Creating Car Free Cities

Silas writes "CarFree.com is a great site that "proposes a delightful solution to the vexing problem of urban automobiles." The site presents a fascinating, detailed proposal for a major city (1 million people in 100 square miles) that doesn't require the use of cars. This isn't a new concept; a lot of the ideas are modeled off of major car free cities in Europe (like Venice)." The page on Morocco is fascinating.

Comments

let's be practical about it....

[stonebeat.org]

here is another alternative http://www.arcosanti.org/ Arcosanti designed by the world famous artchitect - Paolo Soleri - actaully exists :)

You haven't been there

[stoolpigeon]

... have you?
I remember the first time my dad took me there. I was 11 or 12 years old. It was falling apart faster than they were building it. It was an interesting walk albeit risky due to the delapidated nature and lack of any kind of safety barriers. This was roughly 23 years ago.

All these years later not much has changed. The web site makes it look a lot nicer than it really is.

Re:Car-free city must be compact

[jdreed1024]

Note that in the case of London, England, the Underground subway system got there first before motor vehicle traffic because London HAD to build something to alleviate the horrible street-level traffic of horse-drawn carriages of various types in the late 19th Century immediately.

True, however it's important to note that the London Underground started with simply putting trains (regular huge trains with steam locomotives) underground. The main reason for this was the fumes and soot caused by the steam locomotives, and also the fact that there were so many lines coming into the city, they needed to go somewhere, and underground was the best place to put them. It did not start off as an urban transit line or a subway system.

That's why the Underground travels all over the London metro area--in fact, the Underground helped develop a number of London suburbs!

The concept of mass transit creating suburbs is not unique to London. The concept of a "streetcar suburb" is known in nearly every large U.S. city, and others around the world. (It's important to note that the word "suburb" became corrupted somewhere along the line. With the advent of Levittown and the postwar boom, "suburb" became synonymous with "suburbia" - the land of tract housing, large yards, a car in every driveway, and the split-level ranch. That is not, however, what it meant at the turn of the century)

Streetcar companies would buy cheap land at what was then the city limits, built streetcar (or elevated) lines out to the land, parcel it up, and sell it off. Many families bought it, since it was away from the noise of the city, they could have a small yard and such, and yet getting to the city was still easy. The land sales paid for the initial investment of the line, and made a tidy profit for the companies, too.

Problem: cars are very, very expensive

[g4dget]

All it takes to move via car is a relatively flat piece of land.

In the real world, it also takes insurance, traffic police, highway patrols, traffic courts, road cleaning, snow removal, over- and under-passes, gas stations, refineries, planning offices, car junkyards, emergency roadside assistance, fast-responding emergency medical services, helicopters, traffic surveillance, traffic computers,and on and on. Many of those costs are much lower or non-existent for public transportation, and you do pay for them, through taxes, fees, association memberships, auto and medical insurance, etc., expenses you may not associate with cars but expenses that are nevertheless very real.

And those are only direct, easily quantifiable costs. When you add in costs for maintaining a presence in the Persian Gulf, for respiratory diseases caused by pollution, for lost productivity due to traffic jams, for ecological damage from paving over large parts of the country, and other such effects, the costs are even worse.

As an exercise, just total up what you pay in terms of gas, insurance, license fees, interest, amortized purchase price, amortized disposal fees, and other car related expenses per year. I think you'll be surprised how expensive driving it, and that only accounts for a fraction of the costs mentioned above.

Oh, by the way, I don't know whether you are in good shape or not, but if you drive less, chances are you would also be in better shape than you are now (and save on medical bills, too).