Yule Heibel's Library tagged cars →  View Popular, Search in Google

D'oh. Big surprise - not.
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The activity of driving to work should be better thought of as inactivity, and all that time sitting on your butt is slowly eating away at your cardiovascular health – and probably adding to your waistline.
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cars transportation health atlantic_cities

No surprise, imo:
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[Vehicular traffic] changes the way children see and experience the world by diminishing their connection to community and neighbors. A generation ago, urbanist researcher Donald Appleyard showed how heavy traffic in cities erodes human connections in neighborhoods, contributing to feelings of dissatisfaction and loneliness. Now his son, Bruce Appleyard, has been looking into how constantly being in and around cars affects children’s perception and understanding of their home territory.
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atlantic_cities children cars perception isolation

"Appleyard published his compelling research in 1981 in a book called Livable Streets. Sadly, he died the next year — struck by a speeding car in Athens, Greece — and perhaps that is why he is not better known, even among urbanists. But his findings, which have recently been replicated in the United Kingdom, should be part of any discussion about the erosion of social ties in modern society.

Appleyard did his research in San Francisco in 1969, looking at three categories of streets: light traffic (2,000 vehicles per day), medium traffic (8,000 vehicles), and heavy traffic (16,000). What he found was that residents of lightly trafficked streets had two more neighborhood friends and twice as many acquaintances as those on the heavily trafficked streets.

Residents who were interviewed by Appleyard also talked about what they saw as their home territory. On the heavily trafficked street, respondents indicated that their apartment, or perhaps their building, qualified as “home.” On the light-traffic streets, people often saw the whole block as home. They also included much more detail when asked to draw pictures of their streets."

atlantic_cities donald_appleyard traffic cars automobile socialtheory urbanism

Great article about how we went from this:
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Browse through New York Times accounts of pedestrians dying after being struck by automobiles prior to 1930, and you’ll see that in nearly every case, the driver is charged with something like “technical manslaughter.” And it wasn’t just New York. Across the country, drivers were held criminally responsible when they killed or injured people with their vehicles.
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to this: "'If you ask people today what a street is for, they will say cars,' says [Peter] Norton. 'That's practically the opposite of what they would have said 100 years ago.'"

jaywalking cars cities automobile atlantic_cities

I looked at the video included here, and I thought, "this is simultaneously retarded and brilliant." Chris Burden reminded me of Robert Moses (implied in Burden's artistic construct is an infrastructure for automated cars that can easily obliterate any neighborhood in its vicinity), and at the same time I think he's on the right track (no pun intended) in predicting the end of driver-controlled driving. So, on 2nd thought, scratch "brilliant"...
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“It’s a hopeful future,” Burden says. “Cars will have an average speed of 240 miles per hour as soon as Google gets all their cars up and running. Because the future of automobile transportation is that there won’t be drivers anymore.”
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atlantic_cities chris_burden cars infrastructure sculpture installations video

Meshes nicely with the research that shows sitting to be harmful to your health (whether in offices or in cars...)
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Cars have so altered the way cities are planned that "it's arguable that zoning is now health averse," said Larry Frank, a professor at the University of B.C.'s school of community and regional planning. One of his studies found that for every hour spent in a car, there's a six-per-cent increase in the likelihood that you'll be obese.

Old cities are pedestrianfriendly because they had to be. But the rise of mega-cities makes that impossible, unless you consider public transit to be an extension of walking. Transit riders almost invariably walk to and from their bus or train to work or home. In fact, they are nearly 3.5 times more likely than drivers to meet minimum physical activity guidelines, according to another of Frank's studies.
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vancouver walkability cities cars health walking

Fascinating post on how the "needs" of Motordom (as per Gordon Price) screw over residents/ people and nature.
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I have written previously about parking spots replacing parks and playgrounds in cities like Bangalore and Chennai. Now we learn that even houses will be demolished and river beds covered up to make parking lots. It is time we asked our government – in this case the Chennai Corporation – why parking should be given such high priority. How much more should we give up for parking?
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parking motordom cars liveability india cities urbanplanning

Based on Boston.com's photo-essay of "human landscapes in SW Florida," Kaid Benfield's blog entry notes:
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Among land use characteristics, poor street connectivity is the best predictor of a neighborhood's low rate of walking, and the second best predictor of a high rate of driving.
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The images drive (no pun intended) that point home...

suburban_style suburbia suburbs land_use automobile cars

Excellent post by Ephemeral New York on "Three ways of looking at Delancey Street," that is, 1919, 1975, and today. One of the commenters puts it best when he writes that the 2 modern pictures show "sewers for cars." (h/t @davewiner)

nyc delancey_street ephemeral_new_york traffic automobile cars urban_design

Great article about policing, police power, and street safety.
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Depending on police to solve all crime problems is equivalent to depending on emergency room doctors to be primary care doctors --- it's expensive, it's not their job, creates a culture reliant on catastrophe to get any attention, and much better if we prevent the catastrophic stuff from happening in the first place.

Crime prevention and public safety happens in many ways. "Safe streets" don't just happen because people with guns, nightsticks, menacing stares, and power trips are always threatening to beat some teenagers into submission.
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And:
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I said that "public safety" as currently configured is a "male-centric" solution for a reason.

If you take a step back, the friction you see between the police and gangs is essentially a bunch of older guys barking at young guys. Mayor Villaraigosa, Chief of Police Charlie Beck, City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana, less there's something we don't know about --- all guys. Gangleaders, gang members --- usually all guys too.

I don't notice too many women involved in these public safety conversations, unless they are UCLA Urban Planning Professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris.

Subject to more threats of attack, women, along with seniors, children, and the disabled would have a better idea of "safer streets" than males. Architect Doug Suisman once said that the best measure of a safety of a public space is to see how many females to males are in a certain area. The more females, the more successful.
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And
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Creating safer streets means lowering the speed limits on streets. When cars exceed 20 mph, the pedestrians and cyclists become uneasy. It's no wonder, because 85% of individuals will die if struck by a motorist cruising along at 40 mph.
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policing safety street_life streets los_angeles gender cars public_space

Discussion of Freiburg suburb, Vauban, and its "car-free" environment:
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Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community.
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suburbia cars green_strategies vauban germany

"Professor’s Theories Influence Cities to Reconsider Pervasive Free Parking" : on how free parking has distorted urban centers.

intransition parking cars cities urban_design surface_parking_lots

Oregon might transition away from a gas tax in 2009 and switch to a mileage tax instead.

Unfortunately, the scheme raises privacy issues/ concerns, since GPS satellite tracking systems would be used to keep track of one's mileage. Ouch.

oregon carbon_tax cars tax taxation crosscut knute_berger mileage_tax

Something to think about "out west," where existing public transit might be spotty, or where the only public transit is buses. Rail definitely makes sense for many people here. "Some cities with long-established public transit systems, like New York and Boston, have seen increases in ridership of 5 percent or more so far this year. But the biggest surges — of 10 to 15 percent or more over last year — are occurring in many metropolitan areas in the South and West where the driving culture is strongest and bus and rail lines are more limited."

transportation transit transit_oriented_development cars

- great article by Eric de Place on why so many new TH developments are so ugly. As his lede says, "How parking laws make housing expensive. And ugly."

sightline_daily seattle urban_design urbanplanning cars parking architecture

Short video clip produced by CEOs for Cities, which asks, "How much is it worth, to live two miles closer to work?" The answer(s) is (are) astonishing, when you take those 2 miles and make them cumulative, for the whole US. That said, imagine what it does mean, then, if we build cities that are walkable, that engage people in public transit, that shave those 2miles off people's commutes/ daily drives?

ceos_for_cities automobile cars driving video walkability urbanism

via CEOs for Cities, an article by Alex Steffen, which argues for dense, urban communities that will help curb (literally) car use. \n\nFrom his intro preamble: "This is a rough draft of a long essay about why I believe building compact communities should be one of America's highest environmental priorities, and why, in fact, our obsession with building greener cars may be obscuring some fundamental aspects of the problem and some of the benefits of using land-use change as a primary sustainability solution."

alex_steffen cars cities environment green_strategies sustainability urbanism worldchanging

Fascinating slide show narrated by Kevin Fry of Route 1 (which runs 2000 miles from Maine to Florida), and which is in too many places a godforsaken strip mall. Fry's argument is that these places, built for cars not people, alienate us from any kind of authentic sense of place, and in turn this alienates us from citizenship, which is (and must be) local and specific. Relates to this article: http://tinyurl.com/2hkf25 too. (Slide show link via pricetags)

alienation cars kevin_fry nyt placelessness socialcritique sprawl visual_pollution

Dutch landscape architect Adriaan Geuze's vision for T.O.'s waterfront: "The point must be that we won't have to live on the waterfront to feel at home there." In this article by Christopher Hume, some really interesting discussion (by Geuze) about cars, how they've taken over urban spaces, why all-pedestrian zones aren't necessarily a good idea ("scary at night"), and that cities today compete with one another.

cars christopher_hume development pedestrians toronto urban_parks urban_renewal waterfront

automobile cars highway_system infrastructure planning project_for_public_spaces transportation