Peak Oil News and Message Boards

http://carfree.com/
There are 6 "lobes" each with it's own metro rail line, shown as a black line. There are 3 transfer points in the center.

Each small circle in the pic represents a "district" which is like a city neighborhood.
Each district is made up of a collection of city blocks.
No two points in the city are more than 35 minutes apart (door to door) and the trains run every 4 minutes.
//
Is this a hippie drug induce ecotopia fantasy?
A communist's dream come true to create a centralized "planned" city.
Or will the "free market" deliver such a design to the masses who will no longer be able to afford a car in the future?

I have no way of knowing whether this is a viable solution or not - but I do like approaches that address consumption, rather than the hunt for pie-in-the-sky alternative energy. Why waste our opportunity looking for alternative energy, when we could be building alternative mass transit? Don't hunt for biofuels - get rid of the damn cars!

That said, trains every four minutes might be a bit of overkill. Powerdown will likely involve some personal inconvenience - we may have to settle for trains every four hours, or eventually, even four days...

A train every four days?? I would kind of like to have at least one to go to work on and another eight hours later to go home on. But every four minutes??? how long to stop a train unload and load? Traffic control at the three center intersections would be a nightmare. I assume each train has to stop at two of the center stops on each pass through so passengers can make changes. No scale on drawing but would assume that a train stopped on a dot dosn't extend outside the dot otherwise train wrecks a certainty.-)
If each dot is a station say a mile apart and the train stops at every station every trip, then passengers will spend there lives sitting on a stopped train while it takes on or unloads passengers. Ever ride a greyhound bus on a non express route??

vtsnowedin wrote:A train every four days?? I would kind of like to have at least one to go to work on and another eight hours later to go home on. But every four minutes??? how long to stop a train unload and load? Traffic control at the three center intersections would be a nightmare.

I think the author's intention was to propose a system that was so overwhelmingly convenient that it would be a "no-brainer".
If the train runs every 4 minutes even people in Southern California would give up their cars.

There are many things I don't like about this design, one glaring "problem" is it is inherently "socialistic". EVERYBODY from the rich to the poor would have equal access to a train system that runs every 4 minutes and can take people anywhere in the city within 35 minutes. Can we say UNREALISTIC! I am dead certain this is not how PO will play out.
Rich people will naturally use their wealth to pay for superior services while the poor inherently must live an inconvenient life. That's why it's called being "poor". If poor people could live an equally convenient life as the rich then hell I think we all wouldn't mind being poor if that makes any sense.

I think there will be carfree cities in the future. But it will not have a "socialistic" transportation system.
//
I think the author is trying to propose a grade separated rail system like what you would see in a really major city like New York. The trains would never meet at an intersection like cars on a regular surface road but instead one train rout would go over another like cars on a freeway interchange.

cube wrote:

There are many things I don't like about this design, one glaring "problem" is it is inherently "socialistic". EVERYBODY from the rich to the poor would have equal access to a train system that runs every 4 minutes and can take people anywhere in the city within 35 minutes. Can we say UNREALISTIC! I am dead certain this is not how PO will play out.
Rich people will naturally use their wealth to pay for superior services while the poor inherently must live an inconvenient life. That's why it's called being "poor". If poor people could live an equally convenient life as the rich then hell I think we all wouldn't mind being poor if that makes any sense.

I think there will be carfree cities in the future. But it will not have a "socialistic" transportation system.

Come on, cube. That's a little dramatic. There are at least a dozen American cities with good mass transit systems. DC for example has Metro which can deliver passengers from the poorest areas to the most exclusive in minutes. And DC is anything but socialistic.

Having said that, when PO hits hard, I doubt we'll have the energy and financial resources to build any big mass transit systems as proposed in the OP anywhere that doesn't have them already.

Duende wrote:...
Come on, cube. That's a little dramatic. There are at least a dozen American cities with good mass transit systems. DC for example has Metro which can deliver passengers from the poorest areas to the most exclusive in minutes. And DC is anything but socialistic.

Having said that, when PO hits hard, I doubt we'll have the energy and financial resources to build any big mass transit systems as proposed in the OP anywhere that doesn't have them already.

Perhaps you misunderstood me. I'm not saying poor people have to be totally left out.

Maybe in a future world the rich can be within 5 minutes walking distance to a train station while the poor have to walk 15 minutes.
I'm just saying it's kind of unrealistic to have EVERYBODY within a 5 minute walking distance to a train station.

[quote="I think the author is trying to propose a grade separated rail system like what you would see in a really major city like New York. The trains would never meet at an intersection like cars on a regular surface road but instead one train rout would go over another like cars on a freeway interchange.[/quote]
Grade separated crossings would of course be better and I considered that but looking at his drawing the triangle center intersection seemed to indicate that he was thinking only on one plane.
Activist keep trying to reactiveate passenger rail service from Boston to Concord NH and points north. Some of the ROW no longer has rails or ties on it just bike paths and rusting bridges. Billions to do all at once but if they start at the first station north of Boston that has no service now and build a parking lot and provide service they could wait until ridership developes and it becomes profitable before going on to the next station in turn. Rail ridership on Amtrac in the region is up more that 25 percent this year so maybe there hope.

vtsnowedin wrote:...
If each dot is a station say a mile apart and the train stops at every station every trip, then passengers will spend there lives sitting on a stopped train while it takes on or unloads passengers. Ever ride a greyhound bus on a non express route??

What you are talking about is "dwell time". The amount of time the doors stay open to load and unload passengers.

A subway train has superior dwell time compared to a bus.
If you've ever taken a subway train you'll know it does NOT waste much time sitting at a train station.
Doors open --> Doors close --> pretty damn quick!

Stopping 10 times before reaching your destination isn't that bad.
20 times and it starts to get annoying but still faster than driving during traffic.
The above map proposes squeezing 1 million people into an area of 100 sq miles, or think of a 10 mile by 10 mile square
You'll have to get accustomed to living in a smaller apartment unit that's for sure.
If people are packed that close together then it is perfectly possible to make a 35 minute trip.

cube wrote:Rich people will naturally use their wealth to pay for superior services while the poor inherently must live an inconvenient life. That's why it's called being "poor". If poor people could live an equally convenient life as the rich then hell I think we all wouldn't mind being poor if that makes any sense.

I think there will be carfree cities in the future. But it will not have a "socialistic" transportation system.

The design of the system and whether it is physically convenient to get to doesn't determine if it is socialist.

When I was taking the commuter train in and out of Paris you could buy a ticket that was first class or second class and that determined which car you could ride on (same train). As far as I could tell, the cars were all the same, only you paid more for the first class so they were less crowded and you could more likely get a seat.

BY your measure highways are very socialist since they usually cut right through the poorest neighborhoods. People have the opposite reaction to congestion pricing and high occupancy toll lanes where those that can pay, can make their life more convenient .

dinopello wrote:...
BY your measure highways are very socialist since they usually cut right through the poorest neighborhoods. People have the opposite reaction to congestion pricing and high occupancy toll lanes where those that can pay, can make their life more convenient .

Of course highways are socialistic.
No secret there.
Highways in the USA are primarily taxed through income taxes and not gasoline taxes.
Since poor people do not pay income taxes that means the rich and the middle class are basically subsidizing the poor so they too can drive on the roadways.
//
getting back to a car-free city
I think the most realistic scenario would be to modify a pre-existing city to become car free (or at least a section of it) rather than try to build from scratch.
If there is an agreement there will be at least a 50% population die-off post PO I think that kind of diminishes the market demand for a new city wouldn't you agree?

cube wrote:I think the most realistic scenario would be to modify a pre-existing city to become car free (or at least a section of it) rather than try to build from scratch.
If there is an agreement there will be at least a 50% population die-off post PO I think that kind of diminishes the market demand for a new city wouldn't you agree?

It is very realistic, you don't need a car where I live. About 20% of the population are car-free. It's not rocket science.

Die-off, die-it, whatever.

cube wrote:Is this a hippie drug induce ecotopia fantasy?
A communist's dream come true to create a centralized "planned" city.
Or will the "free market" deliver such a design to the masses who will no longer be able to afford a car in the future?

There are already similar cities in varying likeness under development now, likely a result of the efforts of J. H. Crawford, the author of the referenced website and the book, Carfree Cities.

Masdras is one such city;



Other cities exist that are predominantly carfree or substantially so, at least in sections of the city;
List of Carfree Places

A full scale carfree city would not grow from a village (unique situations like Venice aside), it would need to be designed, and implemented in a planned step-wise fashion. It is unfortunate that we are slow to take on this concept, as there are fewer city concepts that will prove as efficient. It is entirely possible, though, for a city to be converted to a carfree one.

Masdras is one such city;

I don't think anybody should be using Masdar as an example of a car-free city just yet. What's the price of gasoline in UAE? Probably less than a buck fifty a gallon. With the kind of money they got over there, $10 a gallon would barely make a dent in consumption. No matter what the higher ups say, if the rich aren't going to be allowed to drive Ferraris and Lexi through the streets, they won't bother. If the rich don't invest, it's unlikely to be built and to succeed. (Unless you can give them jetpacks)

Not to mention, it sounds like all of the pie-in-the-sky (PITS) BS combined with car-free living BS from leaderships that have been BS'ing us for years.*

*Excuse me for lumping all of the emirates together. They have a good amount of autonomy, I believe, so Abu Dhabi isn't exactly Dubai.

Edit: And it's not a city. It's a proposed city. With this kind of money they've got, it's no wonder they'll propose these types of projects. Kind of useless to have money and nothing to spend it on when you're a government. I'll bet the AD governments proposed billions of USD worth of other plans, but it's this one, because of its uniqueness, that has caught everyone's eye. That doesn't mean it will come to fruition. Unless I've missed some updates on construction being done.

A modern car-free city can work. No problem there. But the problem is not only that we're so addicted to getting in our cars, is that there are way too many of us, and most of us want the life or a rock star.