"...condemning their residents to car-dependent lifestyles."Just about every bit of published thinking by transport and planning organisations contains some version or other of the statement above. We are told that the car is a uniquely awful thing, that the idea of personalised and individual transport is bad, and that we should create places that don't require people to have or use a car.
The snippet above comes from a report by "Transport for New Homes" that looks at the government's plans for what it calls Garden Villages. Now I've some sympathy with criticising these mini versions of a new town because it seems an especially expensive way to deliver local and social infrastructure when all of it is already available in existing small towns and villages. But I'm not joining into the "cars are bad" message that dominates much of what passes for transport and planning thought these days.
There are, when it comes to thinking about cars, two dominant thoughts from these planners: firstly that car infrastructure creates new demand for car journeys; and secondly that car infrastructure takes up too much space. I'm quite purposely setting aside the environmental arguments since we have an established route to eliminate carbon emissions from vehicles over the next thirty years. Coupled with the continued improvement in the efficiency of existing engine technology, the car really doesn't represent a major contributor to carbon emissions over the long-term.
It's long been noted that, ceteris paribus, the creation of new road infrastructure does not, at the system level, eliminate congestion. It is strongly argued, therefore, that new roads create traffic. What is never asked is why this happens. After all, most journeys (by whatever means) are done for a purpose - to get somewhere, to visit something or someone, to deliver something. We can, therefore, assume that the new traffic on the new road represents activity that would previously have been foregone because the congested roads acted as a disincentive. Moreover, moving from congestion at a capacity of X to congestion at a capacity of 2X represents a huge contribution to the economy (on the assumption that most of the things being consumed as a result of the previously forgone journey have an economic value) not to mention people's liberty.
When people argue against new infrastructure because it would generate new traffic, they are in essence arguing against economic growth, choice and freedom. Such folk prefer to suppress activity purely on the argument that the very fact of cars on a road is a bad thing. Yet people's preferred method of travel beyond the very local (or the very distant) is to use a car. The private car provides flexibility, storage, responsiveness and, perhaps more significantly, tends to take us from where we are now directly to where we want to be at the end of the journey. The purpose of not allowing new road infrastructure is to use the suppressed demand to try and force people into using other forms of transport. Not only is this illiberal but there's very little evidence that it's stated aim of modal shift is met.
Alongside this suppression of demand and use of congestion as a lever to force modal change (without, it might be said, any appreciation of how much non-car infrastructure would be needed for this to make any difference), is the idea that cars take up too much space. Some of this is a reflection of road networks in dense urban environments, you'll all have seen the cute infographic shoing how much less space bicycles and buses use compared to the monstrous evil that is the motor car. But it's also a reflection of the familiar NIMBY arguments against development - "you're concreting over the countryside", that plaintive cry of NIMBYs opposed to roads.
The land cover atlas of the UK is produced by Sheffield University tells us that the UK's highway and rail network covers just 0.05% of the nation's land area. This is just slightly more than the area given over to fruit orchards. For a further comparison, 9% of the UK's land area is peat bog (these are very important, bigger and better carbon traps than the rainforest). We think that roads take up a lot of land because we spend a lot of time on those roads. Next time, however, you fly (assuming they've not sopped us doing that too) into the UK have a think about what you see out the window. It isn't a vista of an endless built up environment but rather one utterly dominated by open country side - 92% of the UK is not urban, industrial, highways or rail. The idea that cars take up too much land is, quite simply, an urban myth.
The anti-car ideology that dominates transport and urban planning is extremely damaging, against the economic and social interests of the population, and based on a false proposition that we can easily switch from the car to other modes of transport. This isn't to argue that we shouldn't invest in infrastructure for rail, bus, cycles and walking, but rather to suggest that our transport investments need to reflect the actual expressed preferences of the public (not from polling but from their actual daily consumption behaviour).
There are many reasons why Garden Villages are a lazy planning policy cop out but "car-dependent lifestyles" aren't one of them. Much more important is dislocation from existing social networks and the creation of new community infrastructure rather than making better use the infrastructure that's already there. By increasing the catchment of local centres (villages and small towns) we improve the sustainability of those places - sensible urban extensions inproportion to the existing community can achieve this whereas the Garden Villages envisage (even if they fail to deliver) a new centre with new social infrastructure. But attacking these developments purely on the basis that people who go to live there will prefer to use a car is wrong and perpetuates a damaging, one-eyed, public transport obsessed transport planning environment.
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