"No, I don't thank you for the fish at all" (notindetroit)
03/25/2015 at 12:33 • Filed to: peak car
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"No, I don't thank you for the fish at all" (notindetroit)
03/25/2015 at 12:33 • Filed to: peak car | 1
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Yeah, no doubt you've noticed that "Peak Car" is making headlines on the FP lately. Unfortunately, Peak Car looks at the problem incorrectly, at an angle that's only going to perpetuate the problem (at best, just at a slower rate). It's not a car problem but a transportation problem - we need to look at Peak Transportation and prevent the inevitable gridlock regardless what form it takes.
Swapping individual auto transport for public transportation shrinks that gridlock, yes, but public transport !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . The causes of gridlock boil down to a very broadly spread community trying to commute from one disparate part of town to the other through a very small selection of corridors. Regardless as to whether those corridors are highways or commuter rail lines, the basic outline of the typical American city (like the classic L.A. example) clogs them up. And regardless towards road networks or public rail, there's peak practicality limiting those corridors - and it's a very small number.
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A part of this is a failure of urban planning - planners only went so far into the future when extrapolating their population figures - but once again there's a practical limit as to how far this future prediction can go. Endless accommodation for expansion only creates an empty version of the same exact problem (see the nearly empty ghost boom towns of China). Neither does it change the fact that the infrastructure and city layout is already out there and frozen. People live in the out rings and work in the inner rings. Or not necessarily, but the point is that people work and live in such a way that long commutes by some means are necessary.
The really solve the problems of Peak Car (or Peak Transportation) a heavy rethink and outright rebuild of the very core of the American city is necessary. Now, this is what I figure is the best solution, but it is by no means an easy or cheap solution - then again, the problem's become so big an easy and cheap solution is but a fiction. Basically what this entails is to shrink the core of cities by building up, just like in Dubai, China and even right here in America, but with the idea that living and working be co-located so that a typical commute is just a few steps.
This isn't something revolutionary and really it's an obvious solution, but what makes it staggeringly difficult to implement is the fact that it requires major American hubs to be literally rebuilt from the ground up (actually, quite a bit below ground, even). That's going to require billions per hub. The traditional challenges of urban planners don't disappear either, just that road networks are largely replaced with pedestrian networks. They'll also have to figure out how to attract people towards living in such hubs, as well as being able to afford it.
So, yeah, it's very much a huge problem. But I don't think the current forecast of road and public transportation planning is going to cut it in the future either, and as I said, it may not be the easiest solution but the way I see it perhaps the best and the only one that provides real population growth solutions.
MrDakka
> No, I don't thank you for the fish at all
03/25/2015 at 12:56 |
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Building up will help alleviate the problem, but it won't get rid of it. You still need to increase throughput to accommodate a growing population.
RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
> No, I don't thank you for the fish at all
03/25/2015 at 13:00 |
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Alternately, having absolutely everything in the city core is a bottleneck that cannot be 100% solved by building up, and locating both work and home outside the city core is proven to work.
jariten1781
> No, I don't thank you for the fish at all
03/25/2015 at 13:16 |
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The only way you're going to get co-located work/living arrangements is if the companies are heavily involved in the lodging of their employees. That has a chilling effect on personal freedoms and employment mobility. Won't happen in many lifetimes on a large scale. Tried it before with factory towns which were near universally reviled. Putting them in large vertical structures doesn't alter the main failings.
Aaron M - MasoFiST
> No, I don't thank you for the fish at all
03/25/2015 at 13:16 |
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This is one of the tenets of New Urbanism: not necessarily building up (which can make things worse if you have the same commute patterns in place), but adjusting zoning to allow for mixed-use spaces and high levels of walkability.
The one interesting thing that people get wrong is that increasing street capacity and parking capacity in a city tend to increase traffic and stifle economic growth, respectively. What a robust public transit system allows you to do is spend more of your limited space on economically useful developed land, as opposed to roads and parking lots.