An occasional update on items from Motordom – the world of auto dominance.
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SALVADOR DALI, GOOGLE EARTH CONSULTANT:
More of these picked up by artist Clement Valla here on Gizmodo.
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THE ENDLESS LINE
Michael Alexander, New Yorker subscriber, finally got around to last August’s issues. Inside, a story by Keith Gessen on Moscow’s traffic problems:
By the end of the nineteen-nineties, there were more people in Moscow from all over the former Soviet Union than there had been when the Soviet Union was a single state. All of them wanted cars. The city’s plan with regard to this was not to have a plan at all.
See for yourself here. The story online is abridged, but in the summary Gessen has a couple in interesting observations:
The cars standing in endless lines on the crowded Moscow streets resemble nothing so much as the people who used to wait in endless lines outside the Moscow stores.Over the past few years, Moscow drivers have become one of the city’s most active social groups, organizing to eliminate corrupt meter maids and lobbying for more roads. “Car owner” is the one social category that has actually been created in the past twenty years, as opposed to all the social categories that have been destroyed.
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THE PARKING MYTH
Next to “You can’t get people out of their cars,” it’s possibly the next most prevalent myth: “Abundant parking is a necessity for healthy businesses – and there’s a shortage of it downtown.”
Reality:
City statistics show that Vancouverites are increasingly choosing transportation alternatives like transit, cycling, and walking, with the number of people driving downtown decreasing every year for the last 15 years. … Easypark, the city-owned parking management company, has seen a dramatic 20% drop in revenues since the Canada Line was built …
(The drop in driving) has created a plethora of empty and under-utilized parking space in the downtown core, about 7,000 empty spaces across downtown. The cumulative area of these parking stalls adds up to 10.5 hectares, more than double the footprint of BC Place, equivalent to nearly 3% of the land in the downtown area.
Graham Anderson does a great analysis of the parking story in the Vancouver Observer.
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