Annals of Motordom – 16

An occasional update on items from Motordom – the world of auto dominance.

H.G. WELLS PREDICTS THE FUTURE OF THE CAR

As noted below, Sir Peter Hall at a symposium prior to Expo 86 referenced the predictions that H.G. Wells made of the impact of the automobile – in 1901!

Here’s Hall:

H.G. Wells in Anticipations had predicted with uncanny accuracy that by the end of the twentieth century cars would travel across the country, at speed, on special highways of their own.  (The world’s first freeway, in Berlin, came only eighteen years after that prophecy, in 1919). 

 He also predicted that the result of the car would be mass suburbanization; southern England, he suggested, would become one vast dormitory for London.  Look at the map of population growth in England during the 1970s, and you will see that occasionally prophets of genius can get it right.

Commuting patterns in Southeast England – map here.

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DECLINE OF THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONS

From E21:

Part of the longer-term problem facing GM and the U.S. automobile industry more broadly is that while automobile sales in emerging economies are increasing robustly, they are decreasing in the mature economies of Europe, North America, and Japan. Aging populations, deleveraging households, higher gasoline prices, denser metropolitan areas, and the advent of sharing platforms like Zipcar have dampened demand, and many if not all of these trends are likely to accelerate.

We can expect governments throughout the industrialized world to continue subsidizing “national champions” in the automotive sector, creating a powerful beggar-thy-neighbor dynamic that could badly undermine free trade. As this dynamic unfolds, the U.S. will be in no position to lecture its trading partners …

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GOOD CONGESTION, BAD CONGESTION

John Norquist, retired Mayor of Milwaukee and head of the Congress for the New Urbanism, explains the difference between good congestion and bad congestion to the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia:

“It’s like cholesterol … There’s good congestion and bad congestion. 

“You don’t want cars sitting there, burning energy,” Norquist says. ”Nor do you want trucks going through the centre of town and not stopping to do business. There’s no economic benefit.”

Motorways should be ring roads around the edges of metropolitan areas, leaving streets free to clog up occasionally with buses, walkers, cyclists, train commuters and, yes, local cars carrying people who patronise businesses.

“That’s the good congestion,” he says, ”when you generate traffic and passing trade that keeps a neighbourhood vibrant.

“Building roads so cars do not have to slow down does not work.”

It’s a point often missed by those who complain that the changes to the downtown Vancouver grid to accommodate the cycle tracks result in more pollution because cars have to travel further or are caught in ‘congestion.’   Politicians use the argument repeatedly to justify major road expansion – as though the only acceptable state is free-flowing traffic, continually and everywhere. 

Which was, in fact, the intent and mandate of transportation engineers for most of the 20th century: “efficient, free and rapid,” as it said in the first edition of the Traffic Planning Handbook of 1942.  And which is still used repeatedly today by B.C. government ministers to justify Gateway.