[sustran] Re: WorldTransport Forum What is'SustainableTransportation'? (And how, if at all, does it r

[Lee Schipper]

Isnt the irony, however, that while "transportation choices
should not undercut our continued ability to move about," is a lofty
goal,
each travel undercuts everyone's ability to move about..by moving
about?

>>> "Chris Bradshaw" <hearth at ties.ottawa.on.ca> 2/6/2006 11:04:52 PM
>>>
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



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