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

[Carlos F. Pardo SUTP]

Nice article below. It’s funny how it seems that people can’t choose to live
inside the city… 

 

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 €14,000, or $18,100, in Italy or Sweden, costs
€26,000 in Denmark. In Copenhagen, the price of parking spots, which are
rare, recently doubled, to €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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