owning individuals have considerable disposable monetary resources, and they are not reluctant to spend money for their own convenience in mobility. All the above provides the base for drafting the specifications for an urban car—a vehicle that will not replace the regular family sedan or SUV for most households but may become the vehicle of choice for drivers who operate primarily within cities and as a replacement for one of the large vehicles of multicar families. Industry estimates indicate that under “normal” circumstances, small cars could represent only 3% of total motor vehicle sales. That is obviously not enough to have any tangible impact and, therefore, some civic and government encouragement will be necessary. The urban car should, thus, be highly maneuverable (perhaps even able to move sideways), light (less than 2,000 pounds), and short (less than 12 feet long, preferably less than 8 feet), with two seats and a luggage space for several shopping bags, powered by electricity or some other nonpolluting engine, have a low center of gravity, with visibility all around, be simple to operate, and probably have an internal speed restrictor (not above 30 miles per hour). Above all, the vehicle will have to look somewhat like an automobile, because very few people have shown any inclination to buy the microcars (or motorized tricycles, or bubble cars) that occasionally have appeared on the market. No such car exists, but there can be no doubt that any competent automotive designer can produce a working prototype. The closest example today is the SMART car (distributed by Mercedes-Benz) available in Europe and Canada, and soon in the United States as well. The basic scenario would be that an individual living and working in a dense city environment, if he or she insists on having a private car, would own such an urban vehicle and keep it in a compact neighborhood facility. If a motor trip to the outside is necessary, the traveler would drive to a peripheral garage to pick up one’s own regular automobile or rent one. Everybody Pays A myth, perpetuated through unthinking practice and ingrained habit, is that a public right of way (a city street, rural road, or highway) is a free commodity, and anybody can enter this public space and use it as he or she sees fit. Such practice perhaps can be tolerated if there are no competing demands, but even then the value and the 2005 Roma Street VIDEO ANALYSIS Andrew d’Occhio
cost of investment should be recognized. In other words, let us charge each vehicle, moving or stationary, for preempting public space that is in high demand. Without going into the legal complexities associated with this concept, the simple matter is that the ice is broken: There are no constitutional obstacles to such fees, and plenty of precedents for public controls exist. Besides all the traffic regulations and controls that constrain individual behavior, there are curbside parking fees and toll roads, bridges, and tunnels. Some decades ago, policemen gave parking tickets to all vehicles along the curbs in New York City in the middle of night about once a month because extended storage of a privately owned appliance on a public street was not permitted without a specific franchise. Many auto-restricted zones have been implemented, some with sizable entry charges (Singapore, London, Stockholm, and soon New York after a failed first try). Also, we now have various electronic and optical devices to deal with the logistics of vehicle identification and fee collection, which just a few years ago were massive obstacles. The proposal, therefore, is to institute a universal user-charge system for motor vehicles city-wide (then region-wide, and a bit later continent-wide). In its full deployment the system would record the presence of any car at any time and location, judge the level of demand in that instance and determine a corresponding fee rate, accumulate all charges for a given vehicle, and bill the owner at the end of the month. To have a car sit on a street in central Brooklyn at 2 AM may cost pennies per hour; if the same car attempts to move on Sixth Avenue near Rockefeller Center at 5 PM, a charge of $10 or more per block may be generated. Special consideration could be given to vehicles that respect community goals (are small, safe, and green), are needed for work purposes, and to owners with clean and safe records or those with low incomes but needing a car to make a living.
The system will cost money to implement and some expenditure to operate, but there are considerable benefits to be gained: (1) Continuous real-time information about traffic conditions on each major street segment would be generated, which can be passed on to travelers and network users to make their own decisions about when, where, and how they wish to move. (2) Municipal traffic managers will finally have an interactive tool to control and guide traffic operations in response to observed conditions. Signal phase adjustments, traffic diversions, dispatching of emergency crews, and other corrective actions will be possible, as needed. (3) Significant amounts of revenue income will be generated, which can be used for good purposes—the improvement of public transportation, for example. (4) There really are no other major programs left to advance as solutions to contemporary urban traffic problems. All that would be in addition to the well-known benefits that smooth and unconstrained traffic flow would generate: efficient speeds, reduced air pollution, ability for emergency and service vehicles to get through, expedited delivery operations, less road rage, space for bicycles and pedestrians, fewer collisions, etc. In other words, the city would be able to operate as it should. Interior Streets In the usual street hierarchies the lowest level facilities, providing access to buildings and properties, but not carrying much traffic, are called local streets and collectors. It would be more appropriate for the discussion here to coin the term “interior� streets to stress the concept that their purpose is to accommodate linkages and activities inside residential neighborhoods (also business and industrial districts, with some modifications). This encompasses not only movements of private vehicles and pedestrians, service vans and bicycles, baby carriages and mail deliverers, garbage trucks and fire engines, but also pipes and wires, which are placed in the same right-of-way. The street has been and could be again a social space for neighborhood activities; it is a vantage point from which the public face of private properties is seen. In ancient days a single channel carried all these functions (admittedly, not always with complete success); with industrialization it became appropriate to provide back alleys for the unsightly services; with motorization it was considered advisable to separate people as much as possible from the dangerous cars. Radburn, the town for the motor age (1929, in northern New Jersey), became
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There are, of course, still technical issues in making the overarching system work. However, all the necessary elements already exist (sensors, E-Z passes, transponders, wireless communications links), and it is safe to assume that our electronics/communications wizards can put a system together once they get the go-ahead. (Actually, they have it already conceptually; it just has to be tested in the field.) This may be accomplished by transponders sending signals to a grid of roadside receivers, by recording cars as they cross sensor lines, by having meters in each car that are triggered by external signals from specific sites, or some other method using
devices that have not yet been invented.