[sustran] In urban transport be careful what you wish for

Paul Barter paulbarter at nus.edu.sg
Fri Aug 13 13:17:51 JST 2010


These points below and in the new blog post at http://www.reinventingtransport.org might be useful for some sustran-discussers when trying to explain why just focusing on traffic flows is a bad idea and why keeping driving cheap is a problem.  Let me know if you find this useful or not.

In urban transport be careful what you wish for

Freely flowing traffic is a good thing, right? And affordable motoring is good too, isn't it? Most motorists in most cities would surely agree. Maybe you would too?

But as citizens and voters I think we need to be careful what we wish for. When political leaders decide that the central goals of urban transport policy are 1) solving traffic congestion and 2) keeping driving affordable, they may make themselves popular with motorists, but they also risk gradually turning their city into a monster.

I argued along these lines in a talk I gave on Wednesday to a couple of hundred junior college (high school) students.

A bit more of my reasoning and the presentation itself can be seen at http://www.reinventingtransport.org/2010/08/in-urban-transport-be-careful-what-you.html


Paul

Paul A. Barter | Assistant Professor | LKY School of Public Policy National University of Singapore | 469C Bukit Timah Road | Singapore 259772 | Tel: +65-6516 3324 | Fax: +65-6778 1020 | paulbarter at nus.edu.sg<mailto:paulbarter at nus.edu.sg> | http://www.spp.nus.edu.sg/Faculty_Paul_Barter.aspx  http://www.reinventingtransport.org/



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