Category: Transportation

Tearing Down Highways is Good for Traffic, Environment, and People

Cars and car infrastructure cover North America like a bad rash. Car advocates like to argue that this is necessary and that we can’t possibly get rid of this rash because all the cars will become immobile and our economy will crash. The bad news is that the economy crashes even if you love cars, on the other hand, the really good news is that if you remove highways you can improve the economy by revitalizing local neighbourhoods.

Here’s a look at how tearing down highways is a good thing.

Though our transportation planners still operate from the orthodoxy that the best way to untangle traffic is to build more roads, doing so actually proves counterproductive in some cases. There is even a mathematical theorem to explain why: “The Braess Paradox” (which sounds rather like a Robert Ludlum title) established that the addition of extra capacity to a road network often results in increased congestion and longer travel times. The reason has to do with the complex effects of individual drivers all trying to optimize their routes. The Braess paradox is not just an arcane bit of theory either – it plays frequently in real world situation.

Likewise, there is the phenomenon of induced demand – or the “if you build it, they will come” effect. In short, fancy new roads encourage people to drive more miles, as well as seeding new sprawl-style development that shifts new users onto them.

Of course, improving congestion is not the main reason why a city would want to knock down a poorly planned highway–the reasons for that are plentiful, and might include improving citizen health, restoring the local environment, and energizing the regional economy. More efficient traffic flow is just a wonderful side benefit.

Sound dubious? Here are several examples of how three cities (and their drivers) have fared better after highways that should never have been built in the first place were taken down.

Montreal Movers Use Only Bikes

Here’s a novel idea: move all your belongings only using a bike. You can do it regardless of where you live, but in Montreal you can hire someone else to do the hard work for you. Transport Myette is a new moving company in Montreal that uses only bikes.

Myette boasts that his fledgling moving company, Transport Myette, will tow just about anything that can be stacked on his modified bike trailers.
“Pretty much anything, except for pianos, of course,” he said Tuesday at a job, where he and two of his employees carefully pieced together – with the help of duct tape and straps – intricate piles of large household items, including a mattress, a stove and a fridge onto the flatbeds.
The Montreal resident’s inspiration to launch the bike-moving business came while surfing the Internet last summer. Myette stumbled upon the website of an American company that sold mini-trailers.
Up until then, he had been working for a moving company that used a truck.
“I’ve always been a cyclist, I’ve always cared about the environment, so it just seemed natural to me to combine the two,” said Myette, who bought his first custom trailer last fall for $1,000 and now owns three.
Workers pull the trailers with standard mountain bikes equipped with powerful hydraulic disc brakes – for the steep descents.
Outside of peak periods, Transport Myette charges just $25 an hour for one worker with a trailer, $35 an hour for two workers and two trailers and $50 an hour for three of each.

How to Make the Suburbs Livable

Peter Calthorpe is a man on a mission to make the suburbs of North America a place where people can live (seriously, you should see what books he’s written).
The car-dominated culture of the suburbs has produced a series of housing developments that pretends the environment and other people don’t exist, and in the 21st century this lifestyle is confronting reality. Recently, Calthrope has been asked to make a suburb of Toronto, Markham, into a modern city and Markham is moving ahead with the plan. The key component of the plan is to make a more urban setting that revolves around good transportation.

“We’ve had a 50-year experiment with sprawl,” Calthorpe argues. “Now it’s over. Everything’s changing. There’s a huge demographic shift happening. If you include externalities and eliminate subsidies, sprawl is not affordable. The key to unlocking the potential is transit.

But as Calthorpe also points out, successful transit is regional transit. That’s surely true at Langstaff. Cut off by hydro easements, highways, railway tracks and cemeteries, the missing connections to the external world can only be created through transit. Extending the Yonge subway to Hwy. 7 is critical to the project, as are the locations of the new stations.

“If you want to get people out of cars,” says Calthorpe, “you’ve got to get them close to transit. And transit must be there to support walkability, not the other way around. Destinations have to be nearby.”

Times Square Goes Car-Free

New York City is famous for grid lock and horrendous traffic – but that’s the past. New York is really trying to green itself and become friendlier to sustainable forms of transportation. They are even going so far as to make times square car-free.

Vehicles are being barred between 42nd and 47th streets at Times Square and 33rd and 35th Streets at Herald Square.
City officials say the move will reduce pollution and pedestrian accidents and ease traffic flow in the area known as “crossroads of the world”.
…
“It’s good for traffic, it’s good for businesses and we think it is going to be great deal of fun,” city transport commissioner Janet Sadik-Khan said last week.

The symbolism of the financial heart of the American empire discouraging the use of the automobile will hopefully be noticed.

Clean the Air While Biking – With Plants

Here’s a neat idea to clean the air while getting around town – build a bicycle with a plant box. You can follow the complete instructions at the link, but it looks like it takes a bit of work. I’m sure it’s a pleasure to ride with the smell of fresh herbs or flowers under your nose.

Plant bike