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Carfree Freiburg

Freiburg, a city of 216,000, made its medieval core much more pedestrian friendly. It added a good network of bike paths and introduced flat-rate fares for trams and buses.

Jan Scheurer, one of the intellectual leaders of the carfree movement, said, "Vauban is clearly an offer for families with kids to live without cars. It was meant to counter urban sprawl...."

Vauban's 4700 residents have many carrots for living carfree. The stick is also used: parking spaces, available only in a garage at the edge of the neighborhood, cost €17,500. Only about 40% of residents have bought a space, in some cases just for their guests. (Half of the people who bought a space have found that they don't use it!) The rate of car ownership in Vauban is only 150 per 1,000 inhabitants, about one-third the rate in Freiburg as a whole, and less than one-quarter the rate in the auto-centric USA. But even in the USA, cities like Davis, California, have pioneered carfree living, and 17% of its residents bike to work. (Both Davis and Freiburg are university towns.)

In 1998, Freiburg acquired the Vauban site and worked with local greens to develop a master plan for the area. Key points were to achieve ecological, social, economic, and cultural goals while building a solid infrastructure for young families. The city let small homeowner cooperatives design and build their homes from scratch rather than simply hand over the area to a real estate developer. The approach led to a holistic plan for a sustainable urban district.

The streets were deliberately made narrow to discourage cars. Unfortunately, the city would not allow streets to be as narrow as 3 meters (10 feet), and so people do sometimes park in them. Schools are located right in the district, serving the one-third of the local population that is of school age. As Germany's population ages and shrinks, Vauban's model will be used to attract citizens and especially young families. "We have fewer young people. What you need now is a good quality of life with good services, a good infrastructure for kids and older people," says Thomas Schleifnecker, an urban planner from Hannover. But according to Scheurer, what makes Vauban unique is that "it's as much a grass-roots initiative as it is pursued by the city council. It brings together the community, the government, and the private sector at every state of the game."

One very important point is that 57% of the households on "carfree contracts" decided to give up their cars in order to move into Vauban. Carfree districts therefore help to reduce CO2 emissions by offering the carrot that gets people to give up their cars.

The future is arriving, and it's coming on foot, by bike, and aboard public transit. Don't be late!

Fake Carfreedom in Italy

The project includes the construction of three big parking lots (total capacity 1000 cars) outside the medieval walls. These garages will be connected to the historic city heart by 500 meters (1600 feet) of moving walkways, escalators and elevators. The project will cost €59 million. The goal is to fully pedestrianize the historic city center.

Some doubts remain. The local environmental group, Legambiente (Friends of the Earth) Spoleto, has opposed the project from its inception because the intervention will be highly invasive and on too large a scale for such a small city. It will require extremely high maintenance costs. Finally, it will not improve the most serious problems: connections between the center and the suburban areas, traffic along the main urban roads, the number of circulating cars, and inadequate public transport. Air quality is not likely to improve when the project is completed. The project is aimed at tourists and does not meet the needs of citizens, most of whom live in the suburbs, where most services also are located. Finally, the number of tourists does not justify the construction of three parking lots.

Up to now, only the first parking lot is open. The next two are under construction, but the first lot is still nearly deserted at all times of day. The circulation and parking ban in the city center is limited to certain times and areas (even on weekends), so the first garage has had little effect.

The real question is whether or not the local government will really close the medieval core of Spoleto to cars. Legambiente is pushing for this and also for the restoration of the center, which would allow people to move back there. (Today only 4400 people live in the center, compared to 11,000 in the 1970s; the population of the urban area has not changed since then.) Legambiente is also calling for the implementation of radical, sustainable, and non-invasive urban mobility solutions.

I should note that in Italy, as in so many nations, one always has to ask if these projects are not being built to line the pockets of the contractor-friends of those in power. Environmental objectives may have nothing to do with the motives of those in power.

Better Carrots?

Jeffrey Tumlin of Nygaard Associates transportation consultants said, "The most cost-effective traffic reduction... is to provide housing for workers. Matching housing and jobs creates a profit. This is a traffic reduction measure with a 'negative cost'."

Dreamscape?

The mayor's vision encompasses a mall that would be four kilometers long and could be completed within three years. The public has experienced parts of Sydney Road carfree during Cyclovia and embraced the change.

Urban Villages

Fixing Our Communities

Jackson, a pediatrician, spent more than 25 years in public health and was director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the CDC. He was interviewed by Jeff Speck, city planner and director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts:

It seems that what has been eliminated from our new suburban communities is the useful walk: the one that serves a purpose because it gets us somewhere we need to be. It’s only possible with mixed-use zoning. When you’re getting things done, you don’t even notice that you’re walking. The other thing that I would emphasize alongside fitness is public safety. Bringing public safety into the tent is very important. If you add crime and car crashes together, you’re 20 percent more likely to die in the suburbs.

But we know the treatment for these problems. We know how to build communities with central commons surrounded by civic buildings, with sidewalks, parks, and transport, with kids and old folks being able to get back and forth to their daily destinations. I think we are at the right moment to reinvent American communities back to what they were at their absolute best.

[W]e are really talking about a cultural shift, and it is art that is so important when you want to change a culture. We doctors can talk pathology and disease forever, but what really causes change is when art - the narrative, the music, and the things that add value and joy to our lives - is directed in a way that is congruent with what’s healthier for us. That’s where we need to be going.

Cities in 2050

Hank Dittmar, American transport expert and head of the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment

In 2050, I would hope to see cities that restored a more intimate relationship with the countryside around them both in the use of local materials in building construction and local traditions of architecture.

We should be moving towards cities that are based [more] around walking than around the motor car, and around living in a way that relies on the sort of energy budget and food budget that's available to us close by.

One way to move in that direction is to start to think about some timeless patterns of how cities ought to be. And that means thinking about cities as being typological rather than a series of one-off sculptural objects that generate the "wow" factor.

We need to think of ways of having our workplace close to where we live. If we do that, we reduce transport intensity and make it easier for people to be close to their families. You will then see poly-centric cities emerging rather than mono-centric cities, where everyone leaves their home to go to work.

Michael Dear, Professor of Geography at the University of Southern California

We don't build a city and towns with city centres any more; you add city centres afterwards as an aesthetic afterthought or as a consumption opportunity. We simply have a collage or pastiche of almost random urban spread which ultimately collides and creates cities and then we start adding the trappings of conventional cities.

Nigel Thrift is vice-chancellor of the university of Warwick and one of the leading human geographers and social scientists

In the developed world my guess is by 2050 energy sustainability will have become a big deal and the result of that will be that the kind of sprawl that we have seen in the United States in particular will actually be halted, on the grounds of energy costs.

Stephen Graham is a professor of human geography at the University of Durham

I think there is a demand to be face-to-face with people no matter how capable the technology - and, of course, by 2050, we will have had fairly radical technical shifts. Those processes of change seem to go together rather than in opposition.

I think there are signs for optimism based on this extraordinary rapid democratisation.

Walden Bello, Executive Director of the Bangkok-based research and policy institute Focus on the Global South

The capital of the empire is becoming a paradigm for the rest of urban America: Washington, DC, is a predominantly black city dominated by white minority that works in the city by day but lives in the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland by night.

The urban landscape depicted by Paul Theroux in his classic 1986 novel O-Zone, where the rich live in artificial "green" enclaves protected by private corporate armies from the environmentally devastated areas surrounding them that are populated by the rest, will soon move from fiction to fact.

The Trolley Revolution

Trolleys have been frowned upon in part because they take away street space from cars and because their operations are sometimes retarded by car traffic. This has done nothing to reduce their popularity in Europe, where many cities never banished rail vehicles from the street. In the USA, such systems had essentially disappeared by about 1970.

Suddenly, however, the old-fashioned trolley is making a comeback in American cities, often in the same cities that it helped to shape a century ago. Several cities have already restored their streetcars and some three dozen others are planning to, including Tucson, Birmingham, Miami, and Trenton. Streetcars have become an important draw for investment in renaissance neighborhoods in blighted areas. One reason this approach is favored is simple economy. Streetcars are less expensive because they use lighter cars and share the road with other vehicles. And perhaps even more than the railroad, streetcars evoke nostalgia.

Many of today's new lines are quite short - just a couple of miles. They cost $10-15 million a mile compared to $50-75 million a mile for light rail and about $200 million a mile for metro systems. Just as in the past, some developers are paying part of the cost, which they are recouping in the form of higher land values. The final benefit is that construction is relatively quick.

Transit News from the USA

• Double-digit increases in transit passengers in several US cities. Light rail is doing especially well.
• 14 million Americans ride on public transportation each weekday.
• Americans took more than 7.8 billion public transportation trips in the first nine months of 2006, up 3% from the previous year.
• Light rail had the highest percentage growth of any mode: 5.4%.
• Double-digit growth was seen in Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Sacramento. Other big gainers include Buffalo and Houston.

O Canada, Land of the Green

This is particularly odd given that global warming will generally benefit Canadians by lengthening the growing season, melting Arctic ice (opening up polar shipping routes), and simplifying the exploitation of natural resources in the far north. Global warming will even reduce Canada's death rate, which always increases during the winter. Even rising sea levels will have relatively little effect on Canada.

Canadians seem to be influenced by several things. Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, struck home. Recent doomsday forecasts by the respected British economist Sir Nicholas Stern were very disturbing. Finally, the detailed United Nations environmental projections have alarmed many.

But maybe there is another force at work. Maybe people are looking for a great cause. The attempt to impose democracy on Iraq has failed spectacularly. Efforts to promote the values of modern Western democracies, such as human rights, gender equality, and the rule of law, have not achieved the wide adoption that was once foreseen. (Ironically, some of these values originated in the Middle East.)

Every society needs a cause. Stopping climate change is the ultimate collective cause, an effort to do the right thing for ourselves, our grandchildren, and the whole planet. It's a choice for life in an era of terrorism.

Rising Greenhouse Emissions in Asia

Asia is simply not going to be able to provide increased standards of living and better quality of life by adopting Western patterns of automobility. I frankly see no alternative for Asia except the widespread adoption of carfree cities, which goes a long way towards solving all these problems.

False Alarm?

The data comes from the RAPID study conducted in March 2004. Currents were measured by 19 buoys stationed between West Africa and the Bahamas. The snapshot data was compared with four earlier, similar surveys going back to 1957. The snapshot showed a 30% slowing in the northward flow. However, the analysis of the year-long observations showed no net change in flow. Natural variations are large, and 95% of scientists at a workshop in Kiel concluded that we have seen no appreciable change in Atlantic circulation. Plans are to continue observations for a decade. This does not mean that we are out of the woods; it only means that disaster is apparently not imminent.

The Paving of UC Berkeley

The tree-sit protest has heated up on the ground and in court. UC Police confiscated the protesters' camping materials under the trees. The tree sitters are still up in five oaks and a redwood in the grove where UCB wants to build a parking lot and sports facility. The cutting would be wrong from almost any perspective, but where the University runs into real trouble is that the City of Berkeley protects such trees by law. Outcome still unknown at this point.

The Zen of Cars, Bikes, and Feet

"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H.G. Wells

"All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking." - Nietzsche

"No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning." - Cyril Connolly

"There's something wrong with a society that drives a car to work out in a gym." - Bill Nye

"Nothing compares with the simple pleasure of a bike ride." - John F. Kennedy

"Walking makes for a long life." - Hindu proverb

Driving makes you stupid.

Cities are for people, not for cars.

Just park it!

Those who do not find time to walk will have to find time for illness.

End world hunger. Feed people, not cars.

Buying a new car only makes you poorer, never more popular or happier.

Riding a bike is not un-American. This is especially true if you slap an ACLU sticker on it.

Driving an SUV is un-American, no matter how many American flags you stick on it.

One minute of bike pedaling is more exercise than an hour of pushing on the gas pedal. Even if you push really hard.

Streets are living rooms, not parking lots.

Cars make it hard for us to hear each other.

You can't see anything from a car.

Love a cyclist, not a car.

 
Please add to this list and spread it around.

Hot New Links

The links below will open in a new browser window:

Making Other Arrangements by James Howard Kunstler

Towards a motor-free city from Auroville Universal Township

Removing Freeways - Restoring Cities from the Preservation Institute

Weighing In on City Planning: Could smart urban design keep people fit and trim? by Ben Harder

PedNet - pedestrians and cyclists in Columbia, Missouri

The Good Life in Greece by Jay Walljasper

My City Is Mine, Thanks to my Wheels by Debra Efroymson

Why I traded in my car for a bike by Mark Stosberg

One Less Car - The Movie

"Win-Win Transportation Solutions Cooperation for Economic, Social and Environmental Benefits" [PDF!] from VTPI

"Win-Win Emission Reduction Strategies Smart Transportation Strategies Can Achieve Emission Reduction Targets And Provide Other Important Economic, Social and Environmental Benefits" [PDF!] from VTPI

Kollektivtrafik för bilistens behov [PDF!] (Swedish)

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