[sustran] World's Most Congested Cities - Better, faster, cheaper

[Eric Britton (ChoiceMail)]

On Behalf Of Tramsol at aol.com
Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2006 6:03 PM
 

Is this a new mobility agenda or a new travel agenda?

 

Underground and overhead transport systems have a fatal flaw - in order to
deliver people to the diverse places that they want to get to each 'destination'
requires an access point. and the economics (and commonsense) dictate that we
can only have a limited number of access points (stations) or intersections on
the freeway.  Real mobility is to actually get the person (who is the
fundamental focus of this exercise) between places they need to be for the
functions of living.  The ultimate is of course to live such that you expend the
minimum of effort and resources in doing this, by having living and working
space close together, and food and water supply equally convenient. Sadly the
style of many modern lives is one of dependency on others and dependency on the
need to travel distances at the cost of time and other resources, which given
the numbers doing this and the means by which they do it, in order to achieve
that individual journey package delivers congestion.

 

Reading Henry George particularly highlights how our Progress is more to Poverty
(of life and living conditions), as we claim to be increasing our Prosperity.
However we've made our bed and part of the issue is making it comfortable to lie
in.  People do discover the convenience of abandoning the motor car in towns,
and flock to use cycles or buses, or walk because it works for them, and this
really turns a corner when enlightened authorities make sure that the hierarchy
of pedestrian primacy makes it easy to walk to the places you need to go.

 

When you realise that there are more people slipping round Oxford Circus on the
2-3 metre wide footways, than pass though on the 6.3m carriageway you can see
the answer to the congestion conundrum.  Around 200 people per minute can pass
along a road lane width comfortably - compared to clearing 20 cars with the
typical 1.2 people in them as an uninterrupted flow -add in junctions and
stop-start features and that will plummet to 10 cars/minute or less....
concentrate a few thousand cars at an out of town shopping mall and watch what
happens when the shops close and they all try to leave at the same time.... 1000
cars will take at least 1½ hours to get out of one car park egress.....

 

       

 

Dave Holladay
Glasgow

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