[sustran] Re: The Seven Simple Truths of Sustainable Mobility (Comeargue with me)

[Chris Bradshaw]

Ian Perry:

> *The only truth we need to concentrate on is that we need to think of a 
> new,
> complete system that meets the needs and wants of all citizens better than
> the present, dangerous, dirty, inconvenient systems we have - and how to
> implement it so it runs along the existing system, until eventually
> replacing it.*

Yes, the focus needs to be on transportation and the human 'needs' it meets. 
Ian's point above that we need 'complete systems' is right on: the age of 
the automobile has paralleled the dismantling of the sharing system of the 
public realm.  Transit is a nice complement to high-density areas, both 
bringing an increase in intensity of human contacts to support the main goal 
of people living in proximity to each other: maximize commerce, minimize 
commotion (note the root part of the last word, implying the downside of 
excessive motion: speed, numbers).

The car is the perfect complement to the age of self, where the individual 
seeks to enhance his own environment and reduce his 'commerce' cost, at the 
expense of the systems of safe public areas and space-efficient means of 
movement.  The car has not only brought sprawl that spreads people out and 
reduces their potential for chance meetings, and has degraded the safety --  
both traffic safety and eyes-on-the-street safety -- of those trying to 
continue to use the walking/transit shared infrastructure.

A good example is the effort to increase the speed of cars.  Short of 
on-board computers to replace human driving, speed comes with a cost of 
ever-increasing spacing between vehicles, for safety purposes.  This means 
that as speeds increase, there is less room for each vehicle.  Congestion, 
to put it in these terms, is nothing more than the number of 'participants' 
overwhelming the buffer space associated with the 'design speed,' forcing 
all to travel at a speed equal to the buffer space available at that moment. 
When we share the costs of road expansion to overcome this, we are paying 
for a private good (saving of time of a small number of individuals), rather 
than a public good (the most reasonagle good for the maximum number of 
people).  Just the act of using a car vs. walking, cycling, or transit, is 
for a private good: freedom from contact with others, as if that contact 
were primarily detrimental.  But we still don't know why people, seeking, 
but not finding (at rush hour) the time savings, still contnue to attach 
themselves to the very means that stands in the way of returing to a 
low-cost, unsubsidized travel world of just a centuty ago.

What we are losing in our rejigged idea of transit -- rapid transit (vs. 
subways) -- is that light rail and its sister, BRT, are designed to place 
speed and distance of travel over support of higher densities.  "Transit" is 
supposed to be a shared-travel system that directly connects to the public 
realm to support equally shared public and semi-public (workplaces and 
retailing and community centres/place of worship). It can't do that while 
being fast and having widely spaced stations serving low-density nodes. 
Existing higher-density centres outside the core thend to be avoided by LR 
and BRT, offering instead the opportunity -- at widely separated stations --  
for a contrived form of density that must survive on peak-hours 
foot-travellers just a few hours a day, unless they are also near the 
intersection of major arterials, which mean they have to accommodate the 
place-deadening parking lots that the driving public demands..

There seems to be no way to turn back the clock to a time before the 
automobile arrived and began redefining what is valuable in daily human 
existence.  It is noteworthy that the societies that seem to be overtaking 
America's and Europe's lead in innovation, capital accumulation, and even 
education performance, are centred on cities that have retained the 
pre-automobile shared-space system (until just recently trying to embrace 
private-car ownership/worship.

Chris Bradshaw, Ottawa