50 acres and a car?

Manifest Destiny: Car ownership in North America

Talking about transportation and land use as if they are separate concerns is not at all unusual, but it is misguided if not harmful. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin.

Widespread personal automobile use is a fairly recent phenomenon in urban history, having only become a major concern in the last 50 years or so. That means if we want to understand how human settlements work without cars, we have plenty of examples both in low car-ownership countries and our own recent history.

For universal car ownership to work there had to be two pre-conditions: first, large amounts of available space—and most of that at low or no cost; and second, plenty of cheap, dense, portable energy. In North America there was a lot of oil—and a lot of land that had been simply taken from its occupants without any compensation. Australia also had the land and could afford to buy the cheap oil from elsewhere. But few other countries had quite the same combination, so low-density suburban development, which we now regard as normal is in fact peculiar to these countries.
 

Most of Europe did not have cheap oil—and it certainly did not have lots of low cost land. So even though car ownership rates in those countries are relatively high by world standards, urban areas were not allowed to spread out in quite the same way they have here. It is also very noticeable how much bigger the cars in North America (and Australia) are compared to those in Europe or Japan.

If wherever you go you insist on bringing a large piece of machinery with you—capable not just of moving you safely at very high speeds but also several other people and a significant percentage of their worldly goods—then you will need a lot of space, not just to move but also to park. A four-lane street the length of a city block could be filled with 50 people and their cars—or that same number of people could all get on one bus and find a seat, and leave a lot more space for other activities.

The reason we have recently become concerned about “EcoDensity”—a term likely coined as a political marketing ploy but means, basically, good urban planning in general—is the realisation that not only will there not be cheap oil again, but in this region we cannot afford to behave as though urban development can continue to spread out.

In fact, in 1995, we adopted, regionally, a policy to build a compact urban region with complete communities to protect the “green zone” (basically the watersheds, farm land and parks). We were also supposed to “increase transportation choice,” but those weasel words let us down. It turned out that our commitment to “choice” meant that most of us wanted to keep on driving—which, in fact, is what happened. Transit share of all trips remains at around 11 percent, exactly what it was before we adopted those plans. And out in the suburbs, places like Surrey have a transit share of around 4 percent.


 

This is the first a series of blog posts about urban planning, density and transportation by blogger Stephen Rees for Granville Online.

Read more posts in this series.