This is SO the wrong question. Zero-sum games are rarely constructive and rarely ask the right questions. The issue for urban transportation planners isn’t, or shouldn’t be, “which mode is going to win”. The questions should be more along the lines of what is the balance we need achieve among the different modes; what are people trying to do in urban areas that transportation facilitates or enables? Transportation – even riding a bike – is rarely an end in itself; in fact it almost always imposes costs that individuals and the community end up paying for somehow: in time, or pollution, or energy consumption, etc.
We should be asking how we minimize the need to travel in urban areas; and how we minimize the impact and cost of urban travel – in part so that essential traffic, like deliveries and emergency services and Presidential motorcades (kidding…), doesn’t get stuck in traffic made up largely of single-occupant vehicles driving a mile or two down the street at not much more than walking pace. Just look at the madness we create for ourselves with the school trip: 20%-30% of morning rush-hour traffic in many metro areas consists of perfectly able-bodied kids being ferried to school by parents with better things to do with their time who won’t let their kids walk or ride their bikes to school because there are so many harried parents rushing their kids to school and the roads and sidewalks around the school aren’t safe. And frankly, many of the kids could use the exercise.
And lest we forget, the numbers show that fully half of all trips in metropolitan areas are three miles or less; 40% are two miles or less and more than one quarter are just one mile or less. These are the trips we ought to looking at to see if there are more sustainable and efficient ways that people can travel than by car – which is how the vast majority of those trips are currently made, and it really isn’t working that well. That should make sense whether you are a cyclist, pedestrian, transit user, or car driver.
Similarly, the numbers show that we are going to be adding 100 million people to the US population in the next two to three decades, mostly in urban areas. With the best will in the world, that simply isn’t going to work if all those people have two cars and expect to be able to drive an open road 20 miles each way every day to their job or to buy groceries. We have to diversify our transportation system and rely less on SOVs. That means more and better transit, and safer, more convenient and attractive bicycling and walking. That isn’t rocket science and it isn’t an assault on cars either.
The best cities in the world, and the best streets in the world have managed to find a good balance. Copenhagen has a 37% bike mode share, which is amazing and which somehow civilizes the city and rush hour. But the second biggest share of traffic is cars. You can drive almost everywhere you want to in Copenhagen, but it doesn’t always make sense and there are real choices. Places like Portland and Boulder in the USA provide decent (not great, yet) examples of the same phenomenon. And the contrast between New York City avenues that have been balanced and those that haven’t are really quite instructive. Eighth and Ninth Avenues have been rebuilt recently with much better pedestrian and bicycle provision, much better transit, delivery and parking management, and the streets really work as multi-modal corridors. Safety for ALL users has improved. By contrast, 6th and 7th Avenues are still wide open race tracks with illegal and double parking, pointless 4 foot wide bike lanes, terrifying pedestrian crossings that are five or six lanes wide…and frustrated drivers.
Hopefully others can weigh in on the need to create places for people, the need for actual bona fide land use planning to which people adhere, the incredible co-benefits of reducing car travel and getting people onto transit, foot and bike, the cost-effectiveness of a more balanced approach etc. And hopefully the urge to pick one mode over another or to take sides can be resisted. After all, we have it on good authority that the era of favoring motorized over non-motorized transportation is over. We are all in this together.
As for me, I’m escaping to Deep Creek Lake for the week and a few bike rides that actually will be ends in themselves.
https://transportation.nationaljournal.com/2010/08/will-bicyclists-and-pedestrian.php#1610357oldId.20100802094536543
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Re-Imagining How We Use Urban Places
By Michael A. Replogle
Policy Director and Founder, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy
It’s time to re-imagine our cities with less traffic, fewer high-speed roads, and more of our streets reserved for walking, cycling, public transport, and room for the unfolding of “life between buildings” in well designed public space. For decades, cars have been squeezing out pedestrians and cyclists, as transport planners and engineers argued that the solution to congestion and urban efficiency was to build more and wider highways. As traffic grew, it seemed logical that giving more space to cars would improve traffic flow. But the reality has been that adding more high-speed motorways and parking spaces has fueled traffic growth and harmed urban livability, spurred sprawl and drastically boosted CO2 emissions and dependence on fossil fuel.
Global research reveals a counter-intuitive truth, recently described as the “fundamental law of road congestion: adding road capacity will not alleviate congestion on any sort of major urban road or rural highway within metropolitan boundarie…
It’s time to re-imagine our cities with less traffic, fewer high-speed roads, and more of our streets reserved for walking, cycling, public transport, and room for the unfolding of “life between buildings” in well designed public space. For decades, cars have been squeezing out pedestrians and cyclists, as transport planners and engineers argued that the solution to congestion and urban efficiency was to build more and wider highways. As traffic grew, it seemed logical that giving more space to cars would improve traffic flow. But the reality has been that adding more high-speed motorways and parking spaces has fueled traffic growth and harmed urban livability, spurred sprawl and drastically boosted CO2 emissions and dependence on fossil fuel.
Global research reveals a counter-intuitive truth, recently described as the “fundamental law of road congestion: adding road capacity will not alleviate congestion on any sort of major urban road or rural highway within metropolitan boundaries.” As Lewis Mumford put it decades ago: “Increasing road capacity to accommodate increased driving is like buying bigger pantsTransportation experts from the World BankFederal Highway Administration and the Asian Development Bank now all urge that induced travel be considered in transportation planning and system management. to the to cure obesity”.
In the simplest of terms, this means that if you build bigger or faster roads, you get more traffic. If you provide more bike paths, sidewalks, and public transport, you get more use of these. With a limited supply of both money and urban space, we need to make choices: what kind of cities do we want?
For decades, cities like Copenhagen, Vienna, Zurich, and Munich have shown that reducing street space for cars leads to less traffic and a higher quality of life, with more walking, cycling, and public transport, and far lower energy use and CO2. Since 2003, Paris has reduced traffic by 13% in part by eliminating 14,500 on-street parking spaces (a tenth of the total) and imposing user fees on the remaining car parking city-wide. Many of the former parking spaces have been turned into bike parking, public bicycle stations, and bike paths. Other cities from Stockholm to Singapore have used road pricing to manage traffic, though expansion of motorways has countered some of pricing’s effects.
In cities from Seoul to San Francisco and Milwaukee, tearing down elevated highways has improved traffic flow, reduced accidents and pollution, and revitalized once blighted neighborhoods. Though such proposals may seem bold and sometimes heavily criticized, once they are implemented it is clear that the result is greater equity for citizens, better use of public space, and improved and safer traffic flow for all modes.
Through September 15th, at the Center for Architecture in New York, an exhibition called, “Our Cities Ourselves” shows that inspiring visions for repurposing highways are common in cities across the world. Imagine tearing down FDR Drive by the Brooklyn Bridge or the Sheridan Freeway, a freeway in NYC/Bronx that is proposed for teardown by environmental justice groups like the Southern Bronx Watershed Alliance. Imagine putting some roads underground to reclaim access to waterfronts, as Boston did and as Budapest might do. Imagine cities in China, India, Latin America, and Africa modernizing with well-operated bus rapid transit, walking, and cycling networks, with smart traffic management, rather than developing dysfunctional congested, elevated ring roads linking superblocks where everyone is forced to drive or walk long distances to buses stuck in traffic.
The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy has published ten principles for transportation in urban life as a guide to this emerging global paradigm shift. The answer is not to eliminate cars from cities, but to strike a better balance.
Why should we have to travel to Copenhagen or Paris to find the kind of lively animated “life between buildings,” as Danish designer Jan Gehl describes it, that makes us happy to be in cities? Cities from New York to Portland, Oregon are bringing home global best practice and giving priority in both spending and street space to pedestrians, cyclists, and public transport. We might just be finding a new love affair with our cities ourselves.
https://transportation.nationaljournal.com/2010/08/will-bicyclists-and-pedestrian.php#1610358