An occasional update on items from Motordom – the world of auto dominance.
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MOTORDOM ARTICLE OF THE YEAR
Clark Williams-Derry has been writing on this subject – Highway to hell: More roads = more traffic – for some time. But in this piece in Grist he references another piece of research from the U of Toronto:
I expect we’ll be hearing a lot about how investing in new roads will help clear up traffic problems, particularly in greater Seattle and the Washington side of greater Portland. But a study that’s been sitting on my desktop for a while — which I count as the single most interesting transportation paper [PDF] I ran across all year — suggests otherwise. Co-authored by researchers Gilles Duranton and Matthew A. Turnerfrom the University of Toronto, it’s a careful and remarkably thorough analysis of the relationship between urban highway space and traffic volumes in the U.S. And its key finding is straightforward:
“For interstate highways in the densest parts of metropolitan areas, we find that vehicle kilometers traveled [vkt] increases in exact proportion to highways.”
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Jeff Tumlin and Nelson Nygaard have a new book out on Jan 20:
Sustainable Transportation Planning seeks to tackle the greatest social and environmental concerns of the 21st century, focusing on the role of transportation in creating more sustainable communities.
The book offers a big-picture approach to transportation systems.
Using clear, nontechnical language, this guide provides step-by-step instructions for implementing smart transportation concepts in cities of all sizes. Making this material accessible opens the door to greater participation in transportation planning by design and policy professionals, as well as citizen activists. The text also helps transportation professionals better understand and align their discipline within the broader movement toward sustainable urbanism.
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ABSOLUTELY NO PARKING
What is the world coming to? The city of Santa Monica this week approved a development agreement for a 56 unit mixed-use building in its downtown core and didn’t ask the developer to build any parking. … The site is one block from the future Expo Line terminus at the corner of Fourth Street and Colorado Avenue, so people who live in the new building could commute from Santa Monica to Culver City or Downtown LA or Pasadena and not even have to own a car. What is this, Chicago?
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