Beyond Mobility, Island Press, December 2017
Subway systems, trams, Bus-Rapid-Transit, high-speed trains, cars – these can all play useful roles in well-designed transportation systems. But we must not forget what still is and what should remain the world’s most important transportation method: walking.
That is one of the key messages of Beyond Mobility: Planning Cities for People and Places, a survey of urban planning successes and failures around the world.
Authors Robert Cervero, Erick Guerra and Stefan Al set out a general framework for transportation planning, in which the metric of “number of cars moved per hour” is replaced by an emphasis on place-making, with intergenerational sustainability, social equity, safety, and decarbonization as essential goals. The introduction to “urban recalibration” is followed by brief case studies from dozens of cities throughout the world.
First, do no harm to pedestrians
“For all the emphasis on cars and transit, walking remains the most globally important mode of transportation,” the authors write. “Globally, almost 40 percent of all trips are made by foot, and the figure is close to 90 percent in many smaller and poorer cities.”
In the Global South as in western Europe and North America, official transportation planning is dominated by the motoring classes, to the detriment of those who want to or have no choice but to walk. But Beyond Mobility cites many reasons why building safe cities for walkers is a global issue:
“Because walking produces almost no local or global pollution, creates no traffic fatalities, costs residents only the food needed to power their legs, has proven health benefits, and requires low infrastructure investments relative to highways or transit, maintaining high walking rates is critically important in the Global South.” (Beyond Mobility, page 173)
The public health consequences of a planning preference for automobiles are especially severe in the Global South, with deaths from air pollution and traffic accidents highest among the very people who cannot themselves afford cars. Therefore a shift in transportation policy is an obvious social equity issue.
In North America, after generations in which urban residents moved away from city cores to widely spaced suburbs, the trend is now reversing. The downtown areas of many major cities are once again highly sought after by residents and would-be residents, leading to huge price premiums for central-city residential properties.
A key reason for this preference is walkability. While time spent commuting by car tends to be stressful and unsatisfying1, a new generation has discovered the physical, emotional and social benefits of routine walking to work, school, shopping and entertainment.
This urban renaissance comes with obvious problems due to gentrification. A big part of the problem is scarcity: particularly in North America, desirably walkable neighbourhoods are now rare, while most urban residents must settle for neighbourhoods where basic services are distant and transportation options are expensive in terms of money, time, and/or personal safety.
Mobility when necessary, but not necessarily mobility
Real estate ads for suburban residences frequently highlight a key selling point – “close to the expressway”. By design, employment zones and residential districts are generally far apart in the post-war North American suburb. That has led to a situation where an important attribute for a residential neighbourhood is how easy it is to get far away from that neighbourhood each morning.
It’s a daunting task to reverse that trend, to change suburban settlement patterns to the point where many residents can work, shop, go to school, visit friends or go out to eat without getting into a car or boarding a train. Yet efforts at “sprawl repair” have begun in many places. Many of these efforts are guided by the concept of “place-making”, a central idea in Beyond Mobility. The authors quote urban designer Jan Gehl: “Place-making is turning a neighborhood, town or city from a place you can’t wait to get through to one you never want to leave.”2
Suburban shopping malls and suburban office parks come in for particular scrutiny. Both facilities are typically surrounded by hectares of parking lots. In theory it should be possible to redevelop these facilities (especially the many shopping centres which already stand vacant), creating more intensive mixes of residential, employment, commercial, educational and entertainment uses. The authors note that “One of the saving graces of huge surface parking lots is they can be easily torn up and rebuilt upon.” More generally, they state that
“Fortunately, suburban landscapes are malleable and for the most part can be easily adapted, modified, and reused. … In many ways, suburbs are the low-hanging fruit in the quest to create sustainable, highly livable, and more accessible places.” (Beyond Mobility, page 89–90)
This optimism notwithstanding, examples of successful suburban reconfigurations are rare in this book. In many cases, the authors note, redevelopment of a particular shopping mall or office complex produces an attractive mini-mix of services in a compact area, but is still too distant from most services to be “the kind of neighbourhood you never want to leave”.
One redevelopment option which is conspicuous by its absence in the pages of Beyond Mobility is what we might call the Detroit option. Instead of replacing empty suburban pavement with more intensive building patterns, perhaps there are some suburban districts which should become less intensive, returning to agricultural uses which would boost the sustainability of an urban area in other important ways.
Cycling receives very little attention in the book, even though two-wheeled, human-powered vehicles are already meeting the need for medium-distance transportation in many cities, with minimal infrastructure costs, many public health benefits, and almost no disruption of the primary transportation method, walking. The chapter on autonomous vehicles is also a bit of a puzzle. Though the authors are “cautiously optimistic” that driverless cars will enable a better “balance between mobility and place”, their discussion highlights several reasons to believe this technology may result in more Vehicle Miles Traveled and a greater disconnection from the social environment.
When it comes to transformational changes to the cores of major cities, however, the book is full of inspiring examples. In cities from San Francisco to Seoul, Bogotá to Barcelona, freeways have been replaced with boulevards, intersections have been reconfigured to make passage safer and more pleasant for pedestrians, single-use office complexes have incorporated retail and affordable housing, “park-and-ride” train stations have moved closer to an ideal of “walk-and-ride” as surrounding blocks are redeveloped.
Many of these urban recalibration efforts have their own flaws and limitations, but the value of Beyond Mobility is an even-handed recognition of both successes and failures. Above all, the authors emphasize, equitable, sustainable and convivial cities can’t be created all at once:
“urban recalibration calls for a series of calculated steps aimed at a strategic longer-range vision of a city’s future, advancing principles of people-oriented development and place-making every bit as much as private car mobility, if not more. … It entails a series of 1 to 2 percent recalibration ‘victories’ – intersection by intersection, neighborhood by neighborhood — that cumulatively move beyond the historically almost singular focus on mobility, making for better communities, better environments, and better economies.” (Beyond Mobility, page 211)
Top photo: Streets of Hong Kong, China, East Asia, photo by Mstyslav Chernov, via Wikimedia Commons
NOTES
1“Behavioral research shows that out of a number of daily activities, commuting has the most negative effect on peoples’ moods.” Beyond Mobility, page 51, citing a Science article by Daniel Kahneman, “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience”, 2004.
2Beyond Mobility, page 13, citing Jan Gehl, Cities for People, Island Press, 2010.
