Car dependency

A bracing editorial.

In the 1970s a nation confronted a crisis of traffic deaths, many of them deaths of children. Protesters took to the streets to fight an entrenched culture of drivers who considered roads their domain alone. But this wasn’t the U.S.—it was the Netherlands. In 1975 the rate of traffic deaths there was 20 percent higher than in the U.S., but by the mid-2000s it had fallen to 60 percent lower than in the U.S. How did this happen?

Thanks to Stop de Kindermoord (“Stop Child Murder”), a Dutch grassroots movement, traffic deaths fell and streets were restored for people, not cars. Today the country is a haven for cyclists and pedestrians, with people of all ages commuting via protected bike lanes and walking with little fear of being run over. It’s time the U.S. and other countries followed that example.

Children need more independent mobility. Modern suburbia is car-dependent, and kids/teenagers cannot get around without their parents driving them. This has serious consequences on their physical and mental health and well-being.

Aside from the less pleasant aesthetics of American stadiums’ surroundings, car parks are surprisingly costly. “In Australia, each parking space in high-density locations is worth about $100,000”, says urban planner David Mepham, who recently published the book Rethinking Parking. “Yet a lot of that parking is not very well used, if it’s used at all.”

In Melbourne, an estimated 25-41% of parking in apartment blocks in the inner city — which developers are often mandated by law to build — stand vacant. Such unused parking costs Australians more than $6 billion.

For public projects, the cost can be even higher. The Victorian government recently announced a new car park for Frankston station, which will cost approximately $174,000 per space. That money could buy a lot of extra bus services or bike infrastructure, so people wouldn’t need to drive there. But as the Morrison years taught us, politicians still go to great lengths to cut the ribbons on new car parks.

This is one of the best summaries of the problems of car dependency I've seen (and I've seen many).

I’ve loved cars since I was a kid. I’ve owned 60 cars in my life and currently own 9. How did I go from being an absolute car fanatic to someone that can’t stand car dependency? In this video, we delve deep into the issues surrounding our automobile-centric society:

• The endless hours lost to traffic congestion.
• The threats posed to our children.
• The alarming fatalities from distracted driving and flawed vehicle designs.
• The troubling reasons behind bigger cars and the higher risks they pose.
• The questionable decisions of traffic engineers and the infrastructure built for speed over safety.
• Unveiling how the auto industry actively promoted car dependency.
• The disturbing history of how low-income neighborhoods bore the brunt of freeway constructions.
• The alarming shift from pedestrian rights to vehicle dominance.
• How the car industry redefined 'crashes' as 'accidents'.
• How other nations are getting public transportation right.
• And importantly, the crucial role car enthusiasts can play in reshaping this narrative.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said Guilbeault's a "radical" who seems intent on banning federal funds from road projects. 

Conservative MP Mark Strahl, the party's transport critic, said Guilbeault's talk about no more new funding for "large" roads is "outrageous" and an affront to the people who rely on cars to get to and from work.

"This isn't something many Canadians do without. To simply say we're not going to allow any federal money to go into that is extreme, it's divisive and it's right in line with what this government does," Strahl said.

[…]

Guilbeault's comments put into question the future of Ford's promised Highway 413 project, a new highway in the northwest part of the Greater Toronto Area that will connect two major arteries in the area and ease travel between booming areas like Vaughan and Brampton.

Ontario has argued that the project should be fast-tracked because the population growth in these Toronto suburbs demands more infrastructure to ease congestion.

Environmentalists and some local groups have vigorously opposed the 60-kilometre highway because it will cut through farmland and waterways and pave over parts of the province's protected greenbelt.

[…]

As for the government's push to ban single-use plastics by deeming them "toxic," the Federal Court ruled last year that the policy is "unreasonable and unconstitutional."

The new study comes from the University of Nebraska, which received funding from the U.S. Army to examine the impact of electric vehicles on guardrails. The university is a natural location for such research; its Midwest Roadside Safety Facility designed and tested the metal barriers known as the Midwest Guardrail System that are a familiar sight along American highways. The MGS is a beam with a dip running horizontally in the middle—if you think of a guardrail, you’re probably picturing one. “It’s the most frequently used guardrail system, because it’s the cheapest to install and maintain,” said University of Nebraska engineering professor Cody Stolle, noting that all 50 states use it.

The current version of MGS was developed to withstand cars weighing a maximum of 5,000 pounds, but many of today’s SUVs and trucks exceed that threshold. A Cadillac Escalade, for instance, now weighs over 6,200 pounds, and the latest model of the Ford F-150, the most popular vehicle in America, can tip the scales at almost 5,700 pounds. You don’t really want to hit a guardrail with a vehicle like that, but electrification can make things even dicier. Electric cars often weigh around 30 percent more than a gas-powered counterpart, because big vehicles require enormous batteries to propel them hundreds of miles between charges. The goliath-like GMC Hummer EV weighs a staggering 9,083 pounds, 2 tons more than a gas-guzzling H3.

[…]

It’s worth highlighting that this study isn’t really about the merits of EVs. After all, you can buy an EV that weighs less than 5,000 pounds. You just can’t electrify your favorite already-large car—or even buy a hulking gas-powered car—and expect guardrails to work as intended.

The Japanese parking model essentially prohibits all on-street parking with some exceptions for daytime and evening parking, where permitted. There is also a rule that forbids overnight street parking after 3am in the whole country. The larger and more important part of the law requires everyone to demonstrate that they have a legal off-street parking spot before they can purchase a car, those spots can be owned or rented, but they will not register your vehicle without this proof. This requirement means that if you don’t have access to an off-street parking spot for your car, you cannot get a car.

Public works departments know how to fix a dangerous stroad. We put it in a five-year capital improvement budget. We do a big study of the conditions. We mock up several design alternatives, and we hold public workshops where we ask constituents for their feedback and preferences. We send out (typically useless) surveys. A design is selected by the city council, and over the next couple years, it’s built.

The end result of this approach is typically very pretty. There are curb bulb-outs planted with flowers. There are flashing beacons and refuge islands at newly painted crosswalks. The street is calmer, it’s safer, and it actually feels better to drive on, as well as walk along. It’s hailed as a big step forward, a boon to the neighborhood’s quality of life. Everybody is happy. This example from South Minneapolis, of a nasty stroad rebuilt after a deadly crash and public outcry, is typical of my experience.

Okay. So, we know how to do that. Now do it 1,000 times.

The “1,000 times” problem may actually be the primary reason why we can expect local governments to be resistant to adopting an approach like the Crash Analysis Studio as policy. If you truly acknowledge that a deadly crash is not a fact of life, but an anomaly that shouldn’t have happened, and a condition that should be corrected, then you suddenly have a to-do list a thousand miles long.

Nobody is going to say out loud, “We can’t come close to fixing all of them, so it doesn’t make sense to acknowledge that there’s an urgent imperative to fix any of them.” But I’ll bet a lot of traffic engineers have thought it.

The automobile is the paradoxical example of a luxury object that has been devalued by its own spread. But this practical devaluation has not yet been followed by an ideological devaluation. The myth of the pleasure and benefit of the car persists, though if mass transportation were widespread its superiority would be striking. The persistence of this myth is easily explained. The spread of the private car has displaced mass transportation and altered city planning and housing in such a way that it transfers to the car functions which its own spread has made necessary. An ideological (“cultural”) revolution would be needed to break this circle. Obviously this is not to be expected from the ruling class (either right or left).

The bungled opening of the final stage of WestConnex, the Rozelle interchange, is bad enough that veteran transport experts such as Michelle Zeibots at the University of Technology Sydney say only a royal commission can open the lid on how such debacles can happen.

[…] 

“We need to know who thought it up, who pushed for it, who in the private sector and public service designed, sanctioned and signed-off on its various stages and what the nature of the interaction was between government and private sector business interests.”

WestConnex now looks likely to compel a second harbour tunnel, the proposed Beaches motorway and another segment of the M6 tollway.

“It’s a cycle. It goes on and on and on, where they just build a new motorway,” Zeibots said. “You get induced traffic growth, it creates a new bottleneck, a new set of traffic jams, they are bigger and they are more difficult to contend with than the previous one.”

“What a private toll-road company is motivated by is completely and utterly anathema to what a city needs in order to have a good and adequate transport network to support its economic and social exchange functions,” she said.