[sustran] Re: WorldTransport Forum What is 'SustainableTransportation'? (And how, if at all, does it relate to the New Mobility Agenda?)

[Chris Bradshaw]

Brendan,

You suggest that we should not consider 'sustainable transportation' in a
vacuum, or to get too idealistic.

My post only tried to discuss basic principles: transportation choices
should not undercut our continued ability to move about, nor to inflate
distance into a downward spiral, in which we have to go further and further
to accomplish as much as we did in the near past.

I don't love the word 'efficiency.'  But environmental principles have a lot
to do with simply getting the most outcome for the least input.
Transportation, indeed, is an input.  It serves an end.  Does a trip
accomplish more if it is twice as long?  Or use a vehicle twice as large?
Or burn twice as much fuel?  Or occur in a way that instills fear in
pedestrians and cyclists  twice as much?

Cities are the ultimate human invention, by increasing the outcomes of trips
while accomplishing those trips with ever-decreasing use of resources.  They
do (or did) that through creating and maintaining 'propinquity:' proximity
in space and time.

Planning of cities was the purvey of architects until the age of the car.  A
reading of Christopher Alexander's _A New Theory of Urban Design_ (1987) is
a modern attempt to create the conditions of ancient planning, in which each
site was developed (or redeveloped) considering its complementarity to the
adjacent sites.

In the age of the car, planning of places was taken over the professional
planners who evolved not from architecture, but from civil engineers.
Zoning today requires not _complementarity_ (how different land uses work
together), but _compatibility_ (how to ensure adjacent uses are not very
different). The result is the only serious requirement imposed now is for a
land use not to bother its neighbours, and to provide parking, parking,
parking, so that those residing at or visiting the site can have a place to
leave their distance-conqueror during their stay. (see Shoup, 2004, _The
High Cost of Free Parking_).

Sadly, the parking requirement itself doesn't so much accommodate isolation
of land uses from the other land uses that complement it, as it _imposes_
that isolation.

It is sad to see Asians aching to mimic this bankrupt planning principle,
and to accept the only-poor-people-ride-transit (or walk, cycle) bias, as if
driving a car is somehow liberating, when it is really an isolating form of
follow-the-leader, not unlike the parade of elephants in the circus, each
holding it its trunk the tail of the one ahead.  If only those in the
"developed" world could set a new example of commons sense!

Chris Bradshaw