Why Most Transportation Should Be Public and How That Could Help Private Enterprise
We need to clear up confusion between public and private when it comes to transportation and creating new human settlements.
We presently allow OUR public rights of way to be filled with private automobiles. This leads to a pollution-congestion problem which is not merely inhuman but also deadly to the planet. This pattern is being emulated globally. Public rights of way should belong to the public.
Similarly we talk green and assume it can happen by retrofitting innumerable private and separated dwellings, owned by individuals, What is needed is a scale of housing no individual could afford, but which would makes real green economically viable. The whole kahuna: power, recycling, modular capacities.
The solution to the transportation problem:
Advertiser-supported, shared public transportation. Free to user and gradually replacing private cars for commuting and inter-city transit.
Create a new generation of vehicles of all sizes. Create tons of jobs for the persons who build, operate and maintain such vehicles.
Give them preference in terms of access to rights of way. On city boulevards, make them double-wide or double decker, or both. Power them green, hybrid. Batteries could be easily renewed by maintaining stations at regular intervals. Roads could enable their movement via technologies yet to be created,
WE own the roads after all.
Privately-owned and operated vehicles are at odds with a rational transportation solution. We need to reconsider the way we use our rights of way.
A similar understanding could be applied to the creation of viable, sustainable, green communities.
Lack of "consumer confidence" in the future is understandable. We haven't drilled down to the changes we need.
The era of the private automobile and the resulting design of our settlements as strip city highway culture splayed over the land, is unsustainable should be happily over anon.
We need an era of good news:
To create a prosperous economy, we need to go beyond even Al Gore and his hybrid car proposals to the creation of a world where human settlements are built on a scale that can support green economically. And where the private automobile has an increasingly minor role.
Automobile glutted freeways are a form of hell we should not wish to perpetuate.
So what do we do?
1. Start building a new generation of vehicles and highways that will provide free transportation on major roads supported by advertising.
Ride courtesy of ... name your advertiser. Starbucks, your local insurance company, a restaurant. If we plough ad revenues into transportation we are creating a win-win for consumers. Reducing our costs of getting around and stimulating free enterprise and competition within a rational framework.
New vehicles could be green and comfortable. Have a contest among advertisers to produce the very best.
2. Give major tax breaks to companies that build green human settlements with early education, preventive health, entertainment and access to retail products within walking distance. Car free, pedestrian communities, replacing metrosprawl.
Here's Christopher Alexander's notion of a self-contained town.
Preserve country towns where they exist; and encourage the growth of new self contained towns, with populations between 500 and 10,000, entirely surrounded by open countryside and at least 10 miles from neighbouring towns. Make it the regions collective concern to give each town the wherewithal it needs to build a base of local industry, so that these towns are not dormitories for people who work in other places, but real towns- able to sustain the whole of life. SOURCE
The Essential Site for Understanding Alexander
3. The technologies needed to help the rest of the world escape the trap of highway-culture will develop naturally. The entire world is going to literal hell because we have not thought beyond individual, private vehicles.
When Barack was elected, complete strangers hugged.
If we can sustain a measure of openness to diversity and to a truly new frontier, we can move our focus from the notion of arming each individual with a moving lethal weapon that is essentially inimical to life -- that would be the car -- to creating a transportation system where the public interest rules.
And we can move beyond the box of current thinking that restricts public transit to a small fraction of what we actually need.
The rights of way belong to us, not to privately-owned vehicles that proliferate with the growth of populations. God is sending us a message called confusion about the future, based on the unsustainability of the current society.
Get out of the private car mentality.
Get out of the idea of detached dwellings that will never pass ecological muster.
Gulp.
All that?
Yup.
The present mode of life is crumbling as we speak. SOURCE
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Here's someone that agrees. When two or three are gathered. It's the way movements start.
First we need honest economics. The auto and sprawl system is heavily subsidized. Highway fuel taxes pay for about 60% of road costs. They do not cover carbon emissions, oil wars, pipeline wars, wasted time in traffic, drainage problems, medical costs of collisions, etc., etc.
Making transit free would enable us to realize the full benefit of our public investment in it. This is already being done in many places:
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We should stop subsidizing waste.
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The grim reality is Americans are largely do nothing. Sure there has been lots of discussion about gas prices being excessive, oil companies raking in obscene profits, researching alternative energy, preventing global warming, etc., etc., but it is all just hot air.
Given the choice, Americans will say much but actually do nothing.
Today I drove through the traffic gridlock of Burlington Vermont (yes even the urban areas of Vermont have serious traffic woes) and each time I saw a city bus, it was empty. Yep, just a driver all alone endlessly circling the blocks burning up countless gallons of bio-diesel for naught.
The problem as I see it is America's perceived inalienable right to own and drive an automobile, going anywhere at anytime, without any concern for the consequences.
It does not matter that most Vermonter's spend 10-15 thousand dollars per year for the right to own that automobile as long as they can drive whenever to wherever.
It is possible this all started when General Motors conspired in the early to mid 20th century to purchase all the electric streetcars systems and replace them with smelly GM made diesel buses.
The Democrats in congress are of little help either. They only want to perpetuate the situation by bailing out Detroit.
It's no wonder the world thinks we are all crazy. We most certainly are.
Stephen,
Personal transportation should be able to approach and exceed the 600 mpg energy efficiency of a bicycle. I do not mean that we are all going to have to use bicycles. Instead I am just pointing out that with a well engineered powered personal vehicle, we can exceed the 600 mpg efficiency of a human powered vehicle(Human power is not that efficient). Reaching this efficiency is more that possible. See the North American Solar Challenge. These solar powered vehicles are exceeding +60 mph with 5 hp electric motors.
http://en.
Abandoning our current cities, that are the engines of our economy. is hopelessly idealistic. See Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs. Large cities are the foundation of our civilization. Between the East Coast and the West Coast we go from high density to low density and every other density in between. Personal transportation has been one of the enabling technologies of our civilization.
Energy efficient personal transportation is key. It will provide us with the personal and economic freedom our current civilization is based on. The high efficiency will also provide economic and environmental benefits.
A critical piece of our energy infra-structure will be energy efficient personal transportation, not new cities. 200 mpg+ personal transportation would provide the type of personal transportation freedom that would eliminate the need to completely redesign our cities.
Regards,
Thanks for this thoughtful comment, David.
I neither advocate replacement of existing cities, nor total elimination of personal vehicles. Nor a complete redesign of cities.
I advocate is a mix of old and new. And the development of models that are relevant to existing structures and neighborhoods.
The two elements of what I advocate are
I. Public conveyances that have yet to be built. The more advanced and green the better. I advocate that these use our existing roads -- rights of way. That they be free to the user because sponsored by advertisers. I think this is an excellent concept which is easy to understand and hardly revolutionary.
2. The creation of Pueblo like model settlements which would be pedestrian communities which seek to integrate the services needed to grow and flourish within walking distance. I would love to coordinate with designers and architects to develop a viable proposal for such settlements -- which would be sustainable because they would be large enough to afford the elements needed to create sustainability -- recycling, solar and wind power, and so forth.
These would be a cocoon of a redesign which would essentially become a PREFERRED way of living, not a forced way.
Neither of these ideas would necessitate a radical change in the present mode and design.
They would simply suggest the reasons why an integral and functional approach to living is more difficult in the present situation, particularly in the endless stretches of tract home suburbia and in inner
Thanks for the link to overview of Alexander's book on town and city development.
A bicycle does not have 600mpg energy efficiency. In order to arrive at the number you have to neglect any and all the fossil fuels that went into production of the food that the driver consumes. Citing such a number shows that you are drawing arbitrary system boundaries that neglect reality instead of doing an honest analysis. In any case, if you want to compare car mileage with bicycle mileage, please estimate the cyclist's efficiency when hailing a trailer that can carry 300lbs of cargo. Otherwise it's apples to oranges.
This doesn't mean cycling isn't a good idea. It's just not nearly as good energetically as you think.
KTM,
My reference for bicycle energy efficiency is 653 MPGeUS from the wikipedia:
http://en.
This doesn't seem unreasonable when compared to a 235 MPGeUS energy efficiency for walking.
These are typical incremental energy utilization estimates that are used for determining how many calories you burn per 1/2 hour on a treadmill or stationary bike. Seems like reasonable boundaries to me.
Regard,
I have been advocating similar solutions for a long time. I have found the most resistance whenever one challenges somebody's right to drive whenever and wherever they want to, EVEN if one is offering better ways to do both. It is as if people do not acknowledge the problem of everybody's right to drive congesting each other, as long as THEY can drive and everybody else goes away!
A long time ago I wrote to Ted Turner and asked him for help to define a new American dream. The old dream of people sprawling by car out into the wilderness has been deliberately implanted into the American consciousness in the NY World Fair in 1939. It did not exist before! People were happy with public transit, and condensed urban neighborhoods, etc. What did this car fetish unleash in terms of personal greed that cannot be stopped now!
I believe that this dream of being alone in the wilderness has turned sour long time ago, but unless we can give Joe Sixpack something new and better to dream about, we will always fail – no matter how good an idea we'd be promoting.
Do you have other ideas how we can do what you are suggesting to do? And if you need any help, sign me up – I love this subject! I believe that the US could be such a better country if we actually enjoyed our fantastic natural resources, rather than just use them to drive through!
Huff is the best forum I have found to make contact with people who have common interests. I am not a social networking type, but I recognize the utility of this place for creative thinking.
I am not sure that we can do nothing if we cannot convince everyone. The Obama government will need to come to something like this to achieve his integral objectives.
Though I am not directly involved with the integral movement associated with Ken Wilber I do know that some of those folk and some in the environmental movement are thinking along these lines.
But I do not think even Al Gore has thought to where we need to get to.
We are certainly at a key moment for developing models of what change looks like.
I intend to keep posting about this.
Much of what you are talking about has been in place in Singapore for decades. But I seriously doubt that Americans will want the Singaporean model of government that comes with it.
I'm sure you can have one without the other.
Barack is committed to manufacturing muscle in the US and is prepared to knock heads in the auto industry, which has proved singularly obtuse almost forever. If I was a venture capitalis,t I would be interested in companies that wanted to move to Michigan and provide jobs to people who actually would build the vehicles of the future. Maybe in the vacated premises of these ineffective behemoths.
I truly believe that we are talking about what all this confused consumer, confused investor thing is about. We do not have a clear idea how to deal with a society that is not working.
Not really. Please study the reality of successful transportation infrastructure in the world. It is all tightly regulated by "socialist" (American use of the word) or authoritarian governments.
We don't need to create a new contest to incite companies to build the best and most comfortable vehicle, we already have a system for that, it's called profit motive.
I don't want to ride a public transportation system. I like having the freedom to go where I want to go when I want to go there. I don't want to have to stand outside waiting for bus that is full of thugs looking to rob the honest people that are conviently all in the same place. Then what if my schedule doesn't coincide with the bus schedule and I can choose to get to work an hour early or 30 min late everyday. Or what if I work the PM shift and get off between midnight and 2AM are we going to have these buses cruising the city streets empty for just a few people?
What would we do with the ten miles between towns that you propose?
Didn't Western society move past city-states a thousand years ago?
We already have some instances of this thinking -- shared use of vehicles, car pooling and so forth.
If live in Boston and want to go to Gloucester, I would ride free because the billions spent annually on advertising are being re-directed to moving me from one place to another. I would get there more quickly if there were not the typical Boston gridlocks.
A gradual change in the mix between cars and shared vehicles would probably have little effect on dangers involved in shared use. Your mugging stereotype is just that ... a stereotype.
As to the towns I propose, the answer is that such towns will not spring up and be developed until we agree as a people that the present design and plan is disfunctional. Once the Alexander mode was accepted, the distance between towns could be traversed by anything from pneumatic tubes to cars -- you see I am not assuming cars will be eliminated, only reduced in number and possibly de-individualized -- which is to say shared.
Forms come and go. Whether our current form represents a positive evolution is a question that is at least open.
We could reduce the number of cars by using substitutes that cost less and offer more.
We could achieve green sustainability by moving beyond detached dwellings to a more pueblo-like model so that cost-effective eco-matrixes and modular elements could be developed.
Nobody forces you to ride anything but your favorite toy. The problem is to give people who want to ride something else than a car choices. If that's not you, that's just fine.
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