In this article we look at the need for dramatically improved public transport as one of the cornerstones of nearly every carfree conversion. A few cities are so small as not to need internal public transport, and a few others already have such good public transport that few improvements are needed. However, nearly every city needs a greatly expanded route network, more frequent service, and faster operations. None of this is difficult to achieve.

The first change required is a change in attitudes. This must begin with the city government and include the public transport agency. In most places today, public transport is regarded as a second-class service for second-class citizens. This is why few people in the US use it: everyone but the poor is expected to have a car and use it routinely. In a few cities, such as New York, the middle class does use public transport and reasonably good service is offered. More positive attitudes prevail in most of Europe.

Public transport must become a first-class service. It must be safe at night, clean, operated by professionals, reliable, and on time. It should be free of all advertising.

It is accepted in most jurisdictions that people will have to stand during rush hour. It is thought too expensive to provide seats for all. With buses, any increase in seating capacity requires more buses and more drivers. However, rail systems can operate longer trains to provide more seats, without increasing the number of operators. Whatever is done, sardine-packed conditions should never arise.

One advantage of driving is ease with which you can take along practically anything you wish. We will not achieve this level of convenience with public transport, but we can get close by making it easy to take along shopping carts and baby buggies. (The system must be fully accessible to wheelchairs in any case.) This requires level loading (boarding platforms at the height of the vehicle floor), which also eliminates slow loading up and down stairs.

Efficient Route Network

Walking to a stop and waiting for a vehicle are usually the two largest components of a trip by public transport. We need to bring stops to within about 500m of every location in the city. This does not entirely solve the problem because the rider may not be going where the vehicle is, which necessitates a transfer. It is not practical to establish a route network in a large city that does not require an occasional transfer. However, we can hold transfers to a minimum and ensure that the actual transfer is quick and easy. This means short walks, no stairs, and short waits for the next vehicle.

The best route network is usually a hub-and-spoke arrangement, with transfers occurring mostly in the downtown area, where service is concentrated and vehicles arrive frequently. The most common activities must be concentrated in the city centre or situated in every neighborhood, as with grocery stores and elementary schools.

Good public transport service is too costly unless the population is clustered around relatively few stops. There is otherwise not enough demand to justify frequent service. The necessary density was usual in most cities less than a century ago and can still be found in many cities. High density became unbearable in the US during the 1920s, when private cars usurped huge amounts of space for parking and movement. At the same time, cars imposed noise, pollution, and danger. That is why, after WW II, American cities rapidly dispersed into low-density, auto-centric suburbs, a pattern now common around the world. Good public transport is impossible in the suburbs: destinations are too spread out and density is too low for any reasonable system to work well.

Choice of Mode

Service-quality considerations dictate the choice of rail systems over bus systems whenever possible. It is clear that people perceive the difference. As I once said, half in jest, “Nobody with a choice ever took a bus anywhere.”

If surface-running rail systems are chosen, they must be installed on their own rights-of-way, where they never compete with cars for road space. When Zurich, Switzerland, decided not to build an underground metro but to fix its trams instead, the first change was to move cars out of the places where they blocked trams.

The choice between trams and metros is argued endlessly. However, in cities with populations over about one million, at least a few metro lines are almost essential, as only they can provide rapid service over the greater distances of a large city. Trams can provide supplementary, lower-demand service in big cities and can be the principal mode in smaller cities. The smaller trains are actually an advantage given the lower levels of demand.

Capital costs of new metros in cities are extremely high, whereas tram systems can be installed comparatively cheaply. However, when demand warrants the high capacity of a metro, it can still be cost-effective due to the comparatively low per-passenger operating costs. A further advantage of the metro is that it can reach very high speeds on its protected right-of-way. Trams can exceed 50 km/hr, but noise and safety problems mean that surface vehicles should travel no faster.

Very large cities need limited-stop regional rail service like the RER in Paris, which links the suburbs with a few major stops in central Paris. New York runs express trains that serve a similar function. Once again, it is a question of speed. Local trains making many stops achieve rather low average speeds, which makes long trips tedious.

High-Quality Service

If we are to ask people to abandon their cars, then public transport must be available at all hours of the night. Many larger European cities have buses that run at least once an hour during the night, and New York’s subway never quits. Some level of night-time service is nearly essential.

Route planning is usually a tiresome chore for passengers. Finding a route to an unfamiliar destination can take a lot of time. The Dutch have an excellent nationwide system that will plan any trip you can make by public transport (which is nearly all of them). I found it reasonably easy to use and highly reliable. This kind of internet service is moderately expensive to establish but cheap to operate.

Likewise, information should be available at tram and metro stops regarding the time until the next vehicle arrives. This allows you to run an errand when you discover that you have a few minutes before the train arrives.

Faster Service

Public transport service must become much faster than it is today. Ideally, it should be faster to take transit than it is to drive, which makes it much easier to persuade people to give up their cars. A number of conditions must be met.

Transit managers need to speed journeys. Seconds count. This is not the current attitude at most systems, where service is considered acceptable if trips run less than five minutes late. But fast service can only be achieved if every aspect of operations is considered from a time perspective. For instance, it would be common in many systems to order new trains without fully considering how long it takes to close the doors and depart. “Only” five seconds might be saved here, but even on a journey of moderate length, that can save the passenger a minute.

Increases in top operating speed have a smaller effect on stop-to-stop time than might be supposed, but it is still important. Metro trains should routinely reach speeds of 100 km/hr, even though they may remain at that speed for a fraction of a minute. Most of the energy can be recovered through regenerative braking.

More important is the achievement of high acceleration, which has a pronounced effect on stop-to-stop times. Research in the 1930s showed that quite high acceleration is tolerable, even for standing passengers, if it is smooth. Some modern trams only achieve quite low accelerations, which significantly reduces average speeds.

Keep the vehicle moving. Station dwell times are a large part of total time. It should be possible to open doors on both sides of the train to allow faster boarding. If one side is used for disembarking passengers and the other for boarding, times are still further reduced, and there is less jostling.

Fewer stops make for much faster service. This point is rarely appreciated. Cutting out a stop saves the time that the vehicle is stopped and also the time lost to braking and acceleration. Buses are chronically affected by this problem – they’ll stop almost anywhere. Good practice keeps the stops at least 400m apart, and 700m is better. Reducing the number of stops also makes the journey more comfortable. Each district must have only one, centralised stop for a given route.

Finally, fare-free transit is worth serious considering. We will not go into the details here, but it saves a lot of time, money, and aggravation for the passenger, which makes transit a more attractive option.

By J.H. Crawford

Financier Mohammed Al Amoudi owns 100% of the oil company Preem. The company has two plants in Sweden: one situated in Gothenburg and the other, Preemraff Lysekil, about 100km further north, just off the coast. Giant tankers supply the raw material – crude oil. Preemraff Lysekil manufactures various types of fuel and is one of Sweden’s most active points of carbon dioxide emissions. Approximately two million tons of CO2 are gushing out from the refinery every year, as well as a number of other substances, harmful to health and nature.

A revelation: Linnaeus, the king of flowers, sits on a rock in a lush forest. On the ground wriggles twinflowers and in his hand he holds a flower for species identification. Above his head floats a shimmering halo. Trademark Linnaeus guarantees serious science and a love of the earth’s riches. Now a man in clothes full of oil spills penetrates the picture. He places himself on the stone next to Linnaeus. It’s Mohammed Al Amoudi, and greedily he goes after Linnaeus halo. He pulls and stretches it in order to move it into a new position where it shimmers over both him and Linnaeus and he succeeds. Preem has got a new trend sensitive frontman – the petroleum King Carl von Amoudi.

Now Preemraff Lysekil expands. A coker will use heavy oil as feedstock and produce diesel, among other things. When the coker is operational, the carbon dioxide emissions will increase by 25% according to Preem. “But that is a global issue,” they add. It is possible that tailpipe emissions of carbon dioxide decrease a bit if you use what Preem wants to call their “eco-diesel”. How much, that’s unclear. At best, this seems to be a zero sum game: less from the tailpipes but more from the refinery. In the worst case there will be a total increase in carbon emissions. Anyhow the company has already obtained all required permits and construction of the coker was just about to start when the financial crisis struck. The project was put on hold, but the plans may be put into practice anytime at the whim of Preem.

At the same time Preem deletes the word “petroleum” from its corporate name, a classic move of greenwashing. OPAB, one of its subsidiaries, is fighting for permission to drill for oil right at Dalders in the Baltic Sea, but both the Swedish government and the Supreme Administrative Court have refused thus far. Now company management threatens to acquire Latvian licenses to get around the rejection and start drilling for oil in spite of the denials. Joint owner of Preem and OPAB is Mohammed Al Amoudi.

In parallel with exploration plans in the Baltic Sea, Preem carried out a lavish greenwash campaign. Photos of paradise images from different habitats were published in newspapers, magazines and on billboards. One of the pictures showed breathtakingly beautiful mountain scenery in Sarek National Park. Under the picture the Preem bear and a short text:

“As Sweden’s biggest fuel company, we take great responsibility to save the environment. We work with wind, rapeseed oil, ethanol, DME and pine oil, and along with other renewable fuels and propellants they take up an increasing share of what we produce and sell. Therefore, we now remove petroleum from our company name and the name is simply Preem. It does not save the environment, but it shows that we are taking it seriously.”

At the entrance to the oil refinery Preemraff Lysekil is a thin little tree. It is a young lime tree planted in honor of Carl Linnaeus jubilee year 2007 in the presence of both Al Amoudi and Sweden’s King Carl Gustav. A king of flowers, a king of petroleum, and an ordinary king – such a tree planting the media could not miss. In Sweden, there is currently no debate about Preem, the coker and its production of carbon dioxide and toxins.

Helena Fernández and Annika Rydenstam are, respectively, a journalist and an artist who have for many years cooperated with exhibitions, books and actions on various environmental and social themes. Their latest project was the exhibition “Green Wash Village” which took place in autumn 2009 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

All images © Majornas Luftvärn.

More information, pictures and greenwashing: www.preem.se/

Wholly-owned

Preem AB
is
wholly-owned
by
Corral Petroleum Holdings AB
which is
wholly-owned
by
Moroncha Holdings Co. Ltd,
a Cypriot
company
which is,
in turn,
wholly-owned
by
Mr. Mohammed H. Al Amoudi.

The text Wholly-owned is, with the exception of the title, a direct quote from: www.preem.se/templates/page____8815.aspx

New and existing WCD events continue to spread and strengthen in cities and towns across the world. What do you think about the popularity of WCD?
There are many ways to look at the popularity of WCD. If you look at any city where WCDs are held, you will find that the public reaction can fall into three different groups: first, the largest group, are people who simply don’t know a WCD exists or takes place in that city; a second group knows that a WCD is going on, but either dislikes it or chooses not to support it (although their criticism can be very useful); and the third group are the organisers or participants of the WCD. And of course, they like it a lot.

The fact that we have thousands of cities celebrating WCD is something of value and a huge accomplishment. However, we must be realistic – thus far it has had very little impact and it is not considered high priority in the transportation policies of many cities. Currently WCD is just a device to insight public discussion. WCD needs to be worked into the mainstream transportation policies of many cities in order to bring further change and my work will focus on this over the next few years.

Convincing policy makers and authorities to support WCD is a common problem. Why do you think these problems persist and how can they be overcome?
One problem is that there is either none or very little difference between the ways in which WCDs are organised and carried out. Another problem is the current lack of a consistent or specific message with which to bring forward to public policy makers. However, WCD does carry a very important general message: there are too many cars in cities which we need to control and many parts of our cities would do better with fewer cars, but that message by itself is not enough.

WCD has the potential to be a useful tool in influencing a city’s overall policy, particularly regarding transportation. Through my work I try to keep track of WCDs around the world and find how we can make better use of this tool. Having worked and talked with mayors and public policymakers all over the world, it is clear they are very busy and transportation forms just one part of their responsibility. With the current lack of a consistent message and credible proposal, it will always be a struggle to push WCDs further to what we think they should be doing. Therefore, WCD needs to be shown in very concrete terms in order to be taken into the policy agenda.  This could be a small number of well defined recommendations given to public policymakers – ideally, this message should include three points of what people think should and can be done.

Where have you seen WCD work best?
It’s really best to ask the organisers. People involved in the organisation have the best knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. They often work closely with authorities to make one day where many streets are taken over, so it becomes safe for families, cyclists and pedestrians.

A famous example is Bogotá, Colombia, which holds the world’s largest carfree weekday event covering the entire city. The first WCD was held in 2000, and it has since become an institutionalised event, following the 2006 Towards Carfree Cities conference and former Mayor Enrique Peñalosa’s influence which helped a pattern of carfree activities spread in Bogotá, as well as to other cities in Latin America.

There are many small local events, which are sometimes hard to follow; they fall into three main categories: the first ones have good ideas; second ones are ok; and the third are the clear losers. However, there is another group, probably the most important, which act as instruments of change on public policy and people’s practices in the city. Currently WCD is too abstract, so we need to focus it. The important point is how well these events are done, not how many carfree days are held in a city. But despite not having a very strong concept, it has still spread widely, and by strengthening it, it has the potential to grow much more.

In a world still so gripped with cars, do you see carfree day evolving into a permanent reality?
The ideal outcome of WCDs is that at one point they will disappear, because they are no longer needed. We would have accomplished the objective of softening the impact that cars have on a city. WCD has grown, simply because it is an idea that many people like, not just because of the number of organisations, groups, individuals, or authorities supporting it. Now is the time to come up with more and better ideas that people like and that are powerful enough to become a permanent reality.

There are two carfree “gadgets” which I believe are really useful in helping us achieve this: “Carfree Sundays” and a “New Mobility Week”. These are regular events where networks of city streets are closed to traffic for one day a week, or for one week of the year. With these ideas, I intend to create something similar to the European Mobility Week and to link it to the annual WCD. But a New Mobility Week would have more of a consistent structure and contain “doable” actions for specific cities. I don’t think carfree events should have a uniform approach – each with a different concept and mission – the only part which would be the same in every place could be Carfree Sundays. Eventually these activities would take place every day of the week, making carfree cities a permanent reality.

What is your advice for groups or individuals starting a new carfree day?
My first recommendation is to take time to study what works and what hasn’t worked – to become aware of this sector and not just dive straight in with no background. Anybody in any city can do a WCD, but doing it well involves some research.

I would encourage anyone interested in organising an event to create an attractive website, where everyone can pitch in with their ideas – making it fun and interactive. Using media is a great way of reaching out to people. There is a lot of information on sustainable transportation out there which is too dense for most people to feel inspired. It is important to make it simple, selecting what is interesting and accessible to most people, as well as making it available in other languages.

It is important to talk to people who don’t support the WCD approach (e.g. local merchants and car user groups) and with police who are on the street all the time so know more about transportation than most in the city. Listening to what they have to say will help us understand what can be done to make it more of a success.  Make sure you test your ideas, not simply just to think it is a great idea and do it.

What projects are you currently working on and have lined up for the future?
What I would love to do, in a few years, is to put an end to all my mobility-type activities and pass it onto other capable people to carry on this work. I’d like to spend more time on projects outside of mobility: pursuing my interests on how society works and its problems, ranging from economic issues to ethnic tensions.

For now, I still have a lot of work to do in new mobility. Over the next few years, I shall continue to maintain and strengthen the New Mobility Agenda and all of its subsets, of which WCD is one, as well as the World Streets blog, and to work with colleagues around the world to create local editions in local languages in order to make it accessible to more people.

Another project I’ve already began working on is a series of what I call “New Mobility Master Classes”. This involves bringing together people in different countries with broad experience and who can eventually lead their own projects, in order to create a template model for sustainable mobility. The Master Class might be a week long or last a whole month and we try to involve students and academics working in this field.  The overall idea is to take new mobility apart in the context of a single city, over the course of one month, talking about many different topics related to mobility, with one of the days devoted to WCD. Once the model has begun to work well, then other people in the field will be able to run their own Master Classes. So I’ll be busy!

How do you think sustainable mobility and broader issues like climate change can be connected?
We’ve got a planet that is really suffering from our behaviour. People often talk about car sharing, bicycle sharing and street sharing, but it is important to share information online and to bring people together to discuss these topics. The first gathering of this kind is the World Sharing Transport Conference taking place in Taiwan in September 2010. It will look deeper into the topic of sharing which has not been talked about much before, as well as studying other aspects such as the behavioural psychology behind it. The important message to spread is that sharing is a great way to meet new people, it’s cool, and it helps save the planet.

Interview by Jane Harding.

For more information on World Carfree Day and sustainable mobility:

• New Mobility Agenda
• World Streets
• World Sharing Transport Conference
• World Carfree Day

In a collision between a car and a pedestrian at 60km/h the pedestrian has a 90% chance of being killed. Slow the car to 50km/h and the pedestrian fatality rate falls to 50%. Slow further to 30km/h and the pedestrian has a 90% prospect of survival. It would therefore save lives if drivers adopted a safer driving style and one that is slowed down to 30km/h when they leave the main road and enter side streets.

Most drivers start their journeys in a side street, make their way to the main road, travel there until close to their destination, and then enter the street system again. Few places are more than a kilometre from the main road. It follows that few journeys involve more than three kilometres in side streets. The difference between travelling three kilometres at 60km/h and travelling the same distance at 30km/h is three minutes. So we are killing our children for three minutes off our journeys.

This is a powerful argument for people voluntarily adopting this mode of driving and also for a universal speed limit of 30km/h, except on those roads where a higher speed limit is adopted. The message that we shouldn’t kill children to shorten our journeys by three minutes is one that most human beings would readily accept. Why then are cars regularly driven in side streets at more than 30km/h by large numbers of otherwise rational, polite and non-violent individuals?

Firstly, it is because the message has not been widely promoted. The 30km/h message and the three minutes message have been promoted in a half-hearted way and are rarely promulgated in official statements. Secondly, it is because we do not distinguish between streets and roads. A street is just another road made for cars and people who leave traffic jams to enter the street system often accelerate as they see an open road before them.

Slowing the Streets

We have to change this concept of speeding. We have to change it for road safety. We also have to change the number of cars on the road because of the impact it has on communities. Some years ago in San Francisco, US, Appleyard and Lintell studied the impact of street traffic on social networks1. They compared the number of neighbours that people acknowledged as social contacts in three streets that were very similar except that one was lightly trafficked, one moderately trafficked and one heavily trafficked. In the lightly trafficked street people had webs of social contacts extending along and across the street for some distance. In moderately trafficked streets the contacts extended along the street but not across it – so the network was halved. In heavily trafficked streets people had contacts only with their next-door neighbour (if that). This research has now been repeated in the UK – last year Joshua Hart obtained similar findings in Bristol (see Carbusters #36)2.

Does this matter? Social support is now recognised as one of the most important predictors of good health, probably through its effect on minimising the impact of stress. The Alameda County Study showed a fourfold difference in total mortality between the least and most socially networked groups3. Because this association got stronger rather than weaker over time, it was probably causal rather than an indirect effect of, say, sick people giving up social activity. So if cars in streets are damaging our social networks – literally causing us to have fewer friends – then they are probably killing more people that way than they are through crashes.

It isn’t just health either. Another finding of Hart’s work was that heavy traffic seriously reduced the areas of the street over which people felt any proprietary concern. The solution is to change the street into a place which people feel proud to maintain and a place that is designed for social interaction – filled with gardens and trees and areas to sit and talk and play. Cars can still be allowed, but the carriageway can become just the gap between the obstacles. Parking areas can still be marked out – in fact they can be placed across the carriageway so that they add to the obstacles. Such streets have been developed in Holland – they are called “woonerfen” or “living streets”. We need them everywhere. It is time to take back the gaps between our houses and make them safe for our children and part of our personal space. The car roams our streets like a dangerous but much-loved dog. It needs to be on a leash. It probably also needs to be rather less loved – but that’s another issue.

Stephen J. Watkins is Director of Public Health for Stockport and Chair, Transport and Health Study Group in the UK.

1 Appleyard, D., Lintell, M., The environmental quality of city streets: The residents’ viewpoint, American Institute of Planners Journal, 38, March 1972.

2 Hart J., Driven to Excess: Impacts of Motor Vehicle Traffic on Residential Quality of Life in Bristol, UK, MSc Transport Planning dissertation, UWE, April 2008.

3 Berkman L.F., Syme S.L., Social Networks, Host Resistance and Mortality: a Nine Year Follow Up of Alameda County Residents, Am J Epidemiol, 109:2, February 1979.

Walking is carfree. So what’s “Carfree Walking” all about you may ask? Carfree walking started as movement in the UK, aiming to encourage people who take recreational walks to use public transport instead of a car to get to the place they want to walk. Tim Woods from Car Free Walks, a UK website offering guides and promoting walks which are accessible via public transport, explains how easy it is to escape the city without a car and find a walking adventure. Woods outlines the benefits of carfree walking for the environment and for people’s health, as well as the support it gives to public transportation in rural areas.

What is your favourite walk? Which one gets you reaching instinctively for your boots and rucksack? Perhaps an exhilarating hike up an Alpine peak, or a coastal stroll spent gazing out to sea. It is unlikely that you pictured an overflowing car park at the foot of your chosen hill, or extended the daydream to sitting in a traffic jam on the way home. But while more and more people are heading for the great outdoors, many of them use their cars to get there. The tranquil scenery that they seek is being increasingly invaded by the noise, fumes and eyesore of growing volumes of traffic.

The solution is simple: carfree walking. Many people are looking for ways to reduce their car use and using public transport to reach the destination of your chosen walk is a simple way to achieve this. Often people opt for the car by default without considering the public transport services available, especially in rural areas.

Promoting the use of public transport for recreational activities is a real opportunity for the carfree movement. Efforts to reduce car dependency often focus on urban areas, where the problems caused by cars are most obvious. Other worthwhile initiatives try to persuade people that “essential” car journeys – the commute to work, the school run – can be made using sustainable transport. But it is also important to encourage a change to our habits in leisure activities. Otherwise, that much sought after “breath of fresh air” will become increasingly hard to find.

Taking the Alternatives

The environmental benefits of carfree walking are obvious – reducing car use cuts CO2 emissions, lessening the effects of global climate change. But leaving the car at home can improve the local environment as well; helping to keep rural areas pristine and not resembling our cities – it is hard to think of any stretch of countryside that is enhanced by having cars in it. Carfree walking also eases traffic congestion in popular walking areas, which can easily become overwhelmed with vehicles and inappropriate parking at the start of walks.

There are many other reasons to go for a carfree walk. Walking is an obvious way to get fit. The World Health Organisation claims that nearly 60% of adults do not take enough physical exercise and not taking the car provides a little bit more activity, even if it is just the walk to and from the bus station.

Carfree walking also supports rural transport services. In many countries, rural transport services are useful for walkers and a lifeline for people in the local community without a car. However many are underused and face a continual fight for survival. By using these services, walkers can play a vital role in helping to keep them sustainable.

However, there are limits to the possibilities for carfree walking. Not all walks can be reached by public transport, which puts them off limits to those of us without a car. Some people prefer to head into completely untouched wildernesses, where even train lines would be an intrusion to the pristine environment.

Walking Adventures

Despite the limitations, there are endless places across the world to get your boots muddy without firing up the ignition. The opportunity to complete a linear route is an attraction. Going for a walk can be an adventure, and few adventures involve going round in circles – Captain Cook would have ended up back in the UK with that approach.

The Tongariro Alpine Crossing, in the centre of New Zealand’s North Island, sets the standard for carfree walking. A linear route across a dramatic volcanic landscape of deep craters and shimmering emerald lakes, it is hailed as the world’s greatest one day walk (by New Zealanders at least). This awe-inspiring hike attracts thousands of walkers each year, and this unique environment benefits from the fact that most leave their cars behind.

Each morning, 14 locally run bus companies collect “trampers” (the local name for walkers) from nearby towns and drop them at the start of the route. After an unforgettable day exploring the otherworldly scenery (which doubled as Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings films), buses running throughout the day collect the weary hordes 19.4km north of the start. This service is so efficient that few trampers, even locals, bother using their own vehicles – an impressive feat in a country where many depend on cars. It’s the same set-up for all of New Zealand’s Great Walks: Department of Conservation staff helps walkers to arrange shuttle buses to and from each route. This set up is an example to many other countries of how to keep popular walking areas as carfree as possible.

Many people use public transport to complete other famous long distance trails, such as the Appalachian Trail in the US and the hike to Machu Picchu in Peru. The distances involved, and the fact many walkers are from overseas (so often do not have a car with them), make this the logical approach.

Take a Hike

Not every walk receives enough visitors to justify its own dedicated bus service, but walkers can often make use of existing public transport systems. In the UK, the scenery of places such as the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands attracts hikers from across the world. The rich railway history has left a legacy of rural stations, most of which are still in use and in areas where cars cannot reach – perfect for setting off away from the crowds.

The popularity of carfree walking is growing. Walking magazines and walking groups help promote carfree walking by including details of public transport services in route plans. At train and bus stations in many countries, walking poles, rucksacks and muddy footprints are becoming an increasingly common sight during people’s leisure time. There may be some way to go, but it seems people are beginning to appreciate the joys of going for a carfree walk.

Finding a Green Walk

Traffic is a major problem in many parts of the UK’s countryside and many places can resemble a motorway in the summer months. Car Free Walks was started in 2007 by two friends in response to growing frustrations about cars ruining our days in the hills. The trigger to take positive action was the advice given in many of our walking guidebooks. The writers almost always list places to park a car, working on the well-founded assumption that people always drive to the countryside. But the frustration was that many authors recommend train station car parks as a place to leave cars – without even suggesting the option of taking the train! Car Free Walks website has over 150 routes in the UK and helps you plan or recommend a carfree walk. www.carfreewalks.org

Written by Tim Woods

For more information, please visit:
www.doc.govt.nz
www.ramblers.org.uk
www.healthwalks.co.uk

Friedrich Engels wrote in 1845 that a town such as London is a strange thing. The colossal centralisation, “this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point”, has multiplied their power a hundredfold. With the fresh eyes of a visitor, Engels describes all the marvels produced by the city’s concentration of work and activity, industry and markets. Cities are, without any doubt, unparalleled as engines of creation, and Victorian London was the most magnificent of them all. However, as Engels notes, “the sacrifices which all this has cost, become apparent later”.

“These Londoners” he wrote “have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation which crowd their city; a hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully and multiply through union with those of others.”

As Engels moved further into the streets of the great city, he approached what few members of the bourgeoisie ever cared to see: an endless archipelago of dark, damp, badly ventilated dwellings in narrow courts and alleys in “which the filth and tottering ruin surpass all description”. In this sterile land of bricks and ravines between steep walls people starve to death literally next door to all the wealth in the world. Once left to the mercy of the market “the proletarian is helpless; left to himself, he cannot live a single day. The bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence in the broadest sense of the word.”

To Engels it soon became apparent how the city itself in the industrial age serves as a tool to further concentrate capital and property. Just like the feudal system was built on a specific relation in space between the feudalist and the agricultural labourer, so is the industrial age built on a centralisation of people that throws the workers into a war of each against all.

Engels and his contemporary thinkers sat in the middle of the passing between two ages and many of them had the same notion. They could see with their own eyes how the working class was being subdued, how free men and women, once transformed to an industrial proletariat, were fixated in an organic and constant dependence that deprived them of all their potential freedoms. And how the city, in the later words of Fernand Braudel, “generalised the market to a broad phenomena”, making every city dweller dependent on the market for food and income.

Thus, progressive planners, facing the horrific cities of their time, sought alternative forms. It seemed obvious to them that a return to, at least a partial, self-sufficiency was an absolute necessity. This conviction is reflected both in William Morris’ utopian novel News from Nowhere and Ebenezer Howards’ Garden City, as well as in Frank Lloyd Wrights’ later American vision of Broadacre city, among many others. Peter Hall writes:

“The vision of these anarchist [planners and architects] was not merely of an alternative built form, but of an alternative society, neither capitalistic nor bureaucratic-socialistic: a society based on voluntary cooperation among men and women, working and living in small self-governing commonwealths.” (Cities of Tomorrow)

This dream of restoring a lost kind of village life became a prime mover in most progressive planning during the last century. It was a very compelling idea and therefore often rhetorically included, no matter how large scale the projects eventually grew. The form it sought out for the city was an open, decentralised and multicore urban landscape, with all the pleasures and advantages of urban life reachable for everyone without the need to sacrifice other values, such as small scale community life and easy access to nature, and without the concentration of capital and power they witnessed in their own cities.

Ironically, this progressive line of planning in time merged either with the more technocratic way of thinking best represented by Le Corbusier, and/or with the dominant paradigm of car culture.

In his libertarian vision of Broadacre City, Frank Lloyd Wright had envisaged a lot of 1 – 4 acre per household, as a physical manifestation of their independence and self-reliance. But once it was turned into reality, suburbia became a pure autotopia; a society perhaps more locked up in remote dependence than anything ever seen before. No population on this planet votes more with their eyes on the fuel price than the American suburban.

So, the dream of a more decent and decentralised urban development failed. Instead, in the last quarter of a century, another discourse has made its way to the top of the agenda: the compact city.

The pendulum swings. Today planners and decision makers from the right to the left all agree we must build our cities denser and more compact in order to achieve sustainability. And the very same 18th century cities that progressives of the time criticised so heavily are once again seen as an ideal form. This time, however, the focus is entirely on the bourgeoisie flaneur city that Friedrich Engels in his time saw through, as he revealed the filth and oppression it rested upon.

You, who read this article, are probably, just like me, critical of a society dependent on the automobile. And you are, probably, just like me, tempted to accept, perhaps even embrace, the idea of the more compact city as an imperative necessity for a more just environment.

Still I think it is necessary to halt and think for a while. Because just what kind of life are we buying into when we accept the idea of densification? Just what interests benefit from such an agenda? And what possible forms do we throw at the door in the process? Four reflections:

First, we must understand that discourses are powerful mechanisms. Once a discourse of densification has been established as a superior goal and built into master plans, it serves as a perfect excuse to developers who want to build at just the wrong places. The current Stockholm master plan provides an example of this. Its outspoken goal is to build a more compact city, summarized in the credo “build the city inwards”:

“To build the city inwards is the strategy and best response to a Stockholm that needs to grow in a sustainable way, which among other things means decreased energy use, shortened transportation routes and increased public transport.” (Stockholm Master Plan, 2000; 2007 as quoted by Karin Bradley)

This may sound green, but in practice it produces and legitimizes project after project that can be characterised as either one of the following:

• Gentrification through the redevelopment of “underdeveloped areas”, resulting in heightened social segregation, higher land values (meaning higher prices) and eviction of less profitable activities (such as allotment gardens) .
• Densification in already too dense working class areas, resulting in deterioration of the local environment.
• Exploitation of green belts (a particular quality in Stockholm), also resulting in deterioration of the local environment as well as longer distance to get out in nature.
• Externalization of production from brown field areas, which in reality means a less functionally integrated city and longer transportation chains.

Neither of those avenues seems particularly attractive from a progressive green perspective.

As a planner I’ve witnessed how this works in many municipal plans. The densification strategy provides a clearing for exploitation projects which in reality produces a worse environment for the people living in the city, and especially for the working class.

In practice the most obvious consequence of the densification discourse so far are cities that become more socially exclusive and more functionally homogenous.

Secondly, just as the bourgeoisie flaneur city in Friedrich Engels’ time in reality was nothing but a coulisse floating on a sea of poverty, our dense cities similarly float at a sea of extraction of natural resources and production that goes on somewhere far away. As we pursue in building the city inwards, we continually export unwanted but nevertheless necessary production beyond city limits, and beyond our sight, while at the same time sweeping the total environment of consumptionist propaganda more closely around us. Where the cities of the industrial age were production centres, modern cities in the west are mainly centres for consumption, happily unaware of the real cost for its existence and way of life. We as citizens become engulfed in a fake world, where only a minor part of reality is visible and one particular aspect – commercial life, consumption – constantly beats its way into every corner of life. We become, like Jim Carrey in Truman Show, prisoners in a “perfect” world. A shining prison. But, all the same, a prison.

Thirdly, in the same manner as production moves beyond our sight in a compact city, nature itself is removed from our proximity. Sometimes replaced with things such as cultivated pocket parks, street trees, green walls and green roofs, which are all very nice things, but, unfortunately, nothing more than an artificial garniture of “green makeup”. Entirely diminutive compared to the ecological footprint each citizen requires for his/her survival. Therefore, the concept of the “dense” city as it comes articulated, and practiced, carries in itself a continued alienation of man from nature.

The reason why this is problematic is because the environmental crisis is, at its root, a crisis in our relation to nature. Our unsustainable use of resources and the climate crisis are both byproducts of our inability to nurture the biosystem services we depend upon, to close the biogeochemical cycles and adjust our use of resources to nature’s carrying power. This inability stems from a cultural and geographical alienation from nature. In short, as a culture we have thought that nature must be exploited rather than nurtured in order to provide for economic growth and development.

What the dense and compact city does to this relation crisis is nothing but to further expand the mental and physical distance between the city dweller and the external world she depends upon. This is a “solution” of the same kind as when racial segregation is presented as a solution to ethnic conflicts and exploitation. We should know by now that segregation never actually solves any conflicts between two groups of people, but, rather, makes it harder to solve them. Segregation nourishes exactly the ignorant presumptions that form the basis of every conflict; segregation establishes the division between inside and outside, us and the other. And what’s even worse: segregation creates a mental and physical distance sufficient enough to make the act of oppression and exploitation into a lesser moral dilemma for the stronger part.

In this respect, the compact city is no different than suburbia; both establish a totally encompassing artificial and anthropogenic landscape, with few outlooks beyond the thick weave of houses, streets and lampposts.

Some people might argue that this segregation between man and nature is of less importance, as long as we all agree on successively decreasing our use of energy. However, I think the opposition is faulty for the simple reason that we live in a parliamentarian democracy, and in every democracy the amount of environmental consideration stands in a direct relation to the environmental awareness in the electorate as a whole. An electorate with high awareness elects leaders that are strong on environmental issues, while an electorate with a limited awareness – and a weak relation to nature – elects leaders that care more for other things.

This correlation is visible when comparing the political environmental awareness in Sweden, where the cities are rather well integrated in – and connected with – their upland, despite a high degree of urbanisation, and in the USA where the major cities are more clearly separated from their surroundings.

Fourth, the densification strategies of today reflect a recentralisation that stems from an ongoing change in the economy. Just like the industrial age under the regime of Manchester liberalism needed to centralise workers in order to push wages down and utilise the labour of the working class as inputs in production, power in the age of information and neoliberalism is dependent on controlling the zones where the public is constituted. As noted by Lars-Mikael Raattamaa, “control is exercised through cultural dominance. Production of control is production of the [space that is recognized as public.] In order to be successful you must live where the successful people live. This is how the new disciplining works, centralisation instead of dispersion.”

In the age of creativity, the value produced by the “intellectual capital” is tapped and mastered through controlling the interfaces where connections are made, be them physical or virtual. This, again, calls for a centralisation, and, as shown by Saskia Sassen, Manuel Castels and others, cities of all sizes are thrown into a game where they fight over attracting the “right population”. In this struggle, cities go to extremes in prioritising the needs and demands of the mythical nomadic creative class, while at the same time denying the needs of other groups.

This shift of priorities is marked by a shift of focus towards the inner city, where one aspect of urbanity – a “pulsating city life” – suddenly is regarded as the highest of urban virtues. When this abstract notion of urban life is specified, it turns out to be synonymous with a city characterised by shops, restaurants, cafés and cultural institutions – all of which are activities inscribed in an economic circulation, none of which are free. In the visions the perfect street is often imagined as a street with small, personal and specialized shops. But in reality the small units are more often than not outcompeted by global chains and by the Internet, leaving a much more conformist streetscape, dominated by transnational capital, on whose altar other values are sacrificed.

For the reasons argued above, I would urge all green progressives to keep a careful attitude towards densification agendas and the idea of the compact city as a superior form. We still need to tackle the same issues as the anarchist planners of 19th century faced; how to preserve freedom for all and fight centralisation of power, while at the same time having access to the benefits of urban life, and building an ecologically sustainable society.

This is not intended as a critique of cities as such. As Mike Davis rightfully points out in an interview in Occupied London (#1), the only possible “substitute for ever going intensified private or individual consumption is the public luxury of the city.”

But a city, what is that really? We must challenge our presumptions much better – and acknowledge that there are other spatial forms that should be explored when we build the cities of tomorrow.

Erik Berg is a member of the Left Party of Sweden, he is working as a city planner, writes architecture criticism in magazines and runs the blog approximationer.blogspot.com.

Image by Caruba.

Obesity is a growing problem and it may keep on growing if nothing is done to fight it. Car culture plays a role in this phenomenon with drivers and passengers having unhealthy diets and lacking physical activity. This is another reason to promote new models of urban planning and transportation. We decided to ask Dr. David Haslam to outline the sociological and medical aspects of obesity and to provide some advice to prevent it. Walking and cycling are obviously good preventive tools and Cat Chappel from Travel Actively, which promotes these activities, outlines the health and mental benefits of these activities.

Drive your car in moderation

By Dr. David Haslam

Nauru, one of the Polynesian Islands, is the smallest nation on Earth. It went from extreme poverty to great wealth with the discovery that the phosphate, derived from bird guano which covered the island, was a valuable fertiliser, resulting in the sale of their topsoil to Australia. The Islanders became rich, but had nothing to spend their money on, so they turned to a Western diet – alcohol and cars. At first there were no roads on Nauru. The population now has an 80% obesity rate, and a 45% prevalence of type II diabetes, and a high rate of drink-driving and road traffic accidents (RTAs).

The health epidemic was analysed in detail in a 1999 paper Obesity in Britain: Gluttony or Sloth? by Prentice and Jebb, which dissected the so-called “obesogenic” environment we live in to accurately define the cause of obesity. They concluded that lack of physical activity was the most important factor behind the rising tide of obesity, citing specifically increased ownership of cars and TV sets as major culprits.

Although the study underestimates the amount of food eaten, especially outside the home, and presents a somewhat simplistic argument linking the different variables, there is no doubt that modern labour-saving technology such as the car has a lot to answer for. Our prehistoric ancestors were programmed to eat whenever food was available; to prepare for future times of famine and fast, and to conserve energy by resting in case our “flight or fight” response was called upon. Therefore those who laid down energy as fat, and were innately sedentary were in pole position for survival of the fittest.

However, evolution has played a nasty trick on us, and those very same characteristics and phenotypes lead to obesity, diabetes and premature death. Our environment has evolved over the last 30 years with advances in technology and food science, which has made weight gain a normal response to an abnormal environment. Our bodies cannot evolve quickly enough to combat these changes, so anyone managing to avoid obesity must either be extremely lucky, or work extremely hard. To walk to work, whilst leaving a perfectly functional car in the drive takes an enormous effort of will, to overcome our deepest rooted instincts, but such efforts of will are necessary in order to preserve or improve health.

Obesity leads to type II diabetes, heart disease, cancer, liver disease, infertility, and many other medical conditions. Sleep apnoea is a condition in which the sufferer snores, and stops breathing for prolonged periods at night, leading to daytime fatigue and somnolence. Obesity is the underlying cause, and as professional driving is by necessity a sedentary occupation, many taxi, HGV and bus drivers suffer from it. Sleep apnoea leads to falling asleep at the wheel and an alarming increase in RTAs and traffic deaths. The current adult population of the UK will lose a cumulative 100,000 million years of life because of obesity and related diseases. It has been shown by many models including French health organisations Ville Sante and EPODE that by empowering a population to make changes in physical activity and nutritional intake, obesity can be tackled.

The effort to change habits must be backed by sufficient political will, and must be properly resourced, but can be done. People will cycle to work if their employers provide shower and changing facilities, if their cycle lane doesn’t peter out into the wrong lane of a dual carriageway, or involve murderous road intersections. In these times of economic hardship, there are savings to be made by walking or cycling to work or leisure pursuits, (and to turn to cheap home cooked seasonal produce). But the governments have a responsibility to make active travel safe travel. The car won’t become obsolete just yet, but just like chocolate, fast food and ice cream should be enjoyed sparingly.

For more information, please visit:

www.villes-sante.com and www.epode.fr

Carfree Health Benefits

By Cat Chappell

The 2007 Foresight report Tackling Obesities: Future Choices laid bare the immense scale of the UK’s obesity problem. Unless there is decisive action immediately, by 2050 almost 60% of the UK population could be obese. There is therefore a need for creating the right environment that helps people to build physical activity into their everyday lives, and then give them the skills and confidence to achieve this. The key to getting people walking and cycling regularly is by incorporating it into people’s daily lives. Walking and cycling should be the natural transport choice for short journeys. But increasingly we are a society that has got out of the habit of walking, even for short local journeys to school, work or the shops. However, despite the fact that walking and cycling are the cheapest and most accessible form of exercise, physical and mental barriers, such as the belief that it can be time consuming, prevents people travelling actively.

Travel Actively is a consortium of leading walking, cycling and health organisations committed to enabling two million people to be more aware of how they could be more active by 2012. They recognise the importance of these daily activities and have 50 tailor-made walking and cycling projects spread over England. Their 2008 Annual Review gave an insight into how health projects can benefit individual’s lives and health for the better. It highlighted improvements from increased physical activity in individual’s mental and physical health, as well as some improvements to social inclusion and cohesion. By the end of 2008 over 85,000 people had participated to the many projects of Travel Actively. The new walkers and cyclists experienced numerous immediate benefits, but the next step is to make this sustainable in the longer run.

For more information, please visit: www.travelactively.org.uk

“If you were to design the ultimate system, you would have mass transit be free and charge an enormous amount for cars.” Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York.

We are standing at a crossroad: in order to reduce our oil dependency and make our cities climate smart, we have to change our ways of traveling. It is a fact that the future is on a track, and with free public transport everyone can come along for the ride.

Free public transport is a way to reward groups of people who travel in an environmental-friendly way and an economic incentive to choose a mean of transport that, from a social and environmental perspective, is obviously better than driving. The introduction of free public transport would mean more money for practically all commuters, and letting the car drivers chip in and pay for public transport would give them a good incentive to leave their cars at home. It is also a matter of gender equality: today men are over-represented among car drivers and investments in public transport are investments in women’s mobility.

The decline in car-traffic and surge in the demand for public transportation that free public transport would render, would in turn stimulate a much needed capacity and comfort increase in the public transport system. This, combined with the fact that ticket collectors, controllers and guards could be retrained to be bus drivers, train drivers, station hosts and traffic hosts would make the public transport much more attractive than it is today. Also, free public transport would increase the purchasing power of everyone using it, which would support regional economies.

But free public transport shouldn’t be seen as a stand-alone reform, but rather as one part of a bigger package of reforms to make our cities more green, liveable and fair. Free public transport should be combined with infrastructural changes to promote walking and biking, at least for shorter distances, as well as congestion fees and other measures to discourage car driving.

It is great to promote walking and biking as alternatives to driving, and of course these two means of transportation are the most ecological and healthy. But we must acknowledge that not everyone has the luxury of being able to bike or walk to work, school or their leisure activities. Kids, people with disabilities and elderly, people living in suburbs far away from their work and people living in cities where the weather just isn’t suitable for being outside most of the year – for all of them biking or walking is hardly ever an option and this is something that needs to be addressed.

We also have to consider the fact that being able to walk or bike to work is, just like driving, often a question of class. It is seldom working class people who are living in, or close to, the city centre or their work. Free public transport is certainly a reform to promote green alternatives to car-traffic and encourage a modal shift from car to public transport. But one of the most important aspects concerns a better redistribution of wealth in the society. Even though almost everyone would, in one way or another, benefit from free public transport, the biggest winners are people with low incomes living in suburbs far away from the city centre.

“A win-win solution, if I ever saw one” Irwin Kellner, chief economist for MarketWatch (a part of the Wall Street Journal).

In September 2009 Planka.nu released their urban transport planning manifesto Travel doesn’t have to cost the Earth, where they propose five concrete measures to make the transport sector in Stockholm, Sweden, climate-smart and socially fair.

www.planka.nu/rapporter

Success stories

In 1996, the Belgian city Hasselt introduced free public transport under the motto “The city guarantees the right of mobility for everyone”. At the same time the mayor proposed to give absolute primacy on the city’s Green Boulevard to public transport. Since then, bus ridership has increased by over 1,300%.

Ockelbo in Sweden coordinated all their public and semi-public transport such as regular buses, school buses and mobility service into one system and made it free. Since then the ridership has increased by more than 260% and almost half of those were former car drivers. The municipality even saved money from the reform due to a decrease in administrative costs.

Alexander Berthelsen

Do better passengers’ rights and more passenger involvement in public transport policy strengthen customer satisfaction and lead to more passengers, and ultimately to growth and improvement in public transport? Or do enforceable passengers’ rights weaken already loss-making transport companies?

A couple of Trans-European research projects on the effects of passenger rights and passenger involvement, conducted by the Nexus Institute for Cooperation Management in Berlin, give clear, documented answers to these questions central to the future and the potential of public transport: In almost all cases that passengers’ rights have been codified and enforced, the number of passengers has increased, the image of public transport and of transport companies has improved; and despite additional expenses, the economic situation of the transport industry has improved as well. A discerning view shows that, particularly in long-distance transport, extensive reimbursement regulations have proved of value, while local transport still has little experience with major compensatory services.

In recent years, the most important motor for strengthening passengers’ rights in Europe has been the European Commission, thus strikingly demonstrating its citizen-orientation. The Commission closely observes individual improvements on the national level and uses them as arguments for the development of new supranational instruments.

Contrary to passenger rights, passenger participation in service design of public transport systems has increased much less in recent years. It’s still much behind user participation for individual transport systems. There is, however, a connection between passengers’ rights and passengers’ participation. Both areas address a new valuation of the passenger: the identification of the passenger as a customer with enforceable rights instead of merely something that is transported, and the inclusion of passengers as collaborative counterparts and decision-makers in identifying weak points and developing proposals for the improvement of the public transport system.

Legal Liaisons and Socio-political Perspective

Besides the comparative transport political perspective, there is a socio-political and a judicial one. The latter particularly emphasises the necessity of enforcing passengers’ rights as customers in relation to their contractual partner, the transport company. This perspective is important and fully justified, but not without its own dangers. “Justitia non calculat”, jurisprudence does no accounting. This old legal motto could be radically applied to passengers’ rights, which many transport companies fear will undermine their basic economic conditions. They refer to legal consumer protection in the US, which has endangered some commercial sectors due to indemnity claims that are sometimes exorbitant. This certainly has a tradition in the US. In the first decade of the 20th century, railways were so weakened by cartel bans and law suits that they almost had to completely give up their fight for passenger transport against competition of the streets. In Europe, the fears that a strengthening of passengers’ rights could weaken the position of transport companies is, however, not empirically demonstrable.

From a socio-political perspective, it is overall desirable to strengthen civic involvement in public commodities. Public transport is a public commodity. Just as the judicial perspective places passengers’ rights at the centre, the socio-political perspective emphasises passenger participation.

Passenger participation is about the development and adaptation of new, more customer-oriented transport systems and the development of solutions that often occur more easily to the customers than to the experts. Customers are experts, so to speak, in their own affairs – and this is not limited to the design of seats, etc. In the 1950s, it was often sufficient for the planning and development of new transport services if transport engineers and planners acted on even their own instincts. Today, technology developers and transport planners have to consult their customers, because post-industrial society has become more divergent, and because engineers and planners themselves often no longer reflect the mainstream of society.

Monopolies, Mismanagement and Metropolitan Moves

Why have public transport experts not discussed these issues for such a long time? And why are they now beginning to become more and more prominent? There are evident historical reasons for this. Firstly, the legal framework for railways and its specific form of customer-orientation developed in times when it actually had a monopoly as a transport system in many areas. As the rise of motorised individual transport put pressure on public transport, it survived in Europe thanks to public support and governmental protection. They were also able to advance by leaps and bounds through the decades-long fixing of fare rates and franchising in goods transport, which held road-based competition at bay. The limitation of enforceable passengers’ rights was also among these factors. This was certainly a justifiable effort to protect an ailing public transport industry against customers’ demands in order to ensure that it would survive at all.

Indeed, in the long-term this was politically disastrous for the transport companies, which slowly but permanently came to be seen as “shrinking”, or on the retreat. Its employees, in contrast to earlier times, had a crestfallen self-awareness, additionally demoralised by increasingly obsolescent technology. These were times when some employees of local public transport systems did not anymore use the services themselves, and even looked at customers with a certain disdain. A growing proportion of the companies’ revenues were no longer earned from passengers, but in the form of subsidies from public funds.

A widespread change has set in since the 1980s. Strengthened by new, ecological arguments for the construction of public transport systems, this change took the shape of investment in new technology, growth, and offensive customer-orientation. It began in long-distance transport with the targeted construction of inter-city transport and, in the 1980s, a new marketing approach and later the new high-speed routes. Large cities invested in new metropolitan transport systems. Until the end of the century, new trains and offerings in regional transport began to emerge. Transport companies and their employees today are not only significantly more customer-oriented than 20 years ago, they are also once more confident about the future and the growth prospects of their service, and therefore are more open to passengers’ rights and passenger participation.

Direction and Developments

In what direction will and should the development of passengers’ rights and passenger participation in Germany and Europe continue? In short: passenger’s rights and passenger participation will continue to increase in importance for three reasons:

a) EU motor forward Passengers’ Rights

Recent studies document how the EU has, for the last few years, been systematically and consistently advancing the development of passengers’ rights. It has been strengthening its work on train, bus and ferry transport and, moreover, has supported cooperation with passenger and consumer organisations on the European level.

On the establishment level, to date we still have mostly only voluntary commitments by transport companies, who see an improved image, new solutions, and in particular more passengers. Indeed there is a recognisable trend: the movement is in the direction of strengthened cooperation with customers in the services of public transport.

b) Governance of Infrastructure

Passengers’ rights and passenger participation exist in the context of a fundamental reconstruction of the infrastructures and service utilities available to the public. This reconstruction is moving away from services for which public governance alone has responsibility and control, and towards services that are designed and maintained together by the state, economic partners, and citizen engagement. In this context, the importance of passenger participation will continue to increase because people who take part want to be heard and to take part in decision-making as well.

c) Participation for a Better Public Transport

Competition is generally seen as an impetus for customer-orientation on the part of service providers; but this rarely occurs. The reforms of recent years have, however, sought to structure transport with an orientation toward competition. Though they only indirectly make competition for the “passenger as end customer” their goal, developments to date have shown positive effects on customer-orientation.

One precondition for customer-oriented service is that companies are aware of customers’ expectations, and that they are given sufficient attention in the planning process. Today however, as the “purchaser” of public transport systems, transport authorities are the most important “customers” for many transport companies. They are carefully monitored, cared for, and served. Indeed if a transport company wants instead to draw more voluntary customers, it should strengthen passengers’ rights and use passengers purposefully to improve their service. Thus, customer-orientation remains an important area for future development in local transport. We have a long way to go in this area; it is, however, a worthwhile process.

We end here: only when public transport systems can compete on the empathetic level with individual transport systems will they have the possibility of developing the market of voluntary passengers. Strengthening passengers’ rights and passenger participation are two ideal approaches to achieving this goal.

Further Reading:

Martin Schiefelbusch, Hans-Liudger Dienel (eds.): Public Tranport and its Users. The Passenger’s Perspective in Planning and Customer Care, Farnham: Ashgate 2009, 304 pp., figures, tables (ISBN 978-0-7546-7447-4).

This book examines strategies for the representation of user interests in public transport from a variety of perspectives.

By Hans-Liudger Dienel

Illustrations by Daria Samokhvalova

Likewise with economics: when we move beyond the “truths” that are so self-evident as to require no explanation (meaning that many of them will fail to stand up to examination), we can discover breathtaking possibilities. Of course it involves making a little effort to learn some terms and see through the common arguments that are used to keep us in the dark, but if we ever want to achieve our carfree cities, there may be no other choice than to expand our knowledge and discard what “common sense” tells us.

“Today it is almost universally accepted that we must make cars to keep jobs, not to move people about,” wrote philosopher Hannah Arendt back in 1975 (Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, Schocken Books), writing about the change from “an early producer society into a consumer society that could keep going only by changing into a huge economy of waste…” and where progress means that “to stop going, to stop wasting, to stop consuming more and more, quicker and quicker, to say at any given moment enough is enough would spell immediate doom.” (Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, p. 262)

This is the world that economist John Kenneth Galbraith refers to as a squirrel wheel: we must work hard to produce a vast quantity of goods. We then need advertising to convince us to buy them because otherwise the demand would not be enough to match the supply. Then we have to work equally hard to afford the goods that we didn’t want in the first place. (JK Galbraith, 1958, The Affluent Society, Penguin Book) Meanwhile, since many people still cannot afford them, but the goods must be purchased as well as produced to keep the economy moving, banks provide loans even to the credit unworthy…and if the system collapses, the government (meaning the people) step in to bail it out. A great system for those at the top of the major corporations and the banks, but it is less clear how it benefits the vast majority of the population.

Jobs

No question about it, building cars creates jobs. But as Hannah Arendt suggests, is there not something odd about building cars not for transport but for job creation?

The question, thus, is not how many jobs building, selling, and servicing cars creates, but whether less costly means (in terms of money, pollution, environmental destruction, and cost to human life) are available to increase employment. It is also interesting to note that the same people who urge the need to continue the manufacture of cars, to bail out the big auto manufacturers, are happy to see jobs eliminated from the workforce through increased mechanisation and automation.

Rather than look at how many people’s livelihoods are dependent on the auto industry, as a stand-alone fact that means that we must continue producing cars at whatever cost, why not look at the cost of that production, given that the production occurs in large part not to provide transport, but rather jobs? How much in raw materials, water, and energy goes into car production; how much fuel will those cars likely consume when used; how many people will die or be injured in car crashes? Perhaps it is not such a fruitful bargain after all.

What are the alternatives? Other than weapons, tobacco, fast food and soft drinks, most of the economy is far less destructive than cars in terms of impact on environment, health and wellbeing. If people stopped buying cars, there would be an awful lot of money to invest in various other activities that could create jobs – and as a side benefit, create wealth rather than destruction and poverty. The idea of retooling car factories to produce bicycles and mass transit, for which the need would dramatically increase if we stopped driving so much, is only one simple solution to the problem. Fortunately economies tend to be dynamic and to adjust to new circumstances with little or no help: where was the outcry, for instance, when typewriters became virtually obsolete?

Private Wealth, Public Poverty

A not so lovely phenomenon of “modern” times is the incredible disparity between the wealth of some individuals and the poverty of public services. People keep their houses clean and regularly dispose of their trash; streets are filthy and trash collection services often inadequate. People have expensive entertainment systems in their homes; children attend ill-equipped schools. People drive cars often worth tens of thousands of dollars or more; others pay to travel in shabby buses that fail to maintain a regular schedule

Endless creativity goes into defining various details and “refinements” of cars to increase their sales and to convince those driving older vehicles that they must regularly upgrade; little or no such thought seems to go into maintaining and upgrading public transit services, not to mention the condition (and often absence) of sidewalks and bicycle lanes or paths or trails.

The reasons for the disparity are rather obvious, and well-described in Galbraith’s masterpiece, Economics and the Public Purpose (JK Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose, Houghton Mifflin Company Boston), in which he thoroughly debunks the myth that people communicate their needs and desires to companies through the marketplace, and that the business of companies is to satisfy those desires; that is, that the consumer is at the heart of the system. Only small companies face pressures under the marketplace; large corporations control their costs, prices, consumers, and even to a large degree the government. The corporation, not the individual consumer, is at the centre of the economic universe. What benefits General Motors benefits General Motors, not the nation.

As a result, there is an absurd over-abundance of unnecessary products that happen to be lucrative to large corporations, and Madison Avenue is kept busy finding creative ways to convince people to consume the unnecessary. Meanwhile, the goods and services that people desperately need and crave – things like quality affordable health care, good schools, breathable air, walkable streets, and good public transit – are the source of political battles that usually lead to failure for the general public.

Learning to say “No”

Galbraith, while not a self-declared (at least to my knowledge) carfree cities advocate, posits an interesting question: what if, as in the case of building a new school, those wishing to buy a car had to demonstrate their need? What if the assumption was that the car purchase is unnecessary, and the burden of proof were on the consumer to prove otherwise? And what if the situation worked in the reverse for schools and for public transit: that is, it would be assumed that more and better is better unless proved otherwise.

It is a bit disingenuous to ask from whence the money would come for such expenses when tax systems currently contribute to ever-increasing inequality in incomes. When we remember that everyone suffers from public poverty – that the rich themselves must spend enormous sums to provide themselves with transport, security, better schools, good health care and so on – it seems even more absurd that the tax system not be amended and priorities rearranged so that basic and public needs would take precedence over private expenditures.

One needn’t be a socialist, or even believe in the need for greater equality of incomes, to see that there is something wrong when individuals are expected to make enormous outlays for private vehicles because the government is not able to provide a decent transport system. The situation becomes even more absurd when we remember that we produce cars not for transport but for jobs.

What if, rather than bailing out the auto industry, the government were to create employment through expanding public services: better public transit, sidewalks, and bicycle routes; more and better parks and playgrounds and other public spaces; better schools and health care, and so on? Rather than simply working to earn a wage to buy all that is needed to survive, while the job itself destroys the future base of the economy by eating up natural resources and destroying the environment, one could work at a job that increases overall wealth.

What about those who still wish to drive? As Galbraith argues, “Automobile use in the central city…[and] random residential use of land are … cases where the advantage to the particular consumer is outweighed by the adverse effect on the community as a whole. In the past the presumption has favoured individual convenience even in face of larger social cost… The rational legislative decision requires the exclusion from consumption of products, services and technology where the social cost and discomfort are deemed to outweigh the individual advantages.” (JK Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose, p. 290-291) In other words, where the desires of major corporations interfere with the public good, it is the responsibility of government to act in the public interest: in this case, to ban the use of cars in the central city.

Could you use more Vacation?

As Galbraith (and Ivan Illich and the other authors) suggest and the European experience indicates, one could work a lot fewer hours, as well. (Ever wonder how the Europeans can afford their 36-hour work weeks and 6 weeks of annual vacation, not to mention generous maternal and paternal leave policies and an enviable range of social benefits? Sure, they own a lot of cars, but they drive an awful lot less than Americans and have infinitely better systems of public transport as well as conditions for walking and cycling. Hmm…almost enough to give one pause.) Rather than work hard to create products that nobody wants and that people must work hard to afford to buy, we could work a lot less to create a lot more useful wealth that we could share a lot more equally.

Given the evidence, it would seem likely that the only hope for future prosperity is in going carfree. The problem lies in learning how to talk back to the corporations and economists who would like to keep us in the dark about a few basic facts of economics, and in learning to see beyond our immediate crises. Overcoming our fear of economics and learning to talk back to those who would keep us down could prove liberating in the most intoxicating sense of all, by giving us the power to fulfil our dream of carfree cities.

Article and photo: Debra Efroymson, Regional Director, HealthBridge in Bangladesh

This article has also been translated into Japanese by our friends over at Realiser.org, check it out!