[sustran] Re: Metro : Speed and mobility

[Car Busters]

Hi Joel and others,

I have to jump in late on this seemingly terminated metro discussion.
Joel, you mention the need for metro because it's the only thing that
can compete with the car's speed. But I see the car's high speed as
one of its problems. As John Whitelegg's and others' work on time
pollution has shown, higher speed leads to greater distances between
destinations, rather than more free time. Instead we need mixed-use
neighbourhoods that are as self-contained as possible -- providing
jobs, shops, schools, homes. Here in Prague we have metro-induced
sprawl, with Communist-style apartment blocs surrounding metro
stations, and most everything else located closer to the city centre.

If we assume that we will plan for and accommodate a certain speed and
certain number of passengers per hour, then we change none of this,
and we end up with a development pattern requiring excess travel.
Whereas if we work toward reducing the need for mobility -- providing
as much as possible near where people live, and also not providing the
access to speed, encouraging longer-distance travel with an urban
area -- then we start to change things more fundamentally. Do people
agree here?

But anyway, even if we kept today's
put-everything-in-the-city-centre-except-housing-and-thus-require-lots
-of-mobility approach, according to my quick math based on figures
sent to this list recently, two more-or-less parallel but close
together light-rail lines would still be cheaper than one metro line,
with the same capacity and probably better service (because of twice
as many stations on which to board). Or have I gotten this wrong
somehow?

Randy Ghent

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