The Antiplanner has a rule of thumb: Any transportation proposal that requires a whole new infrastructure system in parallel with the infrastructure we already have is automatically a bad idea. Such infrastructure would be expensive to build, take decades to complete, and will be obsolete long before it could make a major contribution to the nation’s mobility. This is true for high-speed rail, personal-rapid transit, light rail, and even plans to build bike path networks for commuters in urban areas (as opposed to recreation paths that have an entirely different market).
Such is the case for a proposal by University of California engineers Mark DeLucchi and Kenneth Kurani. They start by asking a reasonable question: “Can we have sustainable transportation without making people drive less or give up suburban living?”
Antiplanner readers know that I think the answer is “Yes,” simply by using existing, low-cost technologies to make single-family homes and automobiles more energy efficient. That means more insulation and passive solar and cooling systems in new homes; lighter weight materials such as aluminum and perhaps Diesel engines instead of gasoline in new cars. Existing homes can be retrofitted with insulation and low-energy lighting; existing cars will be quickly replaced as the auto fleet turns over every 18 or so years.
DeLucchi’s and Kurani’s answer is also “yes,” but they come up with a very different solution. They start with the proposition that cars are “unsustainable,” a typical assumption of the sustainability movement even though the average car on the road uses less energy per passenger mile than transit systems in all but a few American cities. They call these cars and light trucks “fast, heavy vehicles” or FHVs.
Their goal is to encourage greater use of what they call “low-speed, low-mass vehicles,” or LLVs: vehicles weighing less than 1,000 pounds and having top speeds of 25 mph. Bicycles are LLVs, as are golf carts, mopeds, and Google’s one-of-a-kind driverless car sans steering wheel. LLVs would not replace FHVs, say DeLucchi and Kurani, but each would be used in everyone’s daily lives as appropriate, thus saving energy whenever people substitute LLVs for FHVs.
The problem, they claim, is that “it is dangerous to mix light-weight, low-speed modes with fast, heavy vehicles.” As a result, they believe that the two “should not share any roadway space,” thus the need for a completely new infrastructure system that is parallel to the one we already have. As they say, “every household, business, and public place [should have] direct access to two separated, city-wide travel networks: one for FHVs and the other for LLMs.”
There are several reasons why this is a bad idea. First, it is expensive. Not everyone will want to have two different vehicles for their personal use, or to pay for the extra infrastructure needed to support those vehicles. The energy costs of all that infrastructure might not even be offset by the savings from increased use of LLVs.
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Second, retrofitting existing neighborhoods will be even more expensive and require the use of eminent domain. Although America’s auto fleet pretty much turns over about every 18 years, the median home is 35 years old, which means that America’s housing stock takes at least 70 years to turn over. Even replacing individual homes in existing neighborhoods doesn’t offer a process for adding what amounts to a second street or alley system in those neighborhoods.
Third, it is unnecessary as there are much less expensive ways to keep LLVs safe. In the short run, bicycles and other LLVs can be encouraged to use local streets that have been designated bicycle boulevards, streets that are open to cars for local traffic but to bicycles (and other LLVs) for through traffic. I suspect the only reason why more cities don’t create more bicycle boulevards is that they aren’t anti-automobile enough for the sustainability crowd.
In the long run, self-driving cars will eliminate DeLucchi & Kurani’s objection to mixing FHVs and LLVs in the same roadway space. So long as LLVs can use roads without blocking FHV traffic–that is, the streets are designated for 25 mph or the LLVs can go a little faster than 25 mph–the two should be able to safely coexist.
Fourthly, the dual-infrastructure plan defies an important lesson of history. As DeLucchi and Kurani note, this system was tried in Radburn, New Jersey, prior to the Great Depression. Radburn consisted of streets with single-family houses; the utilitarian side of the homes faced the streets while the architectural fronts of the homes faced backyards that were adjacent to bike and pedestrian paths. Planners at the New York Regional Planning Association designed Radburn and planners to this day still make wistful pilgrimages to Radburn.
Contrary to planner mythology, almost all suburban development following World War II followed most of the Radburn model: utilitarian garages faced the streets (which planners who loved Radburn would later deride by calling them “snout houses”), while the interesting part of the homes–decks, patios, and other entertainment areas–faced the back (which planners rejected because they wanted porches on the front even though Radburn put them on the side opposite the street). The only difference was that few postwar developments had bike or pedestrian paths.
Why did postwar developers leave out the paths? Architect Oscar Newman discovered the answer in the 1970s. His painstaking comparisons of urban designs with crime statistics found that neighborhoods whose homes had twice as many public access points–such as a street in front and an alley or pedestrian path in back–suffered more break-ins and other crime. Homebuyers sensed this and chose homes with truly private yards. On the other hand, many gated communities–another suburban form reviled by planners–do have lots of pedestrian paths because they use other ways to prevent access by potential vandals and burglars.
Any one or two of these objections could be fixed, but the basic problem would remain: we can barely afford to maintain the infrastructure that we have; how can we be expected to build and maintain two separate infrastructure systems? DeLucchi & Kurani’s fundamental error is in assuming that automobiles, or FHVs as they call them, are necessarily unsustainable. If instead they had noticed that cars are becoming more energy-efficient every year, and there is a lot more we can do using existing technology, they would have avoided the side trip to Radburn.
“… and perhaps Diesel engines instead of gasoline in new cars.”
That would be a big mistake. Diesel vehicles are hideously polluting, as the EU has found out. Their efforts to replace petrol with diesel were well-intentioned, but muddle-headed.
Didn’t we switch over to ULSD to allow more advanced emissions control technologies to be used with diesel engines? Volkswagen’s new diesels are supposed to be much cleaner, and they seem to be planning to keep making diesels even with tightening emissions standards from CARB and the EPA.
The Villages, Florida has successfully merged golf carts (LLV) with automobiles (FHV), but it’s the ultimate planned community on a totally blank slate.
As noted above, a suburban development could easily have separate LLV and FHV roads. I could even see a city having some LLV corridors, such as along rivers and wetlands where FHV roads already have bridges and such. But wasn’t the Segway and other “miracle” LLVs supposed to transform how we moved, but haven’t really made a niche market? When’s the last time you saw someone on a Segway other than a mall cop or people on a tour?
The assumption is automatically made that LLV’s are “more sustainable” ( a woefully overused term) than FHV’s. That is not necessarily true.
(1) Many FHV’s (not the monster pickups) provide comparable gas mileage to much smaller cars.
(2) A gas powered golf cart emits much more pollution than almost any car on the road.
(3) they hold a lot fewer people/goods. If 3 or 4 LLV’s must be used where one FHV could accomplish the same task, are the LLV’s really going to be 3 or 4 times “more sustainable”. Doubtful. If not, we are using even more fuel/pollution
Once you factor in the cost of the dual roadways, a lot of time, effort and funding will be spent for little if no benefit.
It seems to me that it would require a very large amount of energy to construct a redundant infrastructure network to serve a separate class of vehicles. It’s questionable whether the assumed energy and emissions savings would materialize over the long run.
How much would you actually have to construct? Many cities/towns etc… Already have many streets that with the occasional bollard could keep larger vehicles from using them as through streets. Or if the AP wants to throw out the emergency vehicle suggestion you could put up cameras, $50 ticket for speeding or staying on the road too long etc…not to the driver. To the property owner, to avoid the complications going after the driver brings up. This wouldn’t be enough, destinations are on arterials, so you’d need to either build some new access for those properties or take a lane or two to act as a local access/service road. Separating local access from through traffic would improve the poor safety record of many arterials. The side streets that would form the bulk of the LLV network were often intentionally but discontinuous. So the occasional construction project might be needed – say an extra overpass over a highway. Or maybe just signs pointing to which turns on the existing built road best accommodate through access. Add in the occasional traffic light to cross arterials etc…
Bicycle boulevards aren’t enough to accommodate bicycles or other LLVs. The additional construction to supplement them and put together something much more comprehensive, even if it doesn’t reach every property, might be less significant than you think.
awhr–
What you’re proposing is not the same as the proposal that the Antiplanner is discussing. The proposal that the Antiplanner is discussing would give access to two completely separate systems to every property.
Your proposal would be cheaper, but it really doesn’t make sense either. Passenger cars already have made huge advances in fuel efficiency and emissions control and there is every reason to believe these advances will continue. The money spent to buy an entire secondary fleet of vehicles would be better spent improving the fleet of primary cars that use the existing street network.
“Any one or two of these objections could be fixed, but the basic problem would remain: we can barely afford to maintain the infrastructure that we have; how can we be expected to build and maintain two separate infrastructure systems?”
Many cities cannot afford to maintain current infra; Seattle is proposing a nearly billion-dollar transportation levy—debt to be paid back with higher property taxes.
How much transportation infra is financed by debt? Anyone know? It’s got to be high.
@Builder
AP says you don’t need two separate road systems because self driving cars will eliminate the safety concern. He added that he wanted the LLVs to be faster so they wouldn’t slow down FHVs. I was wondering aloud so to speak if an alternative existed that would still accommodate slow vehicles, like bicycles, and what could be done before human driven cars are banned, eliminating the safety concern (20+ years?)
Why would you need a second fleet of vehicles? Many families have more than one regular car or truck, I’d wager quite a few of them would be fine with one fewer fast heavy long distance vehicle. Accommodate a cheaper light car to safely pick kids up from school, go to the grocery store etc…and many would sell a second (or third or fourth) SUV/car for a golf cart, or whatever the alternative would turn out to be. Quite a few can’t afford a second car, but a lighter cheaper one might be affordable. Especially if the LLV/side street network accommodates bicycles.
The additional construction to supplement them and put together something much more comprehensive, even if it doesn’t reach every property, might be less significant than you think.
But that’s precisely the problem: in order for this proposal to be effective it does need to reach every property. It has to be ubiquitous. In order to overcome the large cost of separate facilities (in both money and energy) it needs to reap scale economies. The LLV concept is mostly geared toward residential neighborhoods, which would basically need to be exclusively LLV in order to function correctly. Is this transportation issue or a land use regulatory issue?
As for enforcement, all I can say is good luck. We don’t currently enforce speeding, much less distracted driving, very well. Adding another low-priority item is not likely to improve that.
It just seems like a concept that conflates ends and means. If the goal is less energy consumption/emissions, I can think of several other more effective ways of doing so which don’t require these kinds of wholesale changes. These two researchers have been working on electric vehicles for quite some time. I’ll give them some points for creativity, but I think the practicality is lacking. It seems like the objective is small electric vehicles, and everything else is just window dressing.
Ditto on diesels. Compression ignition engines are just too dirty. Walking around in Tokyo, which banned diesel engines last decade, is a breath of fresh air compared to walking around in Hong Kong, New York City, or London. I’d expect diesel bans in most major EU cities within ten years and US big cities probably won’t be far behind. With the explosive growth of natural gas fracking (in the US, anyway) coupled with increasing acknowledgment that CO2 isn’t the catastrophic pollutant it was thought to be at the turn of the century, I’d expect natgas hybrids to take over most of the urban light and heavy vehicle markets in the next 10-20 years.