[sustran] Re: Urban growth and cars: Chicken-and-egg issue

[Lee Schipper]

Six years ago I raised this issue to the UITP guy selling the Millennium data base.. why was there nothing about housing and  land costs/rents etc. The insides of most Asian and L American cities are also expensive in the central, most desirable  areas.
The UITP answer was that this was a fiduciary problem, almost a fiction.

In fact it is what drives sprawl. Land farther out is cheaper. Homes are larger. And in the densest of cities, living space is less than in the less dense cities. The W Bank's "Sustainable Transport" from 1996 takes the Newman And Kenworthy data (which morphed into the Millennium data base) and looks at gasoline  per capita vs housing space per capita, and voila.. those living in the cities with the highest NK "gasoline per capita" have the highest home area per capita and by implication from N and K the lowest population densities

Yet look at all the environmentalist generated blather  on sprawl and you never see housing costs; how much more does it cost to live 100 m from a metro vs 1 km away?  We hear about which people  spend the most  or least on transport, but not how much the same people spend on housing, yet we know that housing cost may be a more sensitive function of location than distance traveled. 

I am writing this from a hotel in Tokyo close to the center and some of the  most expensive land in the  world. And the  Tokyo city residents who live near in without a car have less space/capita to live in than those in the rest of japan or even in the outer suburbs of Tokyo  

So in discussing sprawl, lets talk about what could be the main driving force, desire for living space.  And  let's remember in the US case tax deductions let us deduct all our mortgage interest from the home loan, in contrast to (more  compact) Canada.  Kinda makes you wonder whether in all of the studies of km we should have been studying square meters of home instead?
 
Lee 

>>> edelman at greenidea.info 1/12/2007 9:32:06 AM >>>
THE insides of cities in many cities in Europe are generally really
expensive right now. This is a complicated problem directly related to all
our sprawl and mobility discussions but I dont see enough discussion about
it, never mind solutions.

T


> Nice article below. It�s funny how it seems that people
can�t choose
> to live
> inside the cityâ�*
>
>
>
> Carlos.
>
>
>
> Original source:
> http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/11/business/cars.php?page=1 
>
>
>
> Urban growth and cars: Chicken-and-egg issue
>
> By Elisabeth Rosenthal
>
> Thursday, January 11, 2007
>
>
>
> DUBLIN
>
> Rachel and Emmet O'Connell swear that they are not car people and that
> they
> worry about global warming. Indeed, they looked miserable one recent
> evening
> as they drove home from central Dublin to the suburb of Lucan, a crawling
> 8.5- mile journey that took an hour.
>
> But in this booming city, where the number of cars has doubled in the past
> 15 years, there is little choice, they said.
>
> "Believe me, if there was an alternative we would use it," said Rachel
> O'Connell, 40, a textile designer. "We care about the environment. It's
> just
> hard to follow through here."
>
> There are no trains to the new suburbs where hundreds of thousands of
> Dubliners now live, and the few buses going there overflow with people. So
> nearly everyone drives � to work, to shop, taking the
children to school
> �
> in what seems like a constant smoggy, traffic jam. Since 1990, emissions
> from transportation in Ireland have risen 143 percent, the most in Europe.
>
> But Ireland is not alone.
>
> Transportation emissions are rising in nearly every European country, and
> across the globe. Because of increasing car and truck use, greenhouse
> emissions are increasing even where pollution from industry is waning
> because of stricter laws, as it is in much of Europe.
>
> The 23 percent growth in vehicular emissions in Europe from 1990 to 2003
> has
> offset the effect of cleaner factories, according to a recent report by
> the
> European Environment Agency. The growth has occurred despite the invention
> of far more environmentally friendly fuels and cars. "What we gain by
> hybrid
> cars and ethanol buses, we more than lose be cause of sheer numbers of
> vehicles," said Ronan Uhel, a senior scientist with the agency.
>
> Transportation creates more than one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions in
> Europe, where the problem has been extensively studied and where the bulk
> of
> them comes from cars.
>
> The few places that have aggressively sought to fight the trend have
> imposed
> taxes to offset the lure of driving. Denmark, for example, treats cars the
> way it treats yachts, as luxury items, with purchase taxes that are
> sometimes 200 percent of the cost of the vehicle.
>
> A simple Skoda that costs â�*14,000, or $18,100, in Italy or
Sweden, costs
> â�*26,000 in Denmark. In Copenhagen, the price of parking spots,
which are
> rare, recently doubled, to â�*3.50 an hour.
>
> And so, on a recent morning in Copenhagen, Christian Eskelund, 35, a
> lobbyist, hopped on a clunky bike with a big wooden cart attached to the
> front to take his two children to school. The day before, he used the
> vehicle, a local contraption called a Christiania Bike, which is common on
> the streets of Copenhagen, to buy a Christmas tree. After he dropped off
> the
> children, he would ride quickly to the hospital, where his wife was in
> labor.
>
> "How many children do I have? Two, perhaps three," Eskelund said as he
> helped the children off their wooden seats out of the cart.
>
> But Dublin is more typical of cities around the world, from Asia to Latin
> America, where road transportation volumes are rising in tandem with
> economic growth. In Ireland, car ownership has more than doubled since
> 1990
> and car engines have grown steadily larger.
>
> Since 1997, Beijing has built a new ring road every two years, each new
> concentric superway giving rise to a host of malls and housing compounds.
>
> Urban sprawl and cars are the chicken-and-egg question of the
> environmental
> debate. Cars make it easier for people to live and shop outside the center
> city, and this in turn creates a need for more cars. As traffic increases,
> governments build more roads, encouraging people to buy more cars and move
> yet farther away, a trend evident from Rome to Bucharest.
>
> In Europe alone, 10,000 kilometers, or 6,200 miles, of new highways were
> built from 1990 to 2003 and, with European Union enlargement, there are
> plans for 12,000 more. Government enthusiasm for spending on public
> transportation, which is costly and takes years to build, generally lags
> far
> behind.
>
> Despite intense traffic, neither Dublin nor Beijing has rail or subway
> systems that reach the airport, for instance. Though both are building
> trams
> and subways, they will not reach out to the new commuter areas where so
> many
> people now live.
>
> The trend is strongest in newly rich societies, where cars are "caught up
> in
> the aspirations of the 21st century," said Peder Jensen, lead author of
> the
> European Environmental Agency report on traffic.
>
> Peter Daley, a Dublin retiree who has five children, summed up the changes
> this way: "We used to be a poor country and all the kids used to leave to
> find work. Now they stay and they need a car when they're 17."
>
> As a result, traffic limps around St. Stephen's Green in Dublin. In the
> past
> two years, the city has completed two light rail lines. During the
> holidays,
> the police provide extra officers to direct traffic at all major
> junctions.
> But nothing helps much.
>
> When the O'Connells returned from London four years ago, and were unable
> to
> afford the prices of Dublin's city center, they bought a semi-detached
> house
> in one of hundreds of new developments. Today, it seems that every home
> has
> two or three cars out front.
>
> "No one thought, 'How will all these people get home from work?'" said
> Emmet
> O'Connell, an architectural technician, who said the commute took just 20
> minutes at first. Rachel O'Connell's job at the Dublin College of Art and
> Design comes with a parking space. So their Toyota Yaris is their
> lifeline.
>
> One day a week, Emmet O'Connell takes the bus. But if he does not leave
> home
> by 7:30 a.m., the buses are all full and bypass his stop. On a recent
> evening, the O'Connells' 18-year-old daughter, Imogen, missed her art
> class
> in town after a two-hour bus ride; when she tried to return home, all the
> buses were full, leaving her stranded.
>
> Rachel O'Connell said, "I suppose if petrol got really expensive or I lost
> my free parking, we'd face up to the fact that we shouldn't be driving so
> much,"
>
> Taxes on cars or gasoline of the type in Copenhagen are effective in
> curbing
> traffic, experts say, but they scare voters, making even green politicians
> unlikely to propose them. In Britain, when the chancellor of the Exchequer
> presented his "green" budget in December, it included a gasoline tax
> increase of 1.23 pence per liter, less than U.S. 3 cents.
>
> Yet in Copenhagen, people have learned to do without cars.
>
> "It's easier to go by bike or metro, and it's too expensive to do anything
> else," said Pernille Madsen, 32, pedaling her two children in Copenhagen,
> which is flat and has bike lanes. Her husband rides 25 kilometers to work
> one way.
>
> Other cities have tried variations that require less absolute sacrifices
> from motorists. Rome allows only those cars that have a low emissions
> rating
> into the historic center. In London and Stockholm, drivers must pay a
> congestion charge to enter the city center. Such programs reduce traffic
> and
> pollution at city's cores, but experts are not sure of their overall
> impact.
> There is evidence to suggest that such plans simply move car use to the
> suburbs.
>
> Jensen, the agency specialist, said new cities and suburbs must be
> designed
> with public transportation in place. Meanwhile, traffic chokes along.
>
> John MacClain, a cabdriver in Dublin, said that on a recent trip to
> Prague,
> he liked the architecture. But what really impressed him was the tram
> system. "Now that was beautiful," he said. "I could get everywhere with
> ease."
>
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------------------------------------------------------

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Director
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IMPORTANT NOTE to everyone who gets sustran-discuss messages via YAHOOGROUPS. 

Please go to http://list.jca.apc.org/manage/listinfo/sustran-discuss to join the real sustran-discuss and get full membership rights. The yahoogroups version is only a mirror and 'members' there cannot post to the real sustran-discuss (even if the yahoogroups site makes it seem like you can). Apologies for the confusing arrangement.

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SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South').