Car dependency

The report, released tonight, recommends scrapping rules that force developers to include a minimum number of car park spaces when building housing.

The "Wasted Space" report found that upwards of 40 per cent of car parks were left empty each night in apartments in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane.

"State and local governments typically require new housing to include off-street parking — often much more than residents want, needlessly driving up the price of housing," the report said.

The report found these parking minimums increased construction costs by $70,000 for a two-bedroom Sydney apartment.

Our transportation systems shape and are shaped by attitudes, norms, and biases. Understanding how to shift these in positive directions can help address the pernicious public health challenges of traffic crashes, urban sprawl, inequities in mobility and accessibility, and other effects of a built environment that essentially requires automobile use. This experiment replicated a recent study of public health social norms in the United Kingdom with a United States sample and found similar social norms that often significantly favor cars and may obscure the public health hazards posted by an autocentric approach to planning, engineering, and policy.

Paywalled, unfortunately. Overview from the Guardian here.

Planning and transportation policies aim to promote wellbeing and people’s quality of life. One policy implication of our study that stems from the negative association between high levels of car dependence and life satisfaction involves promoting multimodality. One of our measures of objective car dependence (i.e., the share of car trips out of out-of-home trips) captures to some extent multimodality. The results indicate that using a car for more than 50 % of the time in a typical week, which indicates low levels of multimodality, is associated with a decrease in life satisfaction. Thus, planners and policymakers should continue to implement diverse transportation systems that integrate
alternative modes of travel such as biking, transit, ride-sharing, and micro-mobilities. Our results do not necessarily warrant the conclusion that there is a need for a complete shift away from car use; cars undoubtedly offer numerous benefits, especially given the characteristics of the U.S. transportation infrastructure and travel behaviors of American adults. Instead, our research implies the importance of travel mode diversity, which would facilitate mobility based on needs and preferences therefore reducing car dependence and mitigating its potential negative effects on life satisfaction.

Land use changes are also key strategies that would help reduce car dependence and its negative externalities on wellbeing. While many travel by car because of their positive attitudes toward this mode of transportation, not all Americans drive because of a true choice or personal preference. Some are car-dependent due to land use patterns that favor car-based mobility, which may have negative implications on life satisfaction. Policies that may address this issue include compact development patterns, transit-oriented developments, car-free neighborhoods, and mixed-used urban environments.

Despite the widespread harm caused by cars and automobility, governments, corporations, and individuals
continue to facilitate it by expanding roads, manufacturing larger vehicles, and subsidising parking, electric cars,
and resource extraction. This literature review synthesises the negative consequences of automobility, or car
harm, which we have grouped into four categories: violence, ill health, social injustice, and environmental
damage. We find that, since their invention, cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people and injured
at least 2 billion. Currently, 1 in 34 deaths are caused by automobility. Cars have exacerbated social inequities
and damaged ecosystems in every global region, including in remote car-free places. While some people benefit
from automobility, nearly everyone—whether or not they drive—is harmed by it. Slowing automobility’s
violence and pollution will be impracticable without the replacement of policies that encourage car harm with
policies that reduce it. To that end, the paper briefly summarises interventions that are ready for implementation.

This guy's pretty funny. And I endorse the message:

Even if you don’t want to walk, wheel or ride, you should care because less driving helps everyone, including other drivers, who benefit from reduced traffic.

As a result of this over-investment in car road-building, Australia has the smallest number of walking trips of 15 comparable countries across Western Europe and North America.

Cycling rates are equally dismal.

Globally, the United Nations recommends nations spend 20% of their transport budgets on walking and cycling infrastructure.

Countries like France, Scotland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and the largest cities in China invest between 10% and 20%.

These places were not always known for walking and cycling – it took sustained redirecting of investment from roads to walking and cycling.

Meanwhile, many Australians are dependent on cars because they have no other choice in terms of transport options. 

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Greenfield sites are not the solution for housing affordability, even if it’s an easier political sell than increasing density in existing neighborhoods. Housing needs to work for nondrivers, whether that’s people like me who can’t drive, people who can’t afford to drive, young people or older adults (on average, Americans will spend the last seven to 10 years of their lives being unable to drive). When driving isn't an option for so many people, building more car-dependent communities isn't a solution.

When I see advertisements for greenfield developments, especially ones that are built with “new urbanist” ideals, I think back to my year in North Carolina. Southern Village wasn’t just an exurban housing development: The “Village” featured a town square with an organic grocery store, a small gym, and even a restaurant or two. But it definitely wasn’t possible to get everything you needed without leaving, and leaving meant navigating the highway.

For people who can drive, being able to reduce their driving trips because there’s a cute coffee shop nearby might feel great, but for people who can’t drive like me, places like Southern Village feel more like a desert island than the intended suburban paradise. Without enough transit, and often with only a highway shoulder connecting the development with all the other places a person might need to go, these places necessarily exclude people who are physically or financially unable to drive. Because, sometimes, you need more than a coffee shop or a cute grocery store.