple system that forbids the circulation
of cars twice a week, twice a day, from 7 A.M. to 9 A.M. and from 5:30 P.M.
to 7:30 P.M., in agreement with the last number of the board of the vehicle.
The restriction for the circulation of the cars has been settled according
to the following table:
* Monday 1,2,3 and 4 are restricted
* Tuesday 5,6,7 and 8 are restricted
* Wednesday 9,0,1 and 2 are restricted
* Thursday 3,4,5 and 6 are restricted
* Friday 7,8,9 and 0 are restricted
This project shows the citizen's collaboration, it is a social experiment in
which all Bogotans have participated in one way or another to achieve a
better quality of life. The principal benefits that have been driven out
from this measure are:
* An increase of the speed of displacement,
* A reduction of the time of trip by 29 minutes (almost one hour per day)
* A 10% of air pollution decrease and A US $50 saving per car per year on
fuel.