The End of the Road: How cars have shaped our lives and the future of transportation in our cities

M. R. Benodekar

The End of the Road

How cars have shaped our lives and the future of transportation in our cities.

The End of the Road

End of the Road: How cars have shaped our lives and the future of transportation in our cities. Š 2009 Mihir Benodekar 060198480 Sheffield School of Architecture University of Sheffield 2

Contents

Contents Preface: Super Dense Crush Load

5

P art 1: T he P remise

7

Freedom, Speed and the Allure of the Open Road The Rise of Car Ownership Going Against the Grain:

The car and its conflict with the urban fabric Desperate Housewives: Suburbanisation

P art 2: T he E ffects

Travelling: A necessary evil?

An Everyday Reality: Bottlenecks, congestion and gridlock ‘Greener’ Machines Waste of Space. Waste of Money Peak Oil

7 7 8 9

11

11 12 13 14 15

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The End of the Road

P art 3: T he D eveloped W orld

Drive Thru: ‘MotorCity’ The Ring-road: Scarring the city The Parking Dilemma Commuting: Hemel Hempstead or Hampstead Car Free: Does it work?

Existing Models: A modern-day utopia?

P art 4: T he F uture

Regulation and Policy When There’s a Problem, throw technology at it:

Alternative fuelled cars The Ticking Time Bomb: India and China Reserve Travel for When it is Needed

M umbai List of Illustrations Quotes Bibliography Acknowledgements

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19 22 23 24 27 29 31

33 35 39 40

43 46 47 48 51

Preface: Super Dense Crush Load

P r e fa c e : S u p e r D e n s e C r u s h L o a d

Above: Packed commuter train at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai.

Below: Rush hour traffic in Worli, Mumbai.

In the summer of 2008, I spent one month living and working in Mumbai. I was amazed by how this city continues to operate with its eternal gridlock and bursting suburban railways.

On the trains, the huge numbers of commuters that travel to the business district at the southern tip of Mumbai at peak hours generates what is known as “super dense crush load�.

These trains that are designed to carry 1200 people in reality carry up to 50001. People such as myself, who could not cope with the dramas of travelling by train, would travel by car or taxi. Journeys back from work in the evenings, which would take 40 minutes at off peak hours, would often take over 3 hours to complete between the hours of 4 and 7pm. Even with a whole raft of newly constructed flyovers, cars seemed to find ways of filling the additional road space they created.

Not only was this type of travel a waste of time, but there were also environmental consequences. Running engines were releasing carbon dioxide and other pollutants. Roads had sealed up the natural drainage systems in a city prone to flooding. Crossing the road was a dice with death. How have society and the motorcar evolved to create this scenario and what is the future for Mumbai and similar cities in the developing world as they become increasingly more affluent?

1

BBC4, Bombay Railways: Episode 1, BBC4, 5 December 2007 5

The End of the Road

“The upland air was exhilarating. The sensation of those who travelled was that of gliding through space and it was impossible to resist the instinctive tendency to sing inarticulate songs as an expression of the sheer joy of living in such surroundings.

The more one thinks of that afternoon’s drive and of the innocent pleasure resulting from it, the more plain it is what a boon the motor car used intelligently is capable of being.”

Quote: The Times 2nd September 1905, read in BBC4 documentary, “The Joy of Motoring”.

Photo: William Rose standing beside his 1906 Rose National 4 seater car, registration BD432, chauffeur at the wheel and lady in the back. 1900s.

6

Part 1: The Premise

P a rt 1: T h e P r e m i s e

F reedom , S peed

and the

A llure

of the

O pen R oad . 2

The ‘humble’ motorcar was once a novelty, and little more than a toy to be used by the elite. The passage on the page opposite speaks about the joy that people experienced from having a blast around country lanes in a machine that they were in control of. There was clearly a level of optimism surrounding the car at the begininning of the twentieth century and that it would have immeasurable positive impacts on society.

T he R ise

1920s advertisment for the mass-produced model T Ford.

of

C ar O wnership

Fordist principles were taking hold. Western populations were becoming increasingly more consumer driven. People were being drawn to suburban lifestyles resulting from the anti-urban utopian visions of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius.3 The Ford Motor Company was known for generating its own consumer base realising that ‘workers needed to earn sufficient money to be able to afford a model T Ford and also they needed to have time to enjoy it’.

Ford increased wages and reduced the length of the working

2

Tristram Hunt, The Joy of Motoring, BBC4, 18 February 2009.

Richard Rogers and Anne Power, Cities for a small country (London: Faber and Faber, 2000) 57.

3

7

The End of the Road

day solving both these ‘consumption problems’4 High wages and easily available loans allowed people to have disposable incomes and lower product costs due to mass production techniques increased people’s ability to afford. Not only did people need cars, but they also desired them. Car ownership exploded in the post war years due to the low costs of motoring created by cheap oil. Demand for vehicles was maintained through clever marketing, which heavily focussed around the modern suburban lifestyle. In England, having your own motor became as much an Englishman’s right as owning a home and by 1960 one in three households owned a car5. This unprecedented level of car ownership was not without its tribulations however. Roads were becoming ever more congested as they had not been designed for this sheer volume of traffic.

Welcome the flyover.

T he

G oing

against the

G rain :

car and its conflict with the urban fabric .

The car and the urban fabric have not had the easiest of relationships. Battles have been waged and won and scars in the urban fabric are visible from where the car has been victorious. Urban flyovers and ring-roads tore their way through many cities in the developed world, often splitting communities and townships along their way. With previous footpaths haemorrhaged, new routes consisted of the continual assent and decent of subways and footbridges creating a disincentive to walk. Flyovers were designed to by-pass and remove traffic from slow, congested areas and create reduced commuting times and costs for the motorists. These improvements allured even more people to take up driving, causing a further increase in the number of cars on the road. Not only did these cars require road space in which to travel, but they also required plenty of space to be stored when not in use. “Every car on the road needs a place where it can begin and end, and mostly just sit there: Cars spend about 95% of their time parked.”6 The urban grain has had to adapt in form to accommodate these automotive silos in addition to the infrastructures required for the running of vehicles including showrooms,

4

David C Thorns, The Transformation of Cities: Urban Theory and Urban Life (London Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) 18.

5 Tristram Hunt, The Joy of Motoring, BBC4, 18 February 2009.

6 Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us) (London: Penguin, 2008) 148 8

“When a road is once built, it is a strange thing how it collects traffic.”

Quote: Robert Louis Stevenson

Above: Proud suburbanite owner of a 1960 Ford Popular.

Below: A concrete barrier: the A57(M), Manchester.

Part 1: The Premise

garages and petrol forecourts, not to mention the non-place which is the much-loved motorway service station.

D esperate H ousewives : S uburbanisation For the past century, the process of suburbanisation has been affecting cities across the world. It originated from Britain, when the elite saw an opportunity in creating a new lifestyle for themselves away from overcrowded and polluted city centres. The lifestyle involved the idea of domesticity and the separation of functions of living from working resulting in suburbs that were purely of residential function. The decentralising urbanism of the twentieth century was catalysed by networks such as railways, metro systems, automobiles highways, telephones, the internet and other electronic means of communication. These networks allowed people to live somewhere totally different to their place of work.

In some cases the process of suburbanisation has been left unmanaged, propelled by relaxed planning laws, a strong consumer culture and policies that supported the case of the car. This has resulted in sprawl. People in sprawling and suburban neighbourhoods tend to live at very low densities at between 12 to 24 persons per hectare. 7 This is compared to up to 400 persons per hectare8 in European cities such as Barcelona. Low densities and land zoning mean that jobs, shops and services cannot be maintained locally and so people have to travel long distances to ‘commercial’ or ‘retail districts’. An American housewife speaks of the poor facilities in her suburban neighbourhood: I spent most of the day tracking down books…from the library.

They were impossible to borrow from our suburban library because it hasn’t kept pace with the growth of the community.

(When we moved out here it was more than adequate. But now that our suburb has added three new schools and enlarged another, it’s almost impossible for a youngster to borrow a book suggested at school.)9

“Just as the elevator made the skyscraper possible, so the car has enabled citizens to live away from city centres”

Lady’s Circle, September 1965

Quote: Richard Rogers, Cities for a small planet.

Top: Poster issued by the London Underground in 1934 at the height of the Metroland housing boom

7

Brian Richards, Future Transport in Cities, (London: Spon, 2001) 83-84.

Richard Rogers and Anne Power, Cities for a small country (London: Faber and Faber, 2000) 3

8

Above: High density urban grain of Barcelona.

9

Unknown Author, “One Woman’s Confession: I HATE SUBURBIA (Sep, 1965)”, Modern Mechanix, 6 January 2009 http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2009/01/06/ one-womans-confession-i-hate-suburbia/ [accessed 14 March 2009] 9

The End of the Road

The wife makes journeys, which would not be required had there been an adequate library close by. It is only possible to support such facilities locally if higher population densities are there to finance them either through tax revenues or the population’s disposable incomes. This means that maintaining local shops and services in areas with low population densities becomes either unprofitable or prohibitively expensive. People have to drive longer distances to services in suburban and sprawling locations causing obvious problems to those that do not drive such as the poor or the elderly. Public transport in areas of low population density also becomes unprofitable to run efficiently leading to the undesirable condition that ‘if you do not have wheels, you might as well have no feet’10. People become immobile without their cars and in some cities there are few reliable alternatives. It is startling to think that most suburbanites will hardly step foot into their neighbourhoods on a day to day basis, clambering into their cars in their attached garage, only stepping out once at the car park of their destination. People are confined to their antisocial boxes, where they have little or no contact with neighbours. Research in San Francisco revealed that people who lived in neighbourhoods with heavy levels of traffic, were likely to have fewer friends per capita than those that lived in areas with lighter traffic. The study implies that traffic is a contributing factor to alienation and what some call ‘suburban neurosis’.

10 Peter Woller and Joe Kerr, ed., Autopia: Cars and Culture, (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2002) 142

10

Above: Study by Donald Appleyard into the relationship between traffic and social contact. As traffic increases, social contact decreases.

Centre: The London suburb of Kenton served by two London Underground stations and frequent buses services.

Below: The car-dependent sprawling suburbs of Detroit

Part 2: The Effects

P a rt 2: T h e E f f e ct s

T ravelling : A

necessary evil ?

Our cities have developed into forms that make it necessary for most people living in them to travel and commute on a daily basis. Typical European and American citizens commute for about one and a half hours per day11 with some people travelling considerably more than this. Should we be resigned to the fact that we have to travel vast distances to go to work, school or to the shops? Travelling is wasteful, not only of time but also of resources, an argument made more poignant when considering high levels of congestion and ever-diminishing oil reserves. Although people loath spending time in traffic, surveys have shown that people like minimum commuting times of about fifteen minutes, which they refer to as quality ‘me time’12. If people are prepared to willingly spend fifteen minutes travelling by car, why can they not complete the same journey by bus, bike or foot? A further option could be to eliminate this travelling time by living closer to work or working from home so that this ‘me time’ can be spent in other, more enjoyable ways.

Top: Choosing to live in the suburbs: The Metropolitan Line taking tired commuters home.

Above: The Oyster Card makes travelling cheaper and easier for the commuter.

People’s decisions either directly or indirectly create the need to travel. People may want to travel, but on a daily basis, long commutes are tiring and incredibly wasteful of time, money

11

Winy Maas et al., FiveMinutesCity (Rotterdam: Episode Publishers, 2003) 207 Rafael Behr, “Cars? Don’t They Drive You Mad?” The Observer (London) 24 August 2008, Books 12

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The End of the Road

and resources. People may have chosen to live in a suburban or sprawling neighbourhood in which case the location of their homes may force them to commute to their place of work if it is located in the city centre for example. There is a growing trend for businesses to locate in suburbs due to the lower land costs, in which case living in suburban neighbourhoods close to them may prove beneficial. However these suburban business parks often promote the use of the car by providing free parking and not offering a public transport alternative to the site.

To reduce the need to commute, people could choose jobs that are closer to their place of residence, however this may not always be possible. Alternatively people could work from home. The advent of high-speed internet access means that large amounts of information can easily be sent between office and home alleviating the need to physically visit the office. Similarly shopping can now be done via the internet; however, one could argue that it is the goods bought on the internet that are doing the travelling rather than the person that requires them.

A n E veryday R eality : B ottlenecks ,

The M40: one of the major arterial roads serving London.

“In 1959, only 7% of the total traffic entering London was via private car. But if just 1 percent of the people taking public transportation shifted to cars, the percentage of car journeys would rise 12 percent, and the number of cars in the traffic stream would jump by 5 percent” Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us).

congestion and

gridlock

The shift from public transport to private car has created a huge logistical pressure on Britain’s road network. With people living further away from their place of work, commuting now accounts for 110 billion vehicle kilometres and has very low occupancy rates of 1.2 people per car13. The strain on the roads is most evident at the peak morning and evening rush hours, when roads are oversubscribed by millions of commuters trying to drive to and from work. Figures show that at the end of 2007 there were 34 million cars14 registered on UK roads with 75% of all households having at least one car15. With greater amounts of road space being consumed by

13 Jeremy Leggett ed., “The Oil Crunch: Securing the UK’s energy future” Peak Oil Task Force, http://peakoiltaskforce.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/oil-reportfinal.pdf [accessed 5 April 2009] 32 14 Department for Transport, “Transport statistics Great Britain 2008,” Department for Transport, 2008 http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/statistics/datatablespublications/ tsgb/2008edition/sectionninevehicles.pdf [accessed 17 March 2009] 15 David Milward, “British car ownership increases,” Telegraph, 28 August 2008 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2639887/British-car-ownershipincreases.html, [accessed 17 March 2009]

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Bus lane in Manchester’s Northern Quarter causing tailbacks.

Part 2: The Effects

parked cars, the road space reserved for the flow of traffic is constantly reducing making it a contributor to greater levels of congestion. Without increasing road capacity, the exponential nature of congestion due to constant rises in car ownership could see many cities experiencing states of gridlock such as that seen in Mumbai. Congestion and gridlock cost the nation through delays and loss of earnings. Public transport such as bus services that use the same road infrastructure become less appealing to use as they are also subject to those same delays.

In addition congestion and gridlock result in a huge waste of energy and generate pollution through engines that are left running.

Congestion is also the result of local authority policies on transport and traffic calming. Initiatives such as reducing the number of lanes of a carriage way for dedicated bus and cycle lanes, creating new traffic islands, introducing speed bumps and traffic lights timed to penalise the private motorist all contribute to congestion. This means that even if the number of motorists was to remain the same, the level of congestion would still rise due to the reduced quantity of road space and lower travelling speeds. Greater levels of pollution are created by traffic calming, both from the increased congestion and also from vehicles having to slow down and accelerate more frequently. This somewhat negates the constant engine efficiency improvements being carried out by motor vehicle manufacturers.

‘G reener ’ M achines “It offers 67.3mpg on the combined cycle and open road returns of up to 90mpg, along with CO2 emissions of 111g/km.”

Quote: Dan Strong, “Here comes the 500,” Auto Express, 4 July 2007.

Photos: The new Fiat 500 1.3 Multijet Diesel is one of the most efficient cars on the road today but it still produces similar polutants to the old Fiat 500 albeit less of them.

The majority of cars still run on fossil fuels, the combustion of which generates the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide amongst a whole raft of other toxic waste. Although vehicles are twice as efficient as they were twenty years ago, they still produce the same toxic emissions albeit less of them. Due to people being more reliant on motor vehicles as a result of sprawl and decentralisation, there are fifty percent more vehicles on Brit-

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The End of the Road

ain’s roads compared with 1989 which are covering a higher number of miles and travelling at much lower (and therefore less efficient) urban speeds. That said, one could argue that overall emissions due to motor vehicles could be much higher.

There are many more diesel vehicles on the road today than there were twenty years ago. Although diesel engines use less fuel when compared to their petrol counterparts, the waste produced from combustion is known to contain higher levels of soot and particulates which have been linked to breathing difficulties and cancer. Noise is another pollutant both from tyres and engines. Advances are always being made into quieter engines, road surfaces and tyres, but the relative reductions in traffic noise are miniscule16 and it continues to make the lives of people living along main roads a misery. Pollution and noise from vehicular transport is major reason for people choosing to live in sprawling suburbs as opposed to dense city locations.

One must not forget that car manufacture itself consumes a high level of resources and energy due to the extraction and smelting of metal ores, the extensive use of plastics and glass as well as the energy intensive production process involving panel formation and welding. The lower cost of new cars combined with lower used car values means cars are becoming obsolete more quickly than ever before. There is now stringent legislation in place, which dictates the procedure of dismantling and recycling cars when they come to the end of their useful lives. But even with this in place there are still certain parts which cannot be recycled such as some plastics, tyres, batteries and laminated glass. There has also been a rise in the number or cars being dumped due to the high costs associated with processing end of life vehicles.

W aste

of space .

W aste

of

M oney

The car as a means of transport compared to other modes is very space intensive. Where a single lane of traffic can carry only 2000 cars per hour under ideal circumstances, a rail line can manage up to 20 times as many people over land before any allowances have been made for parking. 17 To cater for

16 L.C. den Boer and A. Schroten, Traffic Noise Reduction In Europe (Netherlands: C E Delft, 2007) 29 17 J.H. Crawford, Carfree Cities (Utrecht: International Books, 2002) 76

14

Fast train running alsongside the M1, Northamptonshire. The railway requires significantly less space than the road.

Part 2: The Effects

demand, busy high speed motorways such as the M1 are now up to ten lanes wide and require vast areas of land for sweeping on and off ramps at junctions. Railways cost considerably more to build than the average of £18 million per mile18 for motorways but it could be argued that their higher capacity and benefits in terms of safety, lower carbon footprint and comfort justify the higher costs. Providing a fast and efficient road network around a city such as London can be very difficult and expensive. Land values are very high and additional space is often not available for additional road construction, it therefore makes sense to invest in high-value but high volume mass transit systems such as the London Underground.

Above: Refuelling a car: one of many costs associated with running a motor vehicle.

Below: Car manufacturers are at the mercy of cheap oil. Things will be very different once Peak Oil has passed.

Although the cost of motoring at the point of use is low, the costs of maintaining and running a car are high. Once taxes, repairs, fuel, depreciation and insurance have been taken into account it could cost up to £600019 per year to run an average family car (based on 10,000 miles per annum). Even though fuel costs per mile remain constant, standing costs such as insurance, road tax and maintenance diminish with every mile driven. This type of pricing means that drivers are encouraged to drive higher miles as the price per mile they pay for motoring reduces the more they drive. Owners of cars will therefore be very reluctant to switch to alternative modes of transport unless the costs of motoring at the point of use are increased.

Reducing car ownership is therefore a very effective way of reducing car use.

P eak O il In 1956, oil geologist M. King Hubbert accurately predicted that oil production in the 48 lower US states would peak around 1970.

In 1974 he predicted that global production would peak around 1995.20

As a globe, we have become over reliant on oil. It is used in the production of everything from drugs and plastics to food.

18 Quentin Fottrell, “Need to know: The damage: Quentin Fottrell unearths the alarming cost of building a motorway,” Independent, 28 November 1998, http:// www.independent.co.uk/life-style/need-to-know-the-damage-quentin-fottrellunearths-the-alarming-cost-of-building-a-motorway-1187736.html [accessed 12 April 2009] 19 The AA, “Running Cost Tables: Petrol Cars,” The AA, 2008, http://www.theaa. com/allaboutcars/advice/advice_rcosts_petrol_table.jsp, [accessed 12 April 2009] 20 J.H. Crawford, Carfree Cities (Utrecht: International Books, 2002) 80

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Even if products are not directly made using oil, they are most definitely transported and distributed by means, which require oil to power them. Oil however is a finite resource. The diagram shows ‘The Petroleum Interval’, a 200-year period during which we discovered the benefits of oil and extracted and used it21. The key feature of this graph is the spike, which refers to the maximum rate of oil production; Peak Oil, after which point the rate of production reduces. Every barrel of oil you make from that moment on will be more expensive.

It will require more energy to get out of the ground and it will be a lesser quality of oil.22 As the level of oil in the fields reduces, it needs to be flushed out using gas or water and it is usually heavier and bituminous in nature. It therefore requires more processing to make it of a higher, usable quality.

This combined with the fact that there will be less and less of this precious commodity will undoubtedly lead to large hikes in the price of oil.

Until the 1980s the oil industry was able to satisfy demand by simply pumping more oil from the ground. Since then however, demand for oil has been consistently rising and the discovery of new oil reserves has been and will continue to fall23. With an ever-widening gap between new discoveries Top: Oil field lies abandoned after running dry. Scenes like this will continue to adorn the global landscape into the 21st century.

Left: Peak Oil graph: Oil production is predicted to peak in the next decade.

21 Rob Hopkins, The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience (Dartington: Green Books 2008) 20 22 Gregory Grene and Barrie Zwicker “End of Suburbia,” The Electric Wallpaper Co., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug [accessed 6 April 2009]

Jeremy Leggett ed., “The Oil Crunch: Securing the UK’s energy future” Peak Oil Task Force, http://peakoiltaskforce.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/oil-reportfinal.pdf [accessed 5 April 2009] 20 23

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Part 2: The Effects

and production, it will no longer be possible to satisfy demand. Beyond Peak Oil, supply will begin to dictate demand meaning that the prices start to rise suddenly and steeply, and countries and individuals with the remaining oil will become powerful.24 This could lead to political instability and war as people fight for the remainder of what some refer to as ‘black gold’. We will see the end of cheap oil and the lifestyles we have become accustomed to and, as a result, will be forced to move away from our carbon-rich lifestyles and return to more localised economies.

Oil will eventually cease to be cheap enough to fuel our transport and we will be forced to seek alternatives.

The recent spike in oil prices has already started to have an affect on some people’s behaviour. When oil prices rose to $150 per barrel, people were forced to change their travelling habits whether it was through the use of more efficient vehicles, using alternative modes of transport or cutting the number of journeys made. This behaviour however is very reactionary to prices and if it emerges that oil producing nations have vastly over estimated their remaining reserves, there could be a potential collapse in the supply of oil and society will be ill prepared to deal with the consequences.

In the year 2005 figures show that 98.8 percent of all energy consumed by the transport sector (in the UK) was petroleum.25 Vast changes will need to be made to our lifestyles in

a post Peak Oil society as we will no longer be able to take travelling in its current form for granted. High oil prices will render suburbs and sprawling neighbourhoods unsustainable as travelling by petroleum-powered transport in these areas will be prohibitively expensive. The price of food and other goods is also set to rise as many depend on oil for their production, transportation and distribution. Governments need to take action now so that society is prepared for this inevitability by shifting urban forms away from those dependent on travel both for humans and the goods they consume.

Rob Hopkins, The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience (Dartington: Green Books 2008) 22 25 Rob Hopkins, The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience (Dartington: Green Books 2008) 70 24

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“To drive along a typical avenue in suburban Detroit today is to view an endless array of wasted spaces: empty parking lots, lawns that no one walks upon, the desolation of the highway median strips, the dead spaces lying beneath and around entrance and exit ramps.�

Quote: John Gallagher, Shrinking Cities: Volume 1, ed. Philipp Oswalt.

Photos Above: Detroit suburb of Canton. Wide, residential roads to nowhere. Set back houses and oversized gardens separate the large houses from one another.

Below: Suburban home in lush, green surroundings.

New Jersey.

Right: Endless parking lots. This is downtown Los Angeles.

18

Part 3: The The Developed World

P a rt 3: T h e D e v e l o p e d W o rl d D rive -T hru : ‘M otor C ity ’ Some cities have been designed around the car accepting it as the major form of transport. The car makes it possible for cities to afford vast expanses of space and separation. Functions within these cities can be zoned, with aerial views clearly showing how highways roads and intersections form a tightly knit web around predetermined sectors for retail, business, leisure and residences. People no longer have to live along main roads and houses can be set back behind vast lawns.

Each house can be large and single storey, with an oversized garden and ample space either side providing separation from neighbours. What is not tangible from maps is the sense of distance and scale. Some North American cities such as Detroit, Phoenix and Los Angeles, which are designed around the car measure distances of more than 100km across resulting in impossible daily commutes from one extremity to the next. In addition, auto-centric cities need to provide roads, parking and other auto-related services. In some cases 70% of land in downtown areas has been devoted to the car.26

 J.H. Crawford, Carfree Cities (Utrecht: International Books, 2002) 78

26

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Retail districts in the majority of auto-centric cities follow similar descriptions to that of the following 1970s advert for Central Milton Keynes: “Come shopping out of the rain at Central Milton Keynes. Come shopping away from the traffic and under the trees. Where your favourite stores are all under one roof. Where the parking’s free and where there’s the biggest departments store for close on fifty miles. Central Milton Keynes shopping as it should be. Junction 14 just off the M1.”27

In most cases this type of shopping centre would form part of a suburban or out-of-town retail district within a city, however here, it forms the centre of this suburban city. The advert boasts of the shopping centre fitting into the wider network of the M1 and having the largest store in the region, implying that it expects people from a large geographic area to visit. Contrary to a local high street, potential customers and employees of the shopping centres are less likely to know each other, resulting in fewer social interactions. Shopping centres such as this have the effect of removing people from the streets. In Los Angeles, street life now occurs in privately owned shopping centres and the only people left on the streets are the poor or the homeless.28 In addition neighbour-

hoods have no human presence at ground level as residential developments dedicate their ground floors almost entirely to garages. With fewer people on the streets, they become unpoliced and begin to serve as a stage for crime and anti-social behaviour. One extreme example is an annual event which occurs in the derelict suburbs of Detroit by the name of ‘Devil’s Night’ where youths are known to set fire to properties as a celebration of Halloween.

‘Barrier effects’ are created whereby walking is considered unpleasant due to: noise, pollution, distance and fragmented pedestrian routes, as well as dangerous due to: fast-flowing traffic and undefended footpaths. People, particularly children are discouraged from walking to school, the local shops or even to meet neighbours across the street.29 As a result these adults and children are gaining less exercise from walking. In dense urban environments people walk more as amenities are close by and using a car would be less convenient. By comparison people in suburban neighbour-

Unknown Author, Central Milton Keynes Advert, http://www.youtube.com/watc h?v=lH_3Ht2pC0s&feature=related [accessed 22 March 2009] 28 J.H. Crawford, Carfree Cities (Utrecht: International Books, 2002) 43 27

20

Above: Plan of Central Milton Keynes showing ample parking and links with road networks.

Below: Firefighters frantically try to put out a Devil’s Night fire in suburban Detroit.

Part 3: The The Developed World

hoods often have no alternatives to using a car and walking is discouraged by having streets that follow a cul-de-sac format, which by their very nature do not connect places together.

Findings by Lawrence Frank of the University of British Columbia show that each additional hour spent in a car per day results in a 6% increase in the likelihood of obesity.30 With figures such as this it is no wonder that the levels of obesity amongst populations in the developed world are increasing in correlation with their consumption of the suburban, autocentric lifestyle.

Pedestrian unfriendly. Being a pedestrian at Brent Cross is not a pleasant experience. You are forced to walk through undefended space, constantly surrounded by fast-flowing, noisy and polluting traffic. The paths weave between the multi-level roads and feature ramps, stairs, loops, bridges and tunnels.

Auto-centric cities make it more costly to connect each property to the various servicing grids because they spread out detailed human-scaled neighbourhoods and replace them by ones that are of a car scale.31 Power cables and telephone lines need to be suspended on unsightly poles, as the provision of underground services would be prohibitively expensive. In some US cities, with each new band of suburban housing attempting to better the last, plot sizes have grown along with distances and providing the basic infrastructure, roads, sewers and utilities for each new suburban home requires a federal subsidy estimated at $25,000 per home.32

Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist (London: Little, Brown, 2006) 81 Paul Arendt, “Can architecture make you fat?”, The Guardian, 3 January 2007,

29 30

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2007/jan/03/architecture.communities [accessed 26 March 2009] 31 J.H. Crawford, Carfree Cities (Utrecht: International Books, 2002) 28 32 Richard Rogers and Anne Power, Cities for a small country (London: Faber and Faber, 2000) 57 21

The End of the Road

T he R ing - road : S carring

the city

The A40 Westway, an urban motorway which carries traffic into the heart of London was part of a vast array of changes, which occurred to the road networks of the city as traffic and congestion grew. These changes included overpasses, underpasses, road widening and in cases such as the A40, brand new elevated highways. The motorway may have created a benefit in terms of allowing people and goods to be transported to central London at speed but the wider lasting social impact on the communities which the road divided were not considered. The construction of the A40 severed many existing streets and created difficult pedestrian routes. It also brought with it noise and pollution which had an adverse affect on the desirability of the surrounding areas and damaged people’s health. Today the areas beneath the A40 have been reclaimed as community spaces and are used as a market, sports centre and studio units in an effort to reverse the social boundaries created by the road. Even with such initiatives however, this concrete eyesore still functions as a psychological and physical barrier within this part of London. When considering these busy roads form part of a network, we can see that they fragment cities especially in the case of pedestrians.

Birmingham also experienced this fragmentation, whereby its drive to embrace the American urban model through the use of ring roads and gyratory systems together with the construction of commercially driven developments such as the Bullring shopping centre devastated the city. The Victorian fabric was ‘carved up and replaced not by a utopia, but by a dysfunctional terrain of urban motorways, concrete underpasses and undistinguished architectural tat.’ 33 Birmingham’s

diverse immigrant communities became fragmented and isolated within a ring of decrepit and decaying inner city neighbourhoods. The ring roads created ‘concrete collars’ within the city, which could only be crossed by the use of concreteclad pedestrian underpasses, which rescinded pedestrians to the position of being the social underclass relative to the car.

This not only discouraged pedestrians, but also shoppers to the centre and by the 1980s central Birmingham was a ‘dieselchoked economic wasteland’34.

Ben Flatman, Birmingham: Shaping the City (London: RIBA Publishing, 2008) 28 Ibid.

33 34

22

“The route was marked out on the map, the way cleared, and the road built. If an end of a street or a block got in the way, it was chopped, leaving houses in some cases less than 20 feet from passing traffic, their luckless inhabitants unable to claim compensation. As for the land left derelict under the motorway, the planners had given no thought to restoring it to local use.”

Quote: Andrew Duncan, history of the Westway Development Trust, London.

Below: Reclaimed community space: Portobello Green Market and studio units below the A40 Westway, London.

Part 3: The The Developed World

Birmingham is now trying to downgrade the Inner Ring Road and introducing surface crossings in an attempt to reduce its barrier-like nature. By creating new pedestrian routes into the city, walking to the centre is now a pleasant experience and more people are leaving their cars at home. It is hoped that similar pro-pedestrian ideas will benefit walkers in London.

Currently people wishing to cross Marble Arch by foot are subjected to dark, foul-smelling subways as opposed to the wonderful sights of the city of London. It was believed pedestrian crossings would have interfered with the ‘smooth’ flow of the traffic between Bayswater, Oxford Street and Park Lane. There are now new plans to return pedestrians back to the street through the introduction of new surface crossings and turning the abandoned underpasses into galleries, bars and cafés.

Major roads in cities across the world act in a similar fashion.

They divide communities and make areas less pleasant places to be. A time when planners could build roads with little consideration for their wider impact is now over but these decisions made in the past have irreversibly changed the urban fabric both physically and socially.

T he P arking D ilemma “There was a golden age of motoring when the multistorey car park was considered a symbol of pride and progress. But car parks are fast becoming symbols of our congested cities, our heavy carbon footprint, our dependency on oil; a civilisation that once embraced the motor car as an agent of liberation now feels a little sheepish about the whole affair.”

Quote: Steve Rose, “Let’s go visit the car park!,” The Guardian, 21 November 2006.

Above: Putting pedestrians on top: Eliminate all pedestrian underpasses and replace them with surface crossings. [Architectural Review September 2007] Below: Free parking: an increasingly rare sight in Britain due to local councils increasing parking charges as a means of discouraging car use.

Over the past century our streetscape has changed beyond recognition. Streets and (car-free) parks, which once formed pleasant spaces within the urban fabric are now liberally littered with vehicles of all shapes and sizes. Houses which once would have had green frontages now have paved driveways and garages. With each car requiring several parking spaces and one hectare providing only enough space to park 400 cars35, the amount of land area taken up by motor vehicles is vast. A quick look on Google Earth reveals huge swathes of land reserved for parking around most suburban amenities.

It is believed that eight in ten cars driving through urban streets are not heading to a destination, but instead are manned by drivers roaming in search of somewhere to park36.

J.H. Crawford, Carfree Cities (Utrecht: International Books, 2002) 76 Mark Townsend, “Britain held in grip of parking hell,” The Guardian, 24 April

35 36

2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/apr/24/transport.world [accessed 26 March 2009] 23

The End of the Road

As a method of discouraging car use, some local authorities have reduced the number of car parking spaces or increased parking charges in city centres. Cars searching for the increasingly limited numbers of parking spaces have created several undesirable effects such as increased congestion, pollution and road rage. Because driving in a city has become such an unpleasant experience, many are choosing to stay away with the under provision of car parks being blamed for one of the most significant mass migrations of the 20th century: the movement of jobs, shops and housing to the suburbs.37 Instead people opt to live, visit shops and use services in suburban or out-of-town locations where plenty of free or cheap parking is available. Perversely, this measure designed to reduce car dependence and ownership could in fact be acting as a catalyst for sprawl and increased car use.

Greenwich Millennium Village has taken a different approach to curtail car dependence. Parking provisions involve storing resident’s cars in garages located at the periphery of the site, making the car a slightly less convenient form of transport. It was hoped that people would consider other forms of transport ahead of the car and that car dependency would decline over time, allowing the parking space to be taken up by live/ work units38. This parking strategy leaves the village as a

pedestrian-friendly space. ‘The footprint of this development is devoted entirely to the residents and visitors to the area’39 allowing a greater proportion of the space to be landscaped.

The reality of the scheme is that it is surrounded by dual carriageways duplicated by separate roads for buses and footpaths are segregated and feel insecure. Once the roads and separate footpaths are taken into account, the Village is in fact relatively low density and heavily car –dependent.40

37 Joe Moran, “Kerbside Control,” The Guardian, 10 April 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/apr/10/comment.transport, [accessed 26 March 2009] 38 Isabel Allen, “Village Green”, Architects’ Journal, vol. 213, no. 4 (February 2001): 32

Johannes Tovatt, “Greenwich Millennium Village”, A & U, vol. 407, no. 8 (August 2007): 74 40 Graham Towers, At home in the city : an introduction to urban housing design (Oxford : Architectural Press, Elsevier, 2005) 75 39

24

Above: Full: Free supermarket carpark, Perivale, London.

Below: Pedestianised Greenwich Millennium Village.

But where are the people?

Part 3: The The Developed World

C ommuting : H emel H empstead A large proportion of people who live in Didcot are not here during office hours, as they only moved here because house prices in London (or Reading) are so high. This has in turn pushed the price of property in Didcot to be ridiculously high for a town where you wouldn’t want to live if you had any choice in the matter.

Description of Didcot, Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran from the book Crap Towns.

Very Dense Dense Moderate Sparse

Wembley and High Wycombe

Very Dense Dense Moderate Sparse

Commuting from Wembley and High Wycombe to Central London take similar amounts of time even though High Wycombe is located three times as far away.

or

H ampstead

Greenbelt policies around cities in the UK have created higher house prices and rents in cities due to the limit of the expansion of its housing stock. In London people seeking cheaper housing close to the city are often forced to move to commuter towns. Better roads and public transport to the city catalyse the growth of these towns as commuting times are reduced.

Sometimes commuting times can be comparative to or lower than travelling within London itself. A good case in point is that a London Underground Journey from the suburb of Wembley into Central London which is a distance of 9 miles takes 27 minutes, whereas a commute to the same station from the Buckinghamshire town of High Wycombe located a distance of 30 miles away takes only 37 minutes by Chiltern Railways. ‘Improved public transport increases the alternatives to renting a place in the city. When a two-hour commute becomes a one-hour commute, and people are able to get a seat on the train instead of standing, some decide they’d rather save money and move out of central London.’41Demand for

property in commuter towns rises. The greater abundance of land surrounding commuter towns means that they are able to expand easily creating a form that is often sprawling and auto-centric. Lower population densities combined with a fluctuating day and night-time population makes it difficult to sustain local shops and services, and people have to commute large distances to amenities and places of work. The forms and locations of commuter towns encourage travel as they depend on other settlements for employment and certain services. This travel could be avoided if these new towns were planned at higher densities with a view to becoming more self-sufficient in terms of providing local amenities and jobs. Alternatively affordable housing should be constructed closer to people’s place of work within major cities.

A typical journey through Didcot could be summarised by the following: ‘M3, carpark, carpark, roundabout, carpark, roundabout, carpark, tart, roundabout M3. Takes about three hours.’42 These towns are normally built on what used to be greenfield sites. Their sprawling nature means that they are very wasteful of the land they are built on. If the growth of these towns is not carefully managed, we could stand to lose

Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist (London: Little, Brown, 2006) 18 Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran ed., Crap Towns (London: Boxtree, 2003) 112

41 42

25

The End of the Road

a large proportion of the countryside. Local authorities therefore need to carefully monitor commuting patterns and the growth of these towns and realise that the construction of faster roads and new public transport routes could create a demand for these towns to grow.

Detroit like many cities in the United States has embraced the car and the idea of commuting. Even though its population has reduced from a peak of 2 million in the 1950s to 900,000 today, the amount of land consumed by the city has increased dramatically. The affluent people have abandoned inner city Detroit in such large numbers, that it is experiencing what some call the donut effect. Wealthy residential suburbs and industrial belts made a ring of ‘fat dough’ around a void inside, which was mainly filled with hopelessness. 43 ‘White flight’ has taken hold, where wealthy, rich households have moved to the suburbs in vast numbers taking with them businesses and jobs, leaving behind the poor and the ethnic communities who are suffering unemployment, poverty and racial isolation in a decaying urban environment. ‘Many suburbanites boast of never stepping foot in Detroit for years at a time – as though the city and its suburbs were two distinct countries.’44 People have no need to commute to the city centre any more as their entire lives focus around the suburbs highlighted by new expressways which run from suburb to suburb, ignoring the old city centre45. Descriptions of modern inner city DeVery Dense troit speak of countless abandoned buildings and skyscrapers Dense some of which have stood empty for so long that matureModerate trees Sparse are growing out of them. People consider the once bustling city centre too dangerous to enter.46 The dereliction and abandonment has started to spread to the inner suburban rings, where old housing plots are being used for micro agriculture, with the existing housing shells used to store hay.47 The centre of Detroit has become the opposite of what a city should be: vibrant, busy and populated.

Detroit

Very De Dense Modera Sparse

London

Milton Keynes

Venice

Mumbai

Philipp Oswalt, ed., Shrinking Cities: Volume 1. International Research, (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005), 242 44 lbid.

45 Philipp Oswalt, ed., Shrinking Cities: Volume 1. International Research, (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005), 244 46 Rem Koolhaas et al., Mutations (Barcelona: Actar, 2001) 598 47 Rem Koolhaas et al., Mutations (Barcelona: Actar, 2001) 600 43

26

Very Dense Dense Moderate Sparse

Very Dense Dense Moderate Sparse

Urban density diagrams showing various cities from around the world. The areas of the circles correspond to the areas of the cities. Note how much larger Detroit is in comparison to Mumbai even though its contains less than one tenth of the population.

Part 3: The The Developed World

C ar F ree : D oes

it work ?

The streets echo to the sound of human sounds: footsteps, voices whistling porters, singing gondoliers. The stink, roar and danger of the car and truck traffic never inhibit street life. People dawdle without worrying about onrushing traffic. All day long people are present on the street, which serves as a stage for an endless stream of interesting and sometimes amusing episodes.48 Venice, J.H. Crawford

Above: Venice on a rainy day but no cars for people to take shelter in.

Below: Vibrant market in the walled area of Fes-alBali.

There are a few cities around the world where the car has not invaded. They have adapted in completely different ways to cities that have embraced the car. In Venice waterways combined with narrow streets have prohibited the use of cars.

There is a car park on the mainland, where cars and trucks are left after which point people and freight must continue either by boat or on foot. The above passage describes how Venice has a very vibrant and busy atmosphere, which is safe, secure and clean. People in a locality tend to know each other as do local businesses. Shops and restaurants spill out into the streets and their owners are able to cater for the needs and requirements of their customers as they frequently visit. Due to there being no cars in Venice, children are safe to play in the streets, with the majority walking to school on their own. ‘If children on the street become obnoxious, a passing adult may correct their behaviour’49 resulting in the children that grow up knowing how to behave in public; the precise opposite of auto-centric cities, where lack of contact with strangers can retard the social development of children. The scarcity of land in Venice has resulted in the city having a compact form so that ‘at a brisk walking pace’ it can be crossed in one hour.50 In Morocco the city of Fes-al-Bali has a totally car-free walled medieval centre. The reason for it remaining car-free is that the majority of its streets are impassable by motor vehicle with widths ranging from 60 centimetres to five meters. The urban density is very high at 550 inhabitants per hectare compared to only 26.5 inhabitants per hectare in Detroit. This implies that the city is very compact with the longest journey by foot taking 40 minutes. The city is busy and vibrant and streets are lined with thousands of small businesses, which thrive off the many pedestrians. Freight delivery within the city is largely by donkey, hand cart or human shoulders and

J.H. Crawford, Carfree Cities (Utrecht: International Books, 2002) 43 J.H. Crawford, Carfree Cities (Utrecht: International Books, 2002) 42 50 J.H. Crawford, Carfree Cities (Utrecht: International Books, 2002) 46 48 49

27

The End of the Road

emergency access routes have been designed into the urban fabric for ambulances and fire engines.51 Dharavi is Asia’s largest slum, located in Mumbai. High demand for land combined with a lack of planning has created a very dense urban grain with little land spared for passages of movement. A population with very low disposable incomes means people are often unable to afford motor vehicles hence creating little need for roads. Vehicular access in this sub-city is severely restricted and public transport only comes as far as the main roads around its edge. People tend to walk everywhere and goods are carried by hand or transported by hand or animal cart. There are many industries located within the bounds of this city, which are predicted to have a combined annual turnover of approximately $665 million per annum.52 These industries are mostly small scale and due to a non-reliance on road transport, they have adapted in such a way that factories which form part of a larger process tend to locate adjacent to one another. This means that the distances products need to be transported between operations are minimised.

The car-free examples that I have mentioned have particular reasons for being so; geographical, financial or historical.

In the cases of Dharavi and Fes-al-Bali, they form part of a larger, heavily car-dependent city and Venice depends on a vast network of canals to meet certain transport needs. Nonethe-less these settlements have certain qualities that make it possible to sustain a car-free lifestyle and we should learn from them. In the developed world, any street wide enough to take a car is already full of them53. Adopting a compact urban grain would result in spaces between buildings not being wasted and higher densities would mean reduced travelling distances. Streets would no longer have to be wide enough to accommodate the car and more land could be given to the pedestrian. Fewer people in cars will mean more people on streets. Local businesses would flourish as more people would be there to sustain them and the absence of cars would make the journey on foot a more pleasant experience. Public transport networks such as the waterbuses of Venice would

J.H. Crawford, “Carfree Cities: Morocco,” carfree.com, 2002, http://www.carfree. com/fes/index.html [accessed 16 March 2009]

51

Reality Tours and Travel, “Dharavi Slum Tour,” Reality Tours and Travel, 2007 http://www.realitytoursandtravel.com/slumtours.html [accessed 5 April 2009] 53 Peter Woller and Joe Kerr, ed., Autopia: Cars and Culture, (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2002) 142 52

28

Recycling cans and drums: A typical street in Dharavi which is too narrow for cars.

Part 3: The The Developed World

be required to support the travelling of greater distances, where travelling by foot would be impractical. Industry wise, we should strive to locate factories that form part of a process close to one another so that energy is not wasted in unnecessary transportation.

Valued possession: In Tokyo, you can only own a car if you have proof of owning a parking space. Those without a parking space cannot legally own a regular motor vehicle. This results in fewer vehicles on the roads.

If we are to reduce our reliance on cars, owning them needs to become an impossibility. For as long as car ownership remains cheap and road networks continue to expand, people will continue to drive. Driving will only reduce if prices are increased substantially (either by economic forces brought on

by Peak Oil or through taxation) or by changing the urban grain so that the car becomes impossible and unnecessary to run in its current form. By doing this, people and goods will be forced to complete their journeys using alternative means where feasible.

E xisting M odels : A

modern - day utopia ?

Many architects and town planners have attempted to create models to change urban forms in order to reduce our reliance on the car. The deputy prime minister of the UK in 1999 commissioned a report into how we could change and expand our cities called Towards an Urban Renaissance. The report was carried out by Lord Rogers and the Urban Task Force and ‘set out a vision of sustainable regeneration of our towns and cities through making them compact, multicentered, live/ work, socially mixed, well designed and connected , and environmentally sustainable.’ The report focussed around the need to upgrade the current urban fabric and the use of derelict and brownfield sites ahead of greenfield sites for new construction.54 The report however has been criticised by Will Alsop in his book ‘Super City’ for being unrealistic as it forces people to make huge cultural shifts changes in and attitude assuming that people would give up living in owner-occupied semidetached housing for rented apartments.55 Britain’s economy is heavily linked to the housing market with people investing a lot of their wealth in property. ‘It would effectively disen-

Richard Rogers, “Delivering the urban renaissance,” The Guardian, 21 July 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2002/jul/21/regeneration.comment [accessed 8 April 2009] 55 Will Alsop, Will Alsop’s SuperCity (Manchester: Urbis 2005) 5 54

29

The End of the Road

franchise the millions that live on rashes of housing estates on the margins of our historic town centres. These are effectively people who have opted to own, have purchased what they can afford and base their lives on the car commute.’56 Implementing the points listed in Urban Renaissance to existing cities would not only require very high levels of investment and intervention by the UK government, but also time and changes in attitude. People would need time to buy into the new ways of life proposed by the document.

Will Alsop’s own approach focuses on the idea of constructing a series of new settlements, some consisting of single buildings which would house 5000 people. These settlements would stretch from Liverpool to Hull along the M62 corridor and would link into the existing rail and motorway infrastructures. They would be of mixed use providing space for living, working and leisure and would each have their own separate character. These concepts have been criticised for being similar to the utopian ideologies, which inspired the ‘disastrous building boom in the 1960s and 70s’57 and in some cases, being impossible to deliver. Elements of his scheme are being implemented in certain areas such as Barnsley, Manchester and Liverpool.

These documents are somewhat reminiscent of the urban visions proposed by Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier at the start of the twentieth century. The report by Rogers is very detailed and outlines how the fundamentals behind a compact, well-connected city could be implemented. The fact that the report is not being fully followed by the government today perhaps shows the difficulty in retrofitting some of the concepts into existing cities. What these new visions fail to directly address is the increasingly imminent period of Peak Oil. Future models will need to realise that alternatively powered forms of motorised transport will need to be installed and that our future consumption of travel will need to be significantly curbed. Aside from the creation of more compact urban forms, the internet will be a large facilitator of this reduction in travel whereby automotive highways will be replaced by the information superhighway. People will be able to work from home or from common local office spaces,

Will Alsop, Will Alsop’s SuperCity (Manchester: Urbis 2005) 6 Matt Weaver, “Barmy or brilliant?” The Guardian, 20 January 2005, http://www.

56 57

guardian.co.uk/society/2005/jan/20/comment.urbandesign [accessed 8 April 2009] 30

Pink Rose City: Will Alsop’s vision of a future city.

Part 3: The The Developed World

as electronic working would remove the need to physically travel large distances to a place of work. The development of internet shopping could see local distribution networks set up so that goods travel shorter distances to the consumer.

This would be particularly useful in sourcing local and seasonal food. Video conferencing technology could reduce the need to have face-to-face meetings and would help people who live in more remote areas keep in touch with friends and family.

Internet revolution: Communicating by internet has become a part of everyday life. It will become a vital tool in reducing the number of miles we travel.

31

The End of the Road

Car clubs such as WhizzGo are becoming increasingly popular. Many such schemes have been rolled out in cities across the UK.

32

Part 4: The The Future

P a rt 4: T h e F u t u r e

Regulation and Policy

Cameras monitor motorists entering London’s Congestion Charge zone. The £8 fee can be paid online, by text, by phone or in certain shops. The fee must be paid by 10pm on the day travelled to avoid a fine.

Governments in all developed countries are realising the damaging effects of the car both environmentally and socially. Currently only the environmental externalities of driving a car are taxed by means such as fuel duty but social externalities such as generating a disincentive to walk are not taxed.

The use of fuel duty to reduce car usage is considered controversial as it tends to affect the poor more than the rich58 and penalises those that do not have access to alternative forms of transport. The relatively flat demand curves for petrol and diesel means for small changes in price, demand tends to remain constant. Governments use this as a tool to raise revenues at the expense of the private motorist, which is another reason for its unpopularity.

The government has recently unveiled a raft of new vehicle taxes. The new Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) bands, charge cars an annual road tax dependent on how much carbon dioxide they produce. Owners of the most polluting vehicles could be charged an annual VED of up to £550 to keep them on the road whereas the cleanest cars will be exempt from this tax.

This policy is geared more towards encouraging consumers to buy and manufacturers to produce greener vehicles and therefore does not tackle the need to reduce car usage. On

58

Andrew Leicester, “Fuel Taxation,” Institute of Fiscal Studies, June 2005, http:// www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn55.pdf [accessed 6 April 2009] 33

The End of the Road

the contrary to reducing car usage, there may be a ‘rebound effect’, where ‘more efficient passenger cars may lead to a greater disposable income leading to increased driving.’59 Schemes such as the London Congestion charge were designed specifically to reduce the number of cars on the roads of London by forcing people to make a decision about – and giving them a precise benchmark against which to measure – whether a trip is ‘worth it’60. The charge currently stands at £8 per day and is designed to make drivers avoid the congestion charging area, or to consider modes of transport other than driving. In the first three years the scheme was successful at reducing traffic congestion by 30 percent, however even though there are 100,000 fewer vehicles entering the congestion charge zone every day, the fact that they have lower average speeds means that congestion is now back to the levels it was prior to the scheme being introduced.61 Of those deterred by the charge, about 40 percent are estimated to have changed to a different mode of transport and 30 percent are estimated not to have made the trip at all.62 Although some people are choosing to use greener transport alternatives, a certain proportion are not entering London at all, resulting in a loss of trade and business. In addition, businesses which rely on deliveries into the congestion charge zone may have had to increase prices due to higher transportation costs. This may have resulted in greater numbers of people visiting businesses in suburban or out-of-town locations where goods will be cheaper and where there is ample parking.

In order to reduce our reliance on cars, the government will need to implement much tougher legislation for those who do have a good alternative to the car. People living in the city of London for example in a lot of cases have no need for the car as there is a sufficiently good public transport network but may still own one for the sake of convenience. Reduc-

59 Jeremy Leggett ed., “The Oil Crunch: Securing the UK’s energy future” Peak Oil Task Force, http://peakoiltaskforce.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/oil-reportfinal.pdf [accessed 5 April 2009] 31 60 Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us) (London: Penguin, 2008) 165 61 Dan Milmo, “Transport: London still gridlocked despite congestion charge,” The Guardian, 7 August 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/aug/07/congestioncharging.transport [accessed 6 April 2009] 62 Transport For London, “Central London Congestion Charging: Impacts monitoring Sixth Annual Report,” Transport for London, July 2008, http://www.tfl.gov.uk/ assets/downloads/sixth-annual-impacts-monitoring-report-2008-07.pdf [accessed 6 April 2009]

34

Oxford Street which lies in the heart of London’s Congestion Charge zone may be losing out places such as the newly opened Westfield Shopping Centre, which offer ample parking and easy access by car.

Part 4: The The Future

ing the number of parking spaces for residents or creating zero car new developments will mean that people have nowhere to park their vehicle and therefore will not be able to own a vehicle unless they lease a space from a third party at substantial cost. The improvement of public transport by addressing issues such as safety, cleanliness and reliability will enable public transport to be seen as ‘attractive, convenient and affordable alternative to car driving’.63 Policies should be designed to encourage car clubs by highlighting the fact that they are a much cheaper way for people to have access to a vehicle. People reduce the number of miles they drive because costs become more transparent. People choose to walk or cycle instead of use the car as they realise that they will be charged for every trip made. Cars used in this way cease to be status symbols; instead they become utilitarian instruments of a collective mobility.64 This simple method of reducing car usage could easily become a more wide-spread model and be implemented in the short term.

In the longer term, government planning policy will need to focus around the implementation of more compact urban forms which reduce our consumption of travel and provide attractive spaces in which to walk and cycle. For people who have to rely on the car alternative fuel vehicles should be considered so that we no longer have to rely on oil.

When there’s a problem, throw technology at it: Alternative fuelled cars We have built our lives around the car as we know it.

We get in, we drive as far as we want to go, we fill up, we drive some more. That is the freedom the petrol powered car gives you. If we replace it with something that goes 10 yards and takes 4 hours to bring to life, we will have gone backwards.

Top Gear’s James May presenting a film on the FCX Clarity, Honda’s first production fuel cell vehicle.

With Peak Oil looming governments and car manufacturers have tried to implement measures that will reduce our reliance on oil. Huge sums of money have been invested in alternative fuel technologies to provide for our future transportation needs. This investment does not however challenge our high consumption of travel. The main alternatives of powering vehicles being considered are biodiesel, electricity and hydrogen.

63

Jeremy Leggett ed., “The Oil Crunch: Securing the UK’s energy future” Peak Oil Task Force, http://peakoiltaskforce.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/oil-reportfinal.pdf [accessed 5 April 2009] 33 64 Will Hutton, “Detroit has run out of road. The car’s future lies in Europe,” The Guardian, 7 December 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/ dec/07/car-future-general-motors-bailout [accessed 8 April 2009] 35

The End of the Road

Biodiesel Using biodiesel to power vehicles is essentially a good idea.

The technology to make it operational already exists and broadening its use could easily be incorporated into existing infrastructure. Biodiesel removes our dependency of fossil fuels and could in theory be carbon neutral due to plants absorbing carbon dioxide whilst growing although this is not always the case. If grown locally, it could provide jobs for domestic farmers. The problem is that if biodiesel was to be used to power all vehicles in Britain, 26 million hectares of arable land would be required; Britain possesses less than 6 million hectares.65 This is not the only limitation of biodiesel.

Any land that is being used to grow biodiesel crops is not being used to grow food. There could be a real risk of food shortages as farmers opt to grow more profitable biodiesel crops in place of food.

Electricity Electric vehicles already exist and the infrastructure required for their use to grow can be easily implemented through the use of domestic electricity grids. Currently their maximum range is limited to between 100 and 200 miles, however this is sufficient for most urban commuting. The issue arises with the length of time required to charge the batteries, which in some cases can be as long as eight hours. Certain authorities are planning to introduce battery swapping services so that this problem is eliminated. So far the battery powered electric car seems like a good idea, however much of the electricity that is currently used to charge the vehicle is generated from fossil fuels and the batteries themselves are manufactured out of highly polluting chemicals, which will need to be disposed of in a controlled manner at the end of the vehicle’s life. If electricity for these vehicles was made by renewable means, this could be a favourable alternative to the petrol-powered vehicle. In addition the running costs of electric vehicles are incredibly low compared to their petrol counterparts. Companies such as Tesla, who manufacture the only electric sports car on sale today claim that the car has running costs of about

65  Rob Hopkins, The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience (Dartington: Green Books 2008) 71

36

Top: Biofuel farmer taking a rest: Vast areas of land need to be used to grow biofuel crops such as rapeseed.

Above: A new Tesla electric sports car is charged up before being delivered to a new customer. This car pushes electric technology to the limit using high performance batteries and motors. Currently only sold in California, it is due to be launched in Europe in 2010.

Part 4: The The Future

a penny per mile66 as opposed to ten pence per mile67 for a standard petrol-powered supermini.

Hydrogen Both governments and car manufacturers are investing heavily in hydrogen technology. They consider it to be the saviour of the future motor car. There are several weaknesses with this technology however, one of which is that hydrogen is an energy carrier and not an energy source. Hydrogen needs to be manufactured by passing electricity through water molecules splitting them into hydrogen and oxygen. This process requires vast amounts of energy. It is predicted that running all the UK’s cars on hydrogen would necessitate ‘67 Sizewell B nuclear power stations, a solar array covering every inch of Norfolk and Derbyshire combined, or a wind farm bigger than the entire southwest region of England’68. In addition

Above: Hydrogen filling stations are a rarity. A lot of money will need to be invested in a hydrogen infrastructure if hydrogen cars are to become a viable proposition.

Below: GM’s Chevrolet Volt and the 2010 Toyota Prius are part of a new breed of plug-in hybrids set to take us into the next decade. They need only be run on petrol if a suitable charging station is not available.

hydrogen is incredibly difficult and expensive to store and vehicles on the road today would cost in excess of £1 million to purchase. There is also the question having to develop manufacturing plants and a distribution infrastructure all of which would require colossal amounts of investment. Finally hydrogen powered vehicles area bout three to four times less efficient69 in comparison to electric vehicles which begs the question: why bother using hydrogen when we could easily use electric vehicles using electricity generated by renewable means?

Of the three technologies mentioned, running future motor vehicles on electricity is the most plausible solution. Hydrogen and Biodiesel both have too many limitations, which would either be too expensive or too difficult to resolve in the near future. Electric cars are already available today.

Cars such as the G-Wizz are commonplace in London, where moves by certain councils to offer the owners of these vehicles free parking compensated for the higher purchase costs.

Where the infrastructure for charging electric vehicles does

Tesla Motors, “Charging and Batteries,” Tesla Motors, 2009 http://www.teslamotors.com/efficiency/charging_and_batteries.php [accessed 11 April 2009]

66

67

Whatprice? “Car running cost – Annual and per mile car costs,” Whatprice?

2009, http://www.whatprice.co.uk/car/running-costs.html, [accessed 11 April 2009] 68 Rob Hopkins, The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience (Dartington: Green Books 2008) 72

Chris Paine, Who Killed the Electric Car? More4, 31 March 2009.

69

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The End of the Road

not exist, hybrid vehicles have become popular. Cars such as the Toyota Prius and the soon to be launched Chevrolet Volt offer both electric and internal combustion drive trains. Electricity is used to power these vehicles at low speeds, assisted by petrol engines at high speeds or during acceleration. The batteries are charged by the engine or by means such as regenerative braking. This technology immediately reduces our dependence on oil and lessens carbon dioxide emissions with cars such as the Prius having figures of 65.69 miles per gallon (combined cycle) and 104g/km70 respectively, which is very good for a family car.

The UK government has recently unveiled plans to offer consumers up to £500071 to purchase electric cars and wants to support schemes for cities across the country such as that proposed by London Mayor Boris Johnson, to make the capital a ‘showcase for electric car technology’72. The investment high-

lights the relative expense of purchasing this new technology in relation to the existing petrol powered motor vehicles. The idea is that the subsidy will offset the higher initial purchase costs of electric vehicles, encouraging people to buy them. In addition the government would need to support infrastructural changes such as the construction of charging stations as well as providing money for research into improving electric technology. However, investing in this technology does not address the social implications of living an auto-centric lifestyle and strives to prop up a suburban and globalised existence that is incredibly wasteful of the planet’s limited resources. Even if electric cars are green ‘at the point of use’, unless the UK government invests heavily in renewable power generation, they will still be powered by electricity generated at fossil-fuel-burning power stations. We need to aim to become less energy dependent as a society and, where it is plausible to run public transport, money should be invested in electric buses, trams and railways. Electric car technology should be reserved for plugging the gaps that public transport

Toyota, “Toyota Prius Specification,” Toyota GB, 2009, http://www. toyota.co.uk/cgi-bin/toyota/bv/generic_editorial.jsp?deepLink=PS2_ Specification_new&nodiv=TRUE&fullwidth=TRUE&edname=specShee t_PS2&carModel=Prius&imgName=bv/CarChapter/PS2/Imagery/PS2_spec. jpg&zone=Zone%20PRIUS&navRoot=toyota_1024_root [accessed 16 April 2009] 71 Alok Jha, “Labour’s £5000 sweetener to launch electric car revolution,” The Guardian, 16 April 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/16/ green-cars-transport-incentives-emissions [accessed 16 April 2009] 72 The Guardian, “Cars: Electric dreams, clunky reality,” The Guardian, 16 April 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/16/cash-for-clunkerscar-industry [accessed 16 April 2009] 70

38

Buyers of electric vehicles such as the £15,000 Reva G Wiz could qualify for a government grant of upto £5000 to help with the higher purchase costs.

Part 4: The The Future

cannot fill rather than replicating it. As India and China become increasingly more mobile, it will be important for them to plan ahead for changes that will need to occur to our transportation networks over the next century.

The Ticking Time Bomb: India and China

“The “people’s car” is also a realisation of the Tata chairman’s long-cherished dream: to put every Indian family behind a steering wheel.”

Quote: Randeep Ramesh, “India gears for mass motoring revolution with £1,260 car,” The Guardian, 10 January 2008.

Photo:The Tata Nano is the cheapest car in the world and is going to spark a motoring revolution in the developing world.

As China and India become wealthier nations, the disposable incomes of their populations are rising. In a similar fashion to what the developed world experienced during the twentieth century, higher disposable incomes result in a consumer culture. At the heart of this consumer culture is the idea of suburban living and the car. Until recently, only the rich and the elite have been able to afford cars but as they become more affordable, car ownership in these two nations will explode. Environmentalists are very scared of what effect cars such as the ultra-cheap Tata Nano are going to have on these countries. True, the Nano will increase many Indians’ mobility, their choices, their personal freedom to travel where they want and when they want – a freedom many in the west have enjoyed for decades73 but we cannot overlook

the fact that containing one third of the global population, mass car ownership in India and China could potentially be very damaging. Are we right preaching about the environmental destruction cars cause by sidestepping the potential benefits to society?

Just because we have become uncertain about technological progress, guilt-ridden about our luxuries, and cavalier about the feeling of freedom brought about by car travel, that doesn’t mean ‘Indians should stay put in their rickshaws’.74 True, cars will enable the people of these countries more freedom and their national economies may prosper as a result of increased trade and manufacture, but signs of the damage brought on by autocentric cities are already being seen in Indian and Chinese cities. Cities are being reshaped giving way to wide-flung suburbs.

In India, the government is spending £35bn75 on the building of new roads. Farmland surrounding cities is being consumed by industrial and residential developments. These two countries are unlikely to sacrifice economic growth for the implementation of

73 Brendan O’Neil, “Nano and the rise of eco-imperialism,” The Guardian, 24 March 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/24/india-tata-peoples-car [accessed 6 April 2009] 74 Ibid.

75 Randeep Ramesh, “India gears for mass motoring revolution with £1,260 car,” The Guardian, 10 January 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jan/11/india. carbonemissions [accessed 6 April 2009]

39

The End of the Road

green measures with Manmohan Singh the Indian prime minister recently saying that “The principal polluters are the United States and countries of western Europe. Per capita emissions are far ahead [of India and China]. You cannot preserve energy by perpetuating poverty in the poor nations.”76 I feel that these two nations are in a much more favourable position to those in the developed world when it comes to adapting to a car-free society. Most western cities have already embraced the car and are now having to suffer the consequences. Cities in India and China are in the midst of adjusting to the auto-centric model. It would be just as easy for them to adjust to reject the car and create clean, compact cities, with good public transport systems where the streets are busy with life and activity and surrounding countryside is preserved. If these countries embrace the car, we will see a huge strain placed on the Earth’s ecosystem, cities will become polluted and sprawling and the post Peak Oil depression will be much graver. Any efforts by the developed nations to cut carbon emissions and reduce oil dependency will be negated by increases in these two developing nations.

R eserve

travel for when it is needed

All countries will need to adapt if we are to survive as a human race. Oil reserves which fuel most of our transportation needs are running low. Alternatives will need to be found to this resource if we are to avoid collapse. People will need to change their attitude towards travel by motorised transport and only use it when necessary. Embracing car clubs would require a shift in attitude from today where the car is seen as a status symbol to the car being seen as a tool and used only in appropriate circumstances when alternatives are not available. Walking, cycling and the use of public transport as a means of moving people around cities will need to be encouraged, with cities adapting to make these modes a more attractive option. Public transport would need to be propelled by means other than the internal combustion engine with the most favourable option being electricity generated by renewable means. Motorised transport would be quieter, cleaner

Jonathan Watts and Randeep Ramesh, “Fighting for air: frontline of war on global warming,” The Guardian, 26 March 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/mar/26/globalwarming.china, [accessed 6 April 2009]

76

40

The Indian Sir Alan Sugar?: A Rolls Royce Phantom spotted on the streets of Mumbai. This car costs twice as much as it would in the UK due to high import duties.

Part 4: The The Future

Local authorities should construct pleasant and safe cycle routes such as those found in Berlin if they are going to encourage cycling.

and more sustainable. Cities would need to adopt a compact and denser form with mixed uses so that people would not be wasting time with mindless daily commuting. Suburbs with low population densities could be altered by constructing infill buildings to increase densities and then introducing mixed-uses so that neighbourhoods could be more self-sustaining. The use of electronic communication and the internet will also cut the number of unnecessary journeys. Simply working from home one day per week would cut a motorist’s annual mileage by 6%.77 Factor in advances in internet shopping and services, and the creation of local distribution networks (mentioned in part 3), the number of miles travelled by people and goods will decrease significantly. The reduced travel as a result of these measures would enable us to lead lifestyles with a lower carbon footprint, which demand the consumption of little or no oil. Superfluous road space and automotive infrastructure could be absorbed back into the urban environment and be used for new buildings, parks or urban allotments. Some of these changes would be longer term than others but if steps are not taken to alter the way we live in response to what we now know, growing populations combined with ever increasing demand for oil consumption and automobiles could lead to severe environmental and social destruction.

Car-free day in Ginza, Tokyo. Could city centres of the future be like this?

Jeremy Leggett ed., “The Oil Crunch: Securing the UK’s energy future” Peak Oil Task Force, http://peakoiltaskforce.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/oil-reportfinal.pdf [accessed 5 April 2009] 32

77

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The End of the Road

Construction workers on a break: The Bandra-Worli sealink is due to open in 2009. Motorists are expected to be charged a daily toll of Rs. 45, which is about 50 pence.

42

Mumbai

Mumbai

“The Bandra-Worli sealink, a visual treat and engineering marvel, promises to reduce travel time between Bandra and Worli to six minutes from the usual 40 minutes…”

Quote: Viju B and Chittaranjan Tembhekar, “BandraWorli sealink, still a dream drive?” Times of India, 16 February 2009 Below: Sports car showroom, Central Mumbai.

The numbers of cars on Mumbai’s streets are growing dayby-day. Speeds throughout the city are dropping as roads become ever more congested. In 2005 vehicles on India’s streets produced 219 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and it is estimated that by 2035 this figure could be as high as 1470 million tonnes78 if car travel is not controlled. A large proportion of these carbon dioxide emissions are due to the affluent people of Mumbai. They are becoming wealthier and their ability to buy into consumer lifestyles is becoming evident. The middle-classes live in suburban apartment blocks where the bottom two storeys are devoted to parking, they shop in airconditioned shopping centres, and drivers chauffeur them to work along newly constructed flyovers. With a continually rising population, Mumbai is sprawling north and eastwards consuming more and more land in an unplanned manner.

The already gridlocked streets and a lack of available land suggest that Mumbai cannot afford to support the growth of car ownership. Mumbai is built on an overcrowded peninsula and construction of newer wider roads is incredibly difficult.

This is why future flyovers such as the Bandra-Worli Sea Link are having to be built into the sea at great expense both financially and environmentally.

78

Randeep Ramesh, “India gears for mass motoring revolution with £1,260 car,” The Guardian, 10 January 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jan/11/ india.carbonemissions [accessed 6 April 2009] 43

The end of The Road

The local authorities in Mumbai will have to question the sustainability of lifestyles we have become used to in the developed world and form a city that is less dependent on energy and oil. The overstretched public transport network, which is used by 88%79 of Mumbai’s commuters, will need to be signifi cantly upgraded. It will need to be safer, cleaner (preferably electric) and of a much higher capacity. It will also need to cater for everyone from the very rich to the very poor.

More car-free areas in the city should be promoted, where car ownership is banned. Pleasant pedestrian routes and separate bicycle paths should be constructed so that people feel encouraged to walk and cycle. The service charges for suburban apartment blocks could fund electric car clubs, to provide cars for access to areas not served well by public transportation. Electronic communication nodes could be set up at various centres around the city so that people from any fi rm can ‘hot desk’ there, eliminating the need to commute across the city every morning and evening. The urban form of the city will need to be controlled. Expansion should be limited and a greenbelt around the city should be properly enforced. Any new construction should happen on brownfi eld sites within the city limits and should provide a mixture of uses at a similar high density as the rest of Mumbai. The city should set up local distribution networks of food and goods, sourcing them from within the city or close by. Distribution of goods should happen by rail, electric vehicle, cycle rickshaw or hand cart.

Finally Mumbai will need to invest heavily in renewable or nuclear energy so that it reduces its reliance on fossil fuels in addition to reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

79

MMDRA, ”Mumbai Urban Transport Project,” MMDRA, 2009, http://www.mmrdamumbai.org/projects_mutp.htm [accessed 15 April 2009]

44

Mumbai sprawl. Car-dependent suburbs have already started growing into the Indian countryside at an alarming rate.

mumbai

For this city to support the growth of a transportation network heavily dependent on oil at this stage would not be a wise move. The crisis following Peak Oil will render the network unsustainable. Private car ownership should be discouraged.

Low vehicle occupancies combined with a lack of road space and a high population will see this city in a constant state of gridlock if car ownership increases. Mumbai’s authorities will have to be intelligent and learn from the mistakes made by cities in developed nations rather than mindlessly copying their auto-centric models if this growing metropolis is to be sustainable in the future.

45

The End of the Road

L ist

I llustrations

Pg

Title

5

Mumbai traffic

7

Model T Ford Advertisment

5 6 8

Train at CST station

2009 R. Jones

Barcelona from the Sagrada Familia

10 11 11

12

12 13

2008 Mihir Benodekar

1960 Ford Popular

9

10

2008 Mihir Benodekar

Lincolnshire County Council

A57(M) Manchester

10

Source

William Rose & Rose National

8 9

c. 1920 Anon

2008 Mihir Benodekar

Metroland housing poster

1993 Dennis F. Edwards

Social interations study

1981 Donald Appleyard

Bird’s eye view: Kenton Bird’s eye view: Detroit Train approaching Baker Street

Oyster card

M40

Manchester bus lane

2007 Mihir Benodekar

2009 Microsoft Live Maps 2009 Microsoft Live Maps 2008 Mihir Benodekar Flickr: Mirka23

2007 Mihir Benodekar

2007 Mihir Benodekar

New Fiat 500

2008 Mihir Benodekar

14

M1 and the railway side-by-side

Anon

15

Nodding donkey and car badges

16

Dry oil drum

13 15 16 17

Old Fiat 500 Refueling the MG at a Swiss petrol stn.

Peak oil graphs

2004 Mihir Benodekar 2006 Mihir Benodekar Lauzan

2008 Rob Hopkins AP Images

Dry fuel pumps

2008 Daily Mail

18

Suburban home, Parsippany

2004 Mihir Benodekar

20

thecentre:MK Shopping centre plan

18 19

Satellite view: Canton, Detroit

Satellite view: Los Angeles

2009 Google Maps 2009 Google Maps

2009 thecentre:MK

20

House on fire, Detroit

21

Footbridges in Brent Cross

23

Putting pedestrians on top

2007 Architectural Review

24

Tesco at the Hoover Building

2008 Mihir Benodekar

21 22

23 24 27 25 26 28 29 30 31 32

33 34

34 36

36 37 37 37

38 39 40 41 41 42 43 44

Bird’s eye view: Brent Cross

Portobello Green Market

P Free!

Greenwich Millennium Village Venice Wembley and Milton Keynes

smugmug

2009 Microsoft Live Maps

2003 Anon

2004 Westway Development Trust

2006 Mihir Benodekar 2007 Adrian Welch

2005 Mihir Benodekar

2009 Mihir Benodekar

City Densities

2009 Mihir Benodekar

Suga san with his Nissan

2005 Mihir Benodekar

Dharavi: Street in 13th Compound

Pink Rose City Mum using Facebook

WhizzGo

Westfield Entrance

Reality Tours and Travels 2005 Will Alsop

2008 Mihir Benodekar

Anon

Congestion Charge

2008 Dustin P. Walsh

Westfield car park

2008 Parking Network

Biofuel Farmer

Anon

2009 Ciba

Tesla on Charge

2008 Daylife

2011 GM Volt

2009 Chevrolet

BP/Praxair fueling station

Toyota Prius G-Wiz on charge Tata Nano

Rolls Royce Phantom in Mumbai

2009 Hydrogen Association 2009 Toyota

2007 Car Magazine 2009 Automobile

2008 Mihir Benodekar

Biking in Belin

2007 Mihir Benodekar

Sea link workers take a break

Anon

Car-free day, Ginza

Porche Dealership, Mumbai

Panorama, Povai

Front Cvr. Car-free Day, Ginza

46

of

2005 Mihir Benodekar 2008 Mihir Benodekar

2008 Mihir Benodekar 2005 Mihir Benodekar

List of Illustrations & Quotes

Q uotes Pg

Reference

6

Tristram Hunt, The Joy of Motoring, BBC4, 18 February 2009.

9

Richard Rogers and Philip Gumuchdjian, Cities for a Small Planet, (London: Faber and Faber, 1997) 35.

8

12

13

22

23

25 35 43

Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us) (London: Penguin, 2008) 153

Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us) (London: Penguin, 2008) 167

Dan Strong, “Here Comes the 500”, Auto Express, 4 July 2007, http://www. autoexpress.co.uk/news/autoexpressnews/209301/fiat_500.html [accessed 20 March 2009]

Andrew Duncan, “Westway Development Trust History,” Westway Develop ment Trust, 2009, http://www.westway.org/about_us/history/#a, [accessed 22 March 2009] Steve Rose, “Let’s go visit the car park!” The Guardian, 21 November 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/nov/21/architecture [ac cessed 26 March 2009] Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran ed., Crap Towns (London: Boxtree, 2003) 75 James May, Top Gear: Series 12 Episode 7, BBC2, 14 December 2008

Viju B and Chittaranjan Tembhekar, “Bandra-Worli sealink, still a dream drive?” Times of India, 16 February 2009, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ articleshow/4133270.cms [accessed 12 April 2009]

47

The End of the Road

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50

Acknowledgements

A cknowledgements I would like to thank Satwinder Samra for his guidance whilst writing and researching this study. I also thank Jim Wilson for his useful feedback and my parents Rajeev and Chhaya Benodekar.

51