[nfb-talk] Fw: The Roads Must Roll

[Ed Meskys]

This story points to a future with far fewer automobiles. Perhaps by when the blind-drivable car is a practical reality, it will not be needed. Ed Meskys



----- Original Message ----- 
From: Ed Meskys 
To: Ed Meskys 
Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2011 5:01 PM
Subject: The Roads Must Roll


This reminded me of the classic Heinlein story. Ed Meskys

==
Sat Oct 22, 2011 10:48 pm (PDT) 


Are we reaching 'peak car'?
ANITA ELASH
>From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Saturday, Oct. 22, 2011 8:00AM EDT

URL <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/are-we-reaching- 
peak-car/article2210139/>

Anyone who has been stuck in big-city gridlock lately may find this 
hard to believe, but millions of Westerners are giving up their cars. 
Experts say our love affair with the automobile is ending, and that 
could change much more than how we get around - it presents both an 
opportunity and an imperative to rethink how we build cities, how 
governments budget and even the contours of the political landscape.

The most detailed picture of the trend comes from the United States, 
where the distance driven by Americans per capita each year flatlined 
at the turn of the century and has been dropping for six years. By 
last spring, Americans were driving the same distance as they had in 
1998. The data are similar in Europe, Australia and Japan. And, 
although Canada doesn't keep national statistics on individual 
driving habits, Australian researcher Jeff Kenworthy has found that 
driving in the nation's five largest cities, combined, declined by 
1.7 per cent per capita from 1995 to 2006.

If developed countries are reaching "peak car," as some 
transportation experts are calling it, it's not just a product of 
high unemployment or skyrocketing fuel prices, as the pattern began 
to show up years before the 2008 financial crisis. Nor is it 
primarily a matter of people feeling guilted into reducing their car 
use for the sake of the climate and the environment - the threat of 
separating people from their wheels (or taxing their fuel use) has 
long been one of the green movement's biggest stumbling blocks.

Indeed, the shift is so gradual and widespread that it's clearly not 
a product of any "war on the car" or other ideological campaign. 
Rather, it's a byproduct of a stage of development that cities were 
probably destined to reach ever since the dawn of the automobile age: 
Finding themselves caught in an uncomfortable tangle of urban sprawl, 
population growth and plain individual inconvenience, people, one by 
one, are just quietly opting out.

Adie Tomer, an infrastructure researcher at the Brookings Institution 
in Washington, D.C., was one of the first to spot the trend. "To me, 
it suggests we've started to hit this wall as far as how far and how 
much people are willing to drive," he says.

No one is suggesting the car is about to disappear from North 
American roads - 85 per cent of us still either drive or carpool to 
work. But as suburbs spread out, commute times slow to a crawl and 
the cost of operating a vehicle climbs higher, even hard-core drivers 
are making what British Columbia transportation consultant Todd 
Litman calls a "rational choice" to find other alternatives.

"If you're a typical North American, at the end of a long, stressful 
day at work, you're not saying, 'I can't wait to get in my car. I 
would just love to go for a drive.' It's much more likely you'll say, 
'I wish I could go for a walk,' " says Mr. Litman, executive director 
of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute.

That's the point at which people run up against what's called the 
Marchetti Wall - the psychological barrier against spending more than 
about an hour getting to work or coming home. The concept is named 
for a Venetian physicist named Cesare Marchetti, who posited not only 
that human beings instinctively adjust their lives to avoid 
travelling more than that amount every day, but that we've been doing 
so since the Neolithic era, even as modes and speeds of 
transportation have advanced.

Suburban Toronto resident Margaret Giles hit the wall one day sitting 
in her 2003 Toyota Corolla, stuck yet again in heavy traffic. She had 
already spent more than an hour trying to travel the 13 kilometres 
between her job at a downtown law office and home, and there seemed 
to be no end in sight.

"I tried going through the city. I tried taking the expressway as 
well. It always took me at least an hour and 15 minutes. People were 
always on their horns, honking. I would just come home miserable and 
agitated," she says. "I started to understand about road rage. And I 
began thinking, 'I'm dying to cycle to work just once.' "

Ms. Giles had not been on a bike since she was 18, younger than her 
two grown-up sons are now. But a few weeks later, she took a cycling- 
safety course, and made her vision a reality. Today, she drives half 
as much as she once did, mostly to do major shopping and visit 
friends, and says she happily rides past gridlocked motorists on her 
way to work, thinking, "It stinks to be you."

Commute times in Toronto are now among the longest in North America, 
and the frustration that pushed Ms. Giles away from her car is one of 
several factors fuelling recent driving trends.

The rebound in urban-centre residential growth over the past 20 years 
has reduced the need to drive, as many people have moved back within 
reach of city transit systems or even within walking distance from 
their jobs. Meanwhile, telecommuting, social media and online 
shopping have all cut back on the need for people to go anywhere 
outside the house at all. Demographics also have an important impact. 
The two largest current cohorts are aging baby boomers and their 
young-adult children, known as Generation Y. The youngest of these 
Millennials are currently in their mid-teens, just the age when they 
should be getting their driver's licences.

But U.S. transportation data show that many of them are putting off 
that long-cherished rite of passage well into their 20s. In fact, 
they're more likely than any previous generation in the automotive 
age never to learn to drive at all. It's a choice that may feed into 
their elders' suspicion that this is a group that stubbornly holds on 
to its adolescence rather than accommodate itself to adulthood, but 
is also just a mark of when they came of age. To them, cars are "an 
older-generation technology," says Tara Mahoney, 28, of Burnaby, B.C.

"Cars are not as interesting as they used to be. They're an outdated 
ethos," says Ms. Mahoney, who owns a Subaru all-wheel-drive but finds 
it much less stressful to use a combination of Vancouver's SkyTrain 
and a bicycle to get to her new-media company's office downtown. "I 
think Generation Y might think of themselves as beyond that, as the 
generation that can do better."

While young people cut the cord to car dependency, the generation 
that yoked its identity to horsepower-driven icons such as teenage 
muscle cars and hippie Volkswagens may soon be joining them. With the 
oldest baby boomers now reaching retirement age, more and more will 
also be abandoning the very slow rat race that is the daily commute. 
Most people cut their driving by about 50 per cent when they stop 
working full-time. And that, Mr. Litman says, should be enough in 
itself to push economists, planners and politicians to take a good 
hard look at the future. "A lot of current policies are misguided," 
he says. "They might have made sense 40 or 50 years ago, but now it 
makes absolutely no sense to continue the policy distortions that 
encourage auto use."

Mr. Tomer agrees: "We're going to need to look in the mirror and 
examine some of the concepts we've been putting down. . Do we want to 
build wider roads, or do people really want the chance to do their 
shopping close to home? Are we looking for more localized economies?"

One conclusion from policy experts such as Mr. Kenworthy and his 
colleague Peter Newman, at the Curtin University Sustainability 
Policy Institute in Perth, is that planners and developers will have 
to change their styles, becoming "much more adept at re-urbanizing 
suburbs and centres than in scattering suburbs around the urban 
fringe," as they wrote in a paper this spring. In suburbs and cities 
alike, the demand will rise for density: "Peak car use will generate 
a growing rationale for removal of high-capacity roads and conversion 
of space to support transit, walking and cycling and the urbanism of 
the new city."

Likewise, cities banking on parking fees or toll roads to balance 
their budgets might find their hopes disappointed, regions dependent 
on the auto industry may need to look elsewhere and economists may 
have to measure growth by a metric other than new-car sales.

As people drive less, governments also should prepare for a drop in 
revenue from fuel taxes, an eventuality that could in itself limit 
how many roads are built, Mr. Tomer says. But over the long term, 
building fewer roads could bring economic relief to cities and their 
residents, as auto-oriented cities spend twice as much to get people 
around than cities that rely more heavily on public transit, walking 
and cycling.

Perhaps the most welcome change for many urban areas, though, would 
be a volume reduction in the ongoing shouting matches between 
partisans of different transportation models. One of the implications 
of Marchetti's constant is that cities become dysfunctional when they 
expand to more than "an hour wide," resulting in a stressed-out 
population, and the symptoms are everywhere evident when users of 
cars, bikes and transit battle in the public sphere for shares of 
city budgets, road space and moral bragging rights.

In Toronto, for example, Mayor Rob Ford made ending "the war on the 
car" a major plank of his campaign last year, and cancelled a 
regional transit plan almost as soon as he took office. Mr. Litman 
expects the constituency for such polemics will diminish as 
congestion eases.

As denizens of (denser) suburbs and city dwellers each come to define 
themselves less by choices of wheels - and find more common ground 
on, for example, light rail - the polarization between centre and 
sprawl that affects other levels of politics may begin to ease too. 
It would be a welcome détente, not in any war on the car but in cars' 
long, slow battle with their own drivers.

Anita Elash is a reporter for The Globe and Mail.