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

[Todd Edelman]

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 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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------------------------------------------------------

Todd Edelman
Director
Green Idea Factory

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