cars

The Simplest Way to Improve Cities: Remove Cars

- Adam Clare

For the last 100 years streets have been destroyed by the automobile and corporations that profit from excessive use of cars. This has caused harm to the wellbeing of people both in and outside the cars as well as countless environmental issues. It does not have to be this way, and cities from Paris to Seoul have shown us that we can modify our cities to reclaim them from the scourge of the automobile industry. Over at Fast Company they have a nice list of five things cities can do to improve life for everyone in the.

Reversing car-centric design is not a utopian dream. Cities around the world are already doing it. Paris is removing 70,000 parking spaces to make room for bikes and trees. Barcelona is expanding its network of “superblocks” that prioritize pedestrians and eliminate through-traffic. Oslo removed cars entirely from its city center and saw foot traffic, and local business, surge. Cities in the Global South are pioneering new forms of green micormobility, such as Jakarta where the government has set a target of electrifying 2.1 million motor cyles by the end of 2025

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Johns Hopkins: Narrow Lanes Save Lives

- Adam Clare

Johns Hopkins has reached a conclusion: to protect lives we need to narrow lives. Cars kill. Cars (and the people driving them) are more likely to cause death when they move fast and wide lanes encourage speeding. A logical step to curb reckless driving by car drivers is to limit the space they have to drive cars, and make the space they drive in more interesting. By narrowing lanes there are many benefits to be had by society at large. It’s good to see an institution like Johns Hopkins has figure out that car focussed design is not a good thing – streets are for people.

  • Narrower lanes did not increase the risk of accidents. When comparing 9- and 11-foot lanes, we found no evidence of increased car crashes. Yet, increasing to 12-foot lanes did increase the risk of crashes, most likely due to drivers increasing their speed and driving more carelessly when they have room to make mistakes.
  • Speed limit plays a key role in travel width safety. In lanes at 20-25 mph speeds, lane width did not affect safety. However, in lanes at 30-35 mph speeds, wider lanes resulted in significantly higher number of crashes than 9-foot lanes.
  • Narrower lanes help address critical environmental issues. They accommodate more users in less space, use less asphalt pavement, with less land consumption and smaller impervious surface areas.
  • Narrowing travel lanes could positively impact the economy. This includes raising property values, boosting business operation along streets and developing new design projects.

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Mobile Pollution Boxes Need to Pay to Enter Manhattan

- Adam Clare

small car

Cars take up a lot of space in urban centres and deprive non-car owners of previous real estate and a clean environment. Yet, for years we have let car drivers occupy our cities with their large metal boxes which impeded the freedom and mobility of others. Back in 2003 London put in place the first congestion charge for their downtown and since then many cities around the world have followed. However, in car brain North America the idea never took off. Until now. New York City will be implementing a congestion charge for Manhattan starting this spring.

Experts see the measure as a first step in the right direction. They believe the toll will help fund the city’s ailing subways and buses, and make the streets of Manhattan a friendlier place. It is also seen as an opportunity to put an end to the car culture in a city — perhaps the only one in the United States — that is perfectly accessible by public transportation, with the exception of isolated peripheral areas. Indeed, for this reason, some have said that the measure is not ambitious enough, arguing that it should apply to the five counties of New York.

“You have to start somewhere, and this is a great start,” says Howard Yarus, of the District 7 transportation committee. The group he represents proposed a plan in 2019 to eliminate free street parking, an unthinkable change for the urban landscape. “Until now, if I took my car, which pollutes the environment, to go downtown I didn’t pay anything, not even when parking. But if I went by public transportation, it cost me $2.90 [for a subway or bus ticket]. As a public policy, that seems terrible to me.”

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Speed Cameras = Safer Streets

- Adam Clare

small car
I live in a city where the police stopped enforcing traffic laws, so we’ve seen increased harm done by car drivers on people outside of cars. When the laws of the road aren’t enforced then drivers will break them – and more! So to make our streets safer politicians have turned to cameras.

Speed cameras automatically take a photo of a speeding car’s licence plate and send a fine to the owner. It’s a good simple system which generates revenue for cities while also encouraging drivers to not break the law and endanger their fellow citizens.

A systematic review published by the Cochrane Library in 2010 analyzed 35 separate studies from around the world and found average speeds in the vicinity of ASE cameras dropped by up to 15 per cent.

In some places, the proportion of motorists exceeding the posted speed limit declined by as much as 70 per cent, although most jurisdictions reported a reduction in the 10 to 35 per cent range.

The review also found a general reduction in collisions near speed cameras, with most jurisdictions reporting a drop of 14 to 25 per cent. There was a corresponding reduction in injuries and deaths.

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Humans Should Rank Higher Than Drivers

- Adam Clare

In North American cities the disease known as Car Brain infected urban planners and today we are dealing with the side effects. Cars have been purposefully prioritized over other forms of transportation from walking to gondolas to the point that some people think they “need” cars. What we ought to do in the 21st century is bring rational thinking into urban planning by gibing space to sustainable, future proof forms of urban transportation solutions. For now we need to change the conversation to be about people moving instead of car moving.

In theory, creating alternatives to driving is a win–win situation. The number of cars on the road increases each year, creating more traffic and pollution. Building more lanes for vehicles only makes things worse, while investing in transit and dedicated infrastructure for bicycles improves safety and reduces congestion. Driving makes people miserable, exacerbates climate change, and causes thousands of preventable injuries and deaths each year. While witty replies were piling up under Bennett’s tweet, three people were hit by a car in the Downtown Eastside; days later, a woman was struck at an east Vancouver crosswalk and was critically injured.

The case for modifying roads to encourage other modes of transport makes itself. We should all want fewer cars on the road as well as alternatives to spending hours of our lives (around 144 hours, or six days, each year, according to recent data from TomTom) inching through rush-hour traffic. So why don’t we? Because infrastructure, of all things, elicits not rational responses but deeply emotional ones. Changing our roads, even slightly, feels like an exhortation to change ourselves, because how we get around says a lot about who we think we are.

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