Does the Car have a Future?

HPSC3300 seminar report, S1 2006

How you envisage the 'car crisis' depends greatly on who you are, where you live and how you use your car. While many urban car commuters see congestion and air pollution as cause for concern, urban planners might take a more sinister view of cars as a technology that segregates the rich from the poor, people from jobs and communities from one another. Potential solutions take many forms, from the individual level, such as fitting a catalytic converter to every car, to the community level, like designing New Urban communities based on accessibility rather than automobility. But while we may see the effects of the car crisis as obvious, the underlying causes are not as easy to address. To come up with innovative, workable solutions we need to take into account not only the problems with the car itself, but problems with the system it is embedded in.

So how did we get here? Various historians and urban planners point out that the push for suburbanisation (often seen as part of the reason for the car crisis) was not created by the car, nor is the car a prerequisite for suburban development (Farrelly, 2006; Hovenden, 1983; Steadman, 1999). In Sydney, for example, early suburban expansion was helped along by bus routes provided by the developers, which connected the new housing estates with the city centre (Hovenden, 1983). Competition between such privately-operated buses and government-run trams spurred government regulation of mass transit services and eventually the boundary between state government and private transport was defined – in Sydney before World War II this resulted in a state government monopoly on mass transit and government regulation of private (car) transport (Hovenden, 1983). The trend toward people accommodating the car, as opposed the car accommodating people, was obvious when attempts to educate the public on road safety in the 1930s were not also matched with attempts to make the roads safer for the public (Hovenden, 1983).

But even if suburbanisation wasn't the original cause of the car crisis in the city, it is certainly a major contributor today. Steadman (1999) points out that where large amounts of inexpensive land surround a city (for example in the US and Australia), car-based suburbs rapidly colonise that land, creating vast tracts of urban sprawl. This sprawl, by virtue of its low population density, makes public transport useless and means that any travel, even to pop out for lunch from a suburban workplace, requires a car journey (Steadman, 1999). From the 1980s, office developments followed residents out into the suburbs, creating cities within cities. These 'edge-cities' are sometimes even larger than the original CBD, but with the crucial difference that they are not well, or even at all, served by public transport, meaning that traffic congestion is a city-wide problem, not just a quirk of the CBD (Steadman, 1999).

Attempts to curb the dangerous side-effects of cars, such as air pollution, do work to some extent, but seem ultimately doomed to failure. Steadman's (1999) figures show that all the gains made in reducing exhaust emissions are eventually offset, or going to be offset, by the increase in car usage. Focusing on the activities of individual cars, then, will at best only ever be a war of attrition. Addressing the problems of pollution and traffic congestion can only successful by reducing the amount of car usage – this means using cars to transport more people, less frequently. But does it mean getting rid of the car altogether?

The combination of low population densities and large areas of land being devoted to single uses prompts some people to look to urban planning for ways to end the car crisis and car dependency. This reaction against suburbanisation is expressed in many ways, such as “accessibility planning” or “New Urbanism” (Cervero, 1997), the “compact city” (Steadman, 1999), or simply “urbanism” (Farrelly, 2006). The central idea that these movements (if they aren't all just different names for the same movement) have in common is that neotraditional urban design, incorporating high population densities and fine-grained, mixed-use zoning, will result in vibrant communities whose residents can get around wherever they need to go without having to drive a car. “It is people and places that matter, not transportation,” says Cervero (1997, p. 9). Steadman (1999) suggests that nostalgia may also play a part in this kind of urban redesign. The village of Poundbury, in Dorset, UK, is an excellent example of this kind of confluence of ideas, where modern urban planning, based around the pedestrian as the unit of transportation, is executed with architecture in the style of the area before cars moved in (Mitchell, 2006). Winding, narrow roads make it difficult to drive, while for the residents, the small block size and structure of their houses make it nearly impossible to house a large vehicle.

The implication of urbanism seems to be that changing the built environment of human space, making dwellings smaller and closer together and mixing shops and offices in with them, will ultimately result in positive changes to the transport system. Reconfigure the environment, and the behaviours will change accordingly. But Cervero's accessibility planning seems like a very complicated way to go about effecting change. Instead of changing the way people live, simply changing the road that passes through their community can have a dramatic effect on their behaviour and prompt changes to the human built environment they live in. In the case of West Palm Beach, Florida, USA, main roads were redesigned to make them less friendly to traffic speed and volume (McNichol, 2004). Changes in the road led to changes in the human dynamic, with increased pedestrian activity, decreased car use and also improved the land value, attracting new development in the form of shops and apartments. “From the beginning,” writes McNichol, “a central premise guiding American road design was that driving and walking were utterly incompatible modes of transport, and that the two should be segregated as much as possible,” (2004, p.110). Accessibility planning as Cervero describes it (1997, p. 10, table 1) does not seem to transcend this assumption that roads cannot be shared by motorised and non-motorised transport*.

The community-based transport initiatives of urbanism only address the movements of people in the course of their ordinary activities, like commuting to and from work and shopping. Here in Sydney, as well as peak-hour congestion there is also the weekend traffic jam to get in and out of the city. The leisure functions of the car will be difficult if not impossible to replace with community or public transport. This huge cultural and historical impact of automobility,the expectation of a holiday as a journey, for leisure time to be spent away from both home and work, will not be easily undone. The desire to “see the country”, especially in Australia, still persists. Not so long ago it was almost a rite of passage to travel the entire country, or at least the mainland, by car. Steadman (1999) points out that long distance car travel is being increasingly replaced by air travel, and also that typically air travel is less fuel efficient than car travel (depending on how many passengers there are). Perhaps for this reason, then, completely eliminating the car would be counter-productive. The new vision of the future might be a reversal of the situation today – large cities emptied of cars, while the roads connecting them are filled with cars and congestion.

Whatever comes of transport initiatives, petrol prices or emissions controls, the cultural significance of the car as a symbol and the meanings it holds for people cannot be erased quickly or completely. But the future will be different, and if the past is anything to go by, the future of the car will depend on the meanings we attribute to it and which of those meanings survives longest, whether it be the status symbol, the expression of personal freedom or the device used in large groups to prevent travel.

References

Cervero, R (1997) 'Paradigm Shift: from automobility to accessibility' Urban Futures Journal, 22. pp. 9-20.

Farrelly, E (2006) 'More reason than ever to fight for human cities' Sydney Morning Herald, 17 May 2006. p. 15.

Hovenden, L (1983) 'The Impact of the Motor Vehicle, 1900-39' In: Gary Wotherspoon (ed.), Sydney's Transport: Studies in Urban History. Hale and Iremonger, Sydney. pp. 139-154.

McNichol, T (2004) 'Roads gone wild' Wired, 12(12). pp. 108-110.

Mitchell, S (2006) 'Prince Charles – not your typical radical' National Geographic, May 2006. pp. 96-115.

Steadman, P (1999) 'The “Car Crisis” in the Late Twentieth-century City' In: Gerrylyn K Roberts & Philip Steadman, American Cities and Technology: Wilderness to Wired City. The Open University, Milton Keynes. pp. 201-233.

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* Cervero specifically lists “bicycle and pedestrian paths” as part of accessibility planning. To a certain extent, the roads we have now would function perfectly well for this purpose (see McNichol, 2004). I find myself agreeing with Hans Monderman (McNichol, 2004) about the traditional design of roads saying to drivers that they can go as fast as they like without worrying about what's happening around them. Dedicated bicycle/footpaths also suffer from this basic design flaw, and worse. You don't put tractors together with cars on motorways for much the same reason as you shouldn't put pedestrians and bicycles together on narrow paths.