The Board Papers
"How Carsharing Can Reduce the ''Drive to Drive'' and Improve Walkability"
Chris Bradshaw, Ottawa Canada
Summary: The Kyoto Accord has brought a new wave of scrutiny to the private automobile. But it is focusing us on only one of the car’s impacts: emissions. The car problem, however, as walking advocates know, is much broader and more profound. What the author addresses in this paper, is how the sharing of cars, as opposed to our regime of private ownership, can achieve dramatically greater walkability by effecting changes in many areas that are usually ignored: how cars are used and how they are designed, both of which are influenced by the form of car-access. The potential of turning away from the current One-Person, One-Car Orientation (OPOCO) will evoke protestations. “People love their cars!” Since society provides shared rights-of-way but leaves car-access up to the individual, we have created a feast-or-famine proposition in which there are too many cars, the cars are poorly utilized, and they are much larger than the vast majority of trips require. In the last 15 years carsharing has joined taxis, car-rental, and ridesharing as ways to share cars: together I call them Metered Access to Shared Cars (MASC). They jointly represent a way to not only greatly reduce peak demands for both roads and parking lots – which increases sprawl – but to make the way cars are driven more pedestrian-friendly. MASC reduces OPOCO’s “drive to drive” by: a) shifting costs from fixed to variable, eliminating car-owners’ efforts to do extra driving to amortize $6000-12,000/year invariable costs, while making the whole cost of each trip more readily apparent; b) having shared cars everywhere people need to be so they don’t have to take a car around everywhere just to have one available if the need arises; and c) increasing the “fuss” of car access by requiring a short walk and some planning. MASC also reduces the amount of car – weight, power, rigidness of its shell – used for each trip by making the vehicle choice a trip-by-trip decision, rather once-every-five-year decision. MASC brings into play many driving/vehicle factors that walkability debates usually ignore, specifically the five Fs: how Frequent/Far, Fast, and “Fazed/Frantically” the vehicle is driven, and how “Fat” and “Filthy” the vehicle being driven is. The paper shows how each is reduced when MASC is used, primarily through reducing sprawl, increasing scrutiny of driver behaviour by the provider, and allowing for the introduction pedestrian-friendly neighbourhood vehicles (NVs) in place of standard highway-friendly cars. Because most MASC vehicles are equipped with GPS readers, as well as scheduling and tracking software, sharing – both consecutive and simultaneous – becomes practical. The author sees carsharing and ridesharing merging first to introduce it to suburban neighbourhoods and business parks where carsharing is non-existent and ridesharing is very limited. He offers 11 additional actions that will bring about a new form of car-access and a new environment for walking, hopefully in time to shape the form of the “automobilization” of Asia, Africa, and South America. ... More
(LTP) Local Traffic Performance design strategy and instrument.
Albert Jansen
Summary: Urban planners and traffic engineers do not always work as well together as we would like. To improve cooperation, the Local Traffic Performance (LTP) project tries to integrate the planning practices from both disciplines. LTP stimulates closer collaboration between urban and transport planners through mutual consultation and by means of mutual use of computational models. Local Traffic Performance is an instrument for smart planning of transport infrastructure, and residential and zoning plan areas. Its aim is to reduce energy use in traffic and transport. It can be deployed at a local level by municipalities. LTP can also serve to enhance traffic safety, to increase the quality of urban development and to decrease noise emissions. LTP shows the consequences of spatial policy for new housing and reconstruction developments to all involved stakeholders already during the process of decision making. In short, LTP is a methodology for smart planning processes and uses modelling as a tool. This paper describes the new instrument and its first results. Transport accounts for about 50 percent of the energy consumption of the average Dutch household. A study by Janse (1997) into the relationship between environmental planning and energy consumption in traffic and transport indicates that environmental planning considerably influences energy consumption in traffic and transport. The study shows that various planning aspects on different scale levels influence energy consumption. In Figure 1 the influence is shown as the reduction in energy use that can be achieved by dedicated policies and as increases in energy use when no clear policies are developed. ... More
(Re)Connecting land use planning and public health: supporting walkability initiatives from within a regional health authority
Sherrill Johnson, PhD, Population Health Consultant, Capital Health
Summary: Health systems everywhere are currently struggling with the burden of 21st century public health problems, most notably chronic disease and injuries. In light of growing concerns about the sustainability of the health care system, interest has been growing in exploring how different types of urban design can promote health and influence the prevention of population-level factors that contribute to disease and injury. The evidence demonstrates that there is an association between land use planning and the health of populations. The most researched area to date for connecting land use planning and public health is the impact of urban design on levels of physical activity. Low density suburban neighbourhoods contribute significantly to physical inactivity. The design of these neighbourhoods and their distance from daily destinations (groceries, services) typically requires a high degree of automobile dependence and decreases opportunities for active transportation, such as walking, cycling and use of public transit. The evidence shows that people who live in walkable communities (those that have mixed land uses, connected streets and higher population density) walk more and drive less than those who live in suburban communities. This paper highlights the links between land use planning and public health and makes the case for public health input into land use decision-making processes. ... More
(re)Presenting Suburbia: image and identity at the citys edge
Kelvin Walsh
Summary: This paper presents the changing representation of suburbs and suburban culture during the 20th century and provides a global scan of new directions in suburban development and their implications for creating walkable cities. The role of the suburb in the metropolis is not as clear as it once was. The edges between city and suburb, suburb and country, and between the core and periphery have become increasingly blurred in the polycentric city. This presentation will explore the representation of suburbs and suburbia in contemporary culture (film, literature, art) and map its changing culture. This is presented alongside the manner in which city design professionals have discussed suburbs. Weaving the two simultaneous discourses provides a deeper understanding of the suburbs, its culture and the opportunities for improving city sustainability in the broadest sense. The presentation will demonstrate the way in which identity, geography, psychology, ecology, planning, population complexity and economy contribute to the complexity that is suburbs. It is vital that, as practitioners, we understand this complexity if we are to turn the visions of a new walkable culture into practice in the suburbs. The presentation concludes with a discussion of new directions in the development of suburbs and provides a global scan of developers emerging trends including the introduction of irony in suburbia, transposing urban ideals to the suburban context, the play on nostalgia and the importance of ecology. ... More
99 percent perspiration - breeding a successful community walking for health initiative
Andrew Stuck and Pam Rouquette
Summary: Established in 1996, Salisbury's Walking Forum and its Salisbury District Walking for Health project, is one of Britain's longest running and most successful walking for health initiatives, with more than 1000 led walks having been completed. A pedestrian-friendly walking network has evolved. Innovative walking initiatives have been tried and tested - this paper will highlight the key lessons to be learnt in creating a successful community walking initiative. The Forum evolved by broadening its remit and widening its membership to include volunteers and professionals in health promotion, recreation, sport, tourism and transport, and succeeded in raising the profile of walking, evidenced by the increasing popularity of the walks themselves, achieved through the work of a volunteer champion. ... More
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