In addition to talking about sprawl and urban-growth boundaries, Owen McShane raised a few other issues at the Preserving the American Dream conference: namely, the role sustainability and climate change play in the anti-sprawl movement.
The most sustainable city?
Many planning advocates take it for granted that sprawl and auto driving are inherently unsustainable. McShane shows just how this attitude can go when he describes Halle Neustadt, which some Swedish urban planners once described as “the most sustainable city in the world.”
The most-sustainable city today.
Outlook, lowest priced viagra Outlook Express, Thunderbird, and Windows Mail are all popular email clients that can use filtering to eliminate Spam. You can imagine that the old guy was smart enough to give the weed a viagra wholesale uk try himself and share it with his friends. So if these pills don’t work then you should not cost levitra lowest use this information for self diagnosis or for treating a wide range of health disorders like erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation and loss of libido due to unhealthy eating habit. During the lifespan, a man has to loved that generic vs viagra be a man in all sense. McShane here refers to some field work done by the Antiplanner. To make a long story short, what made Halle Neustadt “sustainable” was poverty, and as soon its residents gained some wealth, many of them moved out and most of the rest bought automobiles, turning the cities many greenspaces into parking lots.
Owen then turns to climate change, which he describes as the last gasp of smart growth. Smart growth, he notes, “has always been a policy in search of a justification, a solution in search of a problem.” Now, in climate change, smart-growth advocates hope they have found such a problem.
One difficulty, McShane notes, is that there is no guarantee that smart growth is really more greenhouse-friendly than ordinary sprawl. Depending on load factors, Diesel trains can emit more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than autos, and concrete-and-steel high-rise condos can emit more CO2 than wood homes.
McShane refers in particular to an Australian study that found that “place doesn’t matter,” that is, low densities were not particularly greenhouse unfriendly. Instead, income was much more important, meaning that the high-rollers living in million-dollar downtown condos were generating far more greenhouse gases than moderate-income suburbanites.
A second problem is that new technologies can render calculations about greenhouse gases completely invalid. “If New Zealand adopted nuclear energy next year, calculations of future carbon footprints would change dramatically,” McShane points out. “The error terms are so huge as to make the exercise (of measuring carbon footprints) meaningless.”
No one can predict technological change, but planning advocates often interpret this to mean there will be no change. James Howard Kunstler, for example, believes that “No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it.”
Neither McShane nor the Antiplanner agree. I can’t predict what fuel we will use in the future, but I am fairly certain that we will still be driving personal vehicles with four wheels.
If you define who “we” is I will agree with you Randall, but many of us will be riding in automated driverless personal vehicles in the future. Some will have wheels and some will be magnetically levitated.
The people in the downtown high-rises are already riding automated elevators to and from their million-dollar condos.
This looks like one of those appalling slum clearance projects that were so popular in the 1960s and are now being explosively demolished. These projects were the brainchild of the same masterminds that decided to build freeways through built-up areas. Both were an unmitigated disaster because they ignored the fact that most people have a mix of communal and individual motivations. Most of the slums were simply lacking modern amenities such as indoor plumbing. Mostly that is something that could be retrofitted, and probably much more cheaply than rehousing people in tower blocks. Worse still, these projects have a similar population desnsity to the communities they destroyed. But those streets of terraced (row) houses didn’t create isolation the way these towers do. Perhaps that is why the communists liked them so much. The movement to replace freeways with boulevards is another example of a community driven solution, whereas the freeways of the 50s were politician driven, as is light rail today. Freeways were monuments to the civic leaders who got them built. But to get the maximum political benefit these monumental public works need to produce the maximum amount (of roads or apartments) in the shortest possible time for the minimum amount of money. Give that sort of brief to an engineer and what you get is the Embarcadero or Halle- Neustadt. If the engineers had been given a different brief they would have come up with a different solution. That doesn’t actually mean they should be designed by democracy, that would be even worse than design by committee. It means those whose lives are going to be affected by what the engineers build should have more say in the design process than the elected officials. That approach worked wonders for the Dulluth lakeside freeway.
At the last meeting I attended of our local PRT group, a very skeptical newcomer to the meeting suggested that, due to the one-two punch of “peak oil” and the need to respond to global warming, we would all have no choice but to use drastically less energy in the fairly near future. He believed that would take care of the problems of the automobile, more or less automatically. I responded that 1) you can’t predict technological breakthrough; and 2) people would still want something like a personal car, even if it ran on electricity or peanut-oil. Rather than give up their cars, they would turn to alternatively-fueled vehicles. “Not at all,” he said, dismissively. Absent plentiful, cheap oil, there would be NO source of energy, individually or in combination, which would allow the car to continue to be viable.
People would just have to get on the bus or the trolley and like it.
He was basically trying to convince us that PRT is a dead end and that we should be spending our time and effort on reforming the bus system so that it worked. He and his partner were very taken with bus and train systems “that worked” during their recent travels in Europe, as it turned out.
I have been places where the public transportation system worked fairly well, and I have made good use of such systems. I have taken more than my share of bus rides, counting school buses, Greyhound and the like, Tour buses, and municipal transit. I’ll never be convinced that public bus transit will fill the bill, no matter how it is reformed, and no matter how thoroughly the streets are emptied of personal vehicle traffic by “peak oil” and global warming. I turn to PRT because it alone, of all the modes I have encountered, offers most of the advantages of a private car and few of the disadvantages. Plus, PRT has some good qualities of its own to recommend it. Maybe PRT isn’t the right approach for every transportation situation, in every place, but I have to think that buses are a bad approach, even when and where PRT is inappropriate.