Long-range City-planning Perspectives
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| You should lead your life so you won't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip. |
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| You should lead your life so you won't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip. |
| The road traffic infrastructure contributes to a considerable spreading of the urban areas. This spreading forces more and more people to acquire a motorcar. The proliferation of private car ownership, in turn, leads to even more roads, traffic carousels and parking spaces. This urban sprawl accelerates in a spiral fashion. |  |
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he Swedish office of housing has in a study (in "Sweden 2009”, page 74) taken the Gothenburg region (Goteborg) in Sweden as an illustrative example. There, the population has increased by 54 % during the years 1945 through 1990, whereas the surface occupied by this population has increased by 629 % (i.e. it has become more than 6 times as large!).This disproportionate trend is essentially fueled by the increased use of private cars, as shown to the left. The motorcar has created the urban sprawl. The use of motor cars starts a vicious circle; use of private cars creates a need for more roads, which increases urban sprawl, which create more need to use the car, to, in a reasonable time, cover distances. A service which public transport is too inefficient to provide. |
The present development all over the world, is is like letting the genie out of the bottle. Once he is out, it is hard to get him in again. But what happens when fuel prices start to climb, in a few years time? Globally, considering the population explosion and the rapid urbanization, one generally estimates the doubling time of the population of the urban areas to be about 30 - 40 years. If we were to assume the same figures for growth of the living standard and car ownership as for the Gothenburg region, during the transition to the car society, then the surface occupied by the world's urban areas would increase 8 times during the coming 3 - 4 decades! And this would result just for a doubling of the urban population! The growth of urban areas resembles the growth of malignant cancer, both in behavior and appearance on a map. Consider the two views below, "before" and "after". Shifting commuter traffic up in the air makes an awful lot of difference to the traffic needs on the ground! |
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After
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| In year 2002, the world´s population will be around 6.2 billion people. In 1996, the population was 5.8 billion people, and out of these, 4.7 billion lived in the third world, or "developing countries". These developing countries also provide 98 % of the yearly population growth. As for the USA, the population in 1999 was 274 million people, and this grows at the present with 2.4 million people a year. And the rate of urbanization is in all countries larger than the population growth. |
How the population explosion , the urbanization and the increased number of cars per capita will affect the countries of the European Union (EU) during these coming decades is hard to predict. The rates of increase of both the urban population and number of cars will be slower in the industrialized world than in the third world, but the strains on the economy, the nature and the city environment will be so considerable that new traffic technologies would have to be introduced to keep the urban areas habitable. |
And these are indeed on their way. Generally, one can divide cities into different types, in regard to how they look and how they function. Three common types of city-building strategies are the ”star-shaped city”, the ”band-shaped city” and the ”node city”. These names refer of course to the general shape of the city in question. |
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| Central Stockholm, Sweden, with beams added to the bridge |
| Continent | Urban population (millions) | Percent Urban | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1975 | 1995 | 2025 | 1975 | 1995 | 2025 | |
| Whole World | 1 538 346 | 2 584 454 | 5 065 334 | 38 | 45 | 61 |
| Africa | 104 123 | 250 276 | 804 239 | 25 | 34 | 54 |
| Europe | 453 668 | 535 052 | 597 660 | 67 | 74 | 83 |
| North & Central America | 235 306 | 331 761 | 507 609 | 57 | 68 | 79 |
| South America | 137 578 | 249 331 | 406 679 | 64 | 78 | 88 |
| Asia | 592 282 | 1 197 970 | 2 718 435 | 25 | 35 | 55 |
| Oceania | 15 389 | 20 063 | 30 712 | 70 | 72 | 75 |
lder European cities are often of the ”star” type, with railway stations in an old city center. These cities are characterized by having a large proportion of their commuters travelling by public transport. As time goes by, new suburbs pop up. They are connected radially with the downtown through suburban trains or underground railways, usually complemented with streetcars and buses. Big efforts in this regard are made, in order to avoid overcrowding the city center with cars. Around railway and subway stations, the land is heavily exploited with high-rise buildings. This is done mainly because the common mass transport methods require huge traffic flows in order to become economically feasible (not because people want to live this way).
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In order to increase the mean velocity between the railway/subway stops, the distances between the stops is made longer and longer as the city grows. Eventually, people find that they cannot reach their destinations within a reasonable time by using public transport, because of:
|  Between the star-shaped radii with public transport, ”green fingers” grow up. These green fingers single house suburbs, where inhabitants on the whole take care of their own transportation needs by using their own cars. This leads to a spirallling demand for new roads, new traffic spaghettis and new parking lots. Bus routes are drawn into these suburbs, but public transit is highly uneconomical in such areas. |
| Maybe a low-volume bus transit can be afforded on a sparse timetable. The buslines are mostly used only by those who can not afford to, or for other reasons, can not use the car (children, handicapped and elderly). For these cathegories of people, the isolation is increasing as the public transport slowly goes down the drain. It is also increasingly difficult for them to find suitable work within a reasonable time-distance. |
After some time, the star fingers are interconnected by peripheral roads where new junctions form centers for new ”land development”. Less and less green is left in the ”green fingers”. It is increasingly difficult and timeconsuming for vans and cars to get to the central railway stations in these cities. It seems much more rational to drive directly to the destination in another city compared to go to the local railway station. As a consequence, the railway is bled off economically, subsidized for a while with tax-payers' money, and finally totally abandoned. | The velocity in the car lanes decreases due to increased traffic, and finally resembles infantry soldiers marching at a speed of 5 km/h, BUT with a distance between them of 6 meter instead of 1meter. Bangkok in Thailand is a prime example of this bumper-to-bumper traffic. |
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and-shaped cities are originally small industrial communities. Friends of rail transit often advocate the Band-shaped City in order to promote rail bound traffic. The urbanization is strung out along the railway lines, and in order to give it a more "round" shape, these proponents envision rails more or less in parallel to the original one. This would be complemented with radial streetcar-lines. |
Since the rail cuts the city in two parts, the band-shaped city often divides into a poor and a rich part or an industrial part and a residential part (blue and red, respectivelly, in the illustration) on each side of the railway. The industrial part would not hve as much streetcars, since streetcars do not handle freights well. Insted, truck traffic tends to dominate there. |  |
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| The land costs are huge close to the rails, but diminishes further away. In the residential areas this is counteracted somewhat by high sound levels close to the railway and the industrial areas, but people generally put a premium on easy access to communications facilities. | As this city grows, and new functuions are added to its original industrial function, it turns almost inevitably into a ”star city” with all its accompaning disadvantages, as listed above. |
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he nodal city is a modern "invention"; a result mainly of good transport facilities. It is mostly to be found in the U.S., with its wide-open spaces and high standard of living, which means that one can afford to build roads and use motorcars. On the map, it mostly resembles something between a collection of cities close together, |
and one (or more) cities with rather distant suburbs, providing for some rural areas in-between. The concept as such is the one that draws the most benefit from what beam traffic systems can offer. Aside from private cars, it would also function well with high-speed commuter trains connecting the communities. |  |
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e have elsewhere described how:
The cost of real estate will be considerably more evenly distributed over the region, with small peaks in the close vicinity to the nodes, where it would be reasonable for the costs to be higher. Instead of the rapidly climbing real estate values found in the heart of star-shaped cities (compare the extremes New York and Tokyo), the regional planning could be directed towards new nodes, evenly distributed over the region. Now, wouldn't that be a real boon for city planners!? | As population and traffic unavoidably increases and new suburbs (= nodes) are added to the larger region, the beams already in place would have the capacity to swallow up to about a 30-fold increase in passenger and freight (see the web-page about the "formidable traffic machine".), without - as in the case of motor cars - new demands on broader streets and more parking places in other parts of the region arises. Instead of numerous freeways and traffic carousels for motor vehicles, one-, two- and three-tier roundabouts on pole-supported beams could be used. They would not really take more ground space than the necessary pole supports. The illustrations below show how the spreading pattern of a big, growing city, not having tendencies to become a nodal city, could be altered if a beam traffic system were to be introduced at an early stage. The left pattern is the standard one, with rather compact urbanization clinging to the main roads and spokes-oriented railroads. With the beams in place, and successively being extended as new population centra emerge, people and industries could locate wherever they pleased, within "reasonable" distance of the area's central hub. With the quick and efficient beam cars, the size of this area could be considerable. |
Are skyscrapers a good idea?But; is it sensible to build such huge buildings? When catastrophy strikes, the consequences ara calamitious. And, as was abundantly made clear on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center in New York was reduced to rubble; this kind of buildings are likely to become prime targets for terrorists! They cannot reasonably be constructed to withstand the impact of heavy commercial airliners. To do that, the walls would have to be a lot thicker, and the building considerably more expensive, relative to the floorspace obtained. But similar attacks against lower buildings, spread over a larger area, can never have this kind of destructive impact. And particularly not if built-up urban areas are split up by parks and recreational areas. That´s the opportunity that automatic beam traffic system offers city planners! (photo below, by Reuters; from the collapse of World Trade Center in New York, Sept. 11, 2001.) | |
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Both existing high-rises and single-house suburbs could equally well be supplied with quick and efficient direct traffic to work sites, colleges and other educational institutions as well as public service facilities within a large area. In such a nodal structure, the beam traffic would provide the same amount of transportation work as about 10 times the number of private motor vehicles, because the private cars are so poorly used. Adapting the existing parts of the urban area to the beam traffic could take longer time. But the beams could be introduced step-by-step, gradually improving the city environment as the motor vehicles disappear. City planners ought to produce a long-range strategy, keeping the local Agenda 21- resolution in mind. They would then see how neatly the beam traffic network would fit into such a strategy.
 The illustration at right shows what it could look like along a couple of city blocks. The yellow rectangles are the FLYWAY® cubicles. It might seem awkward to have them placed in the middle of the street, but one should then remember that the purpose of the beams are to replace practically all private motor vehicles in those streets where the beams are erected, so the traffic in the streets should be just a fraction of what it used to be. An alternative is, of course, to erect the beams along the sidewalks. |
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Yet, apart from being unhealthy, these cities also deprive people of much of what they want; greenery, closeness to nature and an opportunity to grow own vegetables when other sources of income fails. Cities need to be interlaced with greenery and room for private plots in order to be livable. Beam traffic systems promote this kind of city as well, by making it easier to turn an urban area into a cluster of nodal cities, with good communications inbetween. |
The Japanese have long been considered good city planners. After the big Tokyo earthquake in 1923, after the bombings during World War II, and again after the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, the Japanese city planners used these opportunities to improve upon their cities. They:
The reconstruction of Nagoya after the second world war is a good example of this. Some streets were broadened to 100 meters across, other streets at regular intervals, were broadened to 50 meters. Old industries along waterfronts were expropriated and torn down, giving the public access to the shores, etc. Even though Japan is cramped for living space, the need for a good city environment was considered important enough to sacrifice som land. |
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Edited article, originally by Wendell Cox. Stockholm and Los Angeles density and auto competitiveness.
Used abbreviations: CBD = central business district (e.i. downtown) GDP = gross domestic product.
Of course, high population density helps make service design more economical by making it possible with a given amount of money to provide more auto competitive service, all things being equal. But, rule number 1 is that there is no getting around the fact that there must exist a public transit service that can compete with the auto. Now to a few things that may help account for the differences between Stockholm and LA.
Alain Bertaud and Lee Schipper might be on to something on the urban form of Stockholm. Stockholm is largely a corridor-based urban area, with important geographical and topographical barriers defining the corridors. There is less opportunity to travel suburb to suburb there than in LA, largely due to these barriers. Geographical barriers play a big role in transit market share elsewhere as well. One wonders, for example, whether Manhattan's high transit market share would be similar if there were neither an East River nor a Hudson (West) River, and a grid network of boulevards and streets, unimpeded, approached the borough from both sides. Would Toronto's market share be so high, if a plain stretched across to New York instead of Lake Ontario? Maybe, and maybe not. Geographical impediments help to make public transit systems more competitive, by restricting vehicle flow to or through areas.There are barriers in Los Angeles, but there are also broad expanses of unimpeded geography. |
Alain Bertaud also rightly raises the issue of monocentricity. Stockholm, according to the 1990 data, had a CBD market share of 20-25 percent. Los Angeles has perhaps 3 percent. This takes us back to auto competitiveness, Auto competitiveness, in most areas, is a monocentric concept. In the United States. Only Minneapolis-St. Paul and New York, have metropolitan transit systems that provide auto competitive service in any large amount to more than one center (NY has Manhattan, Brooklyn and Newark). It also helps that the high-density 4 boroughs of New York City have very high levels of service that result in auto competitive service to a lot of other locations, as is also the case in places like London, Paris and Tokyo. One might argue that Sydney (in Australia) has a polycentric system, with auto competitive service to downtown (and adjacent North Sydney) and the high levels of bus service that converge on Parramatta. But this may be nothing more than an accident of regulatory history. But in LA, no rapid bus or rail services converge from every sector on the large centers like the Airport area, Century City, downtown Long Beach, Newport Beach, the Chatsworth high tech center or the host of other subsidiary centers. The same is true of the I-287 corridor in NY, the Schaumburg area of Chicago, Denver Tech Center, etc. Some of these centers have employment levels competitive with CBDs (Tech Center figures now appear to be larger than the Stockholm CBD). Similarly, while I have not studied the route map carefully, I suspect that the Arlanda high tech corridor on the way to Stockholm airport is not served by auto competitive service from the northernwestern suburbs, much less the more remote northeastern, southern or eastern suburbs or perhaps even the central city itself. Some work was done some years ago in the US that found a very strong relationship between CBD employment size and transit ridership. CBD employment is an important driver, since, at least in the new world, little auto competitive service is provided to elsewhere. Also, a quick re-review of the seminal Puskarev-Zupan-Cumella work leads to the impression that they were concerned, almost exclusively, with transit service to or within CBDs. |
It appears that LA metropolitan area has a GDP per head (1998 PPP) 15 percent above that of Stockholm. But this is misleading, because the distribution of income is probably less equal in Los Angeles, with its large number of recent immigrants from Mexico, elsewhere in Latin America and southeast Asia. That means that cars are available to a larger percentage of people than if income were more equally distributed (LA is actually a fairly low income metroplitan area for the US. San Francisco's GDP per head is probably the highest in the world, 60 percent above Stockholm's). Further, as Peter Hall has pointed out, the Stockholm housing estates, with their especially effective auto competitive service to the CBD, are often populated by lower income people. Suburbs like Tensta, Rinkeby and Fittja, for example, have high immigrant and low income populations. Frankly, Rinkeby can easily remind one of a high rise Chicago housing project. This concentration of low income, transit dependent people along the high capacity transit corridors probably helps make transit market share higher. But, as people become more affluent, all things being equal, they are more likely to buy cars. This means they can get to work and other destinations more quickly than on most transit services. Finally, the existence of auto competitive service probably reduces the incentive for buying automobiles, which is perhaps so obvious that it needn't be stated.
Americans do not drive cars to work because they love them. They drive cars to work because there is no alternative. Give them an alternative and they will choose transit in quite remarkable numbers. The problem is that jobs and trip destinations are scattered throughout the urban region, and auto competitive service is not available. There is no change in culture that is going to attract large numbers of people who work in Century City, Tysons Corner, Tech Center, the Arlanda corridor, or Missassauga to abandon their automobiles for transit service that takes twice as long as driving, and requires them to be exposed for 15 to 30 minutes to the elements of weather as they wait to transfer between vehicles. Culture has historical importance, which perhaps increases the threshold of time people are willing to spend on transit in relation to automobile travel. But history is about the past, not the future. It simply cannot be recreated in reality.
The commercial, warehousing and industrial sprawl along the E6/E20 in Goteborg (Sweden) or in the suburbs of Copenhagen (Denmark) look little different than the sprawling commercial landscape one views along I-405 in the Orange County area of Los Angeles, or along the 16 lane McDonald Cartier Freeway in the Toronto area. And, given the importance of employment spatial arrangements to the provision of auto competitive transit service, this is probably a more important an impediment than residential densities. |
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Introducing a network into an existing city environment is a challenging task!We have drafted some schematical city networks as suggestions how to solve specific problems. | |
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| Copyright © 2004, SwedeTrack System. | Last Updated: 2007-01-17 |
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eople are drawn to the cities mainly because of work opportunities and hope of a better life. In poor countries, cities are exploding with people coming in from the counryside, because agriculture can no longer sustain them. They prefer an often dismal existence in the city rather than going back to the countryside.
n 1990, Los Angeles urbanized area population had approximately 11 million people. LA population density are high for new world urban
areas. Based upon 1990 and 1991 census data, LA had the largest area of more than 40/ha density in the high income new world. This vast area of more than 800 km2 was somewhat larger than the area of similar density in New York, and much larger than the area of similar density in the only other urban area that comes close to this, Toronto. If there is a case that demonstrates that density in and of itself is of little account, this is it.