Since we are talking hypothetically...

Do you actually think cars will go away? Obviously, the overwhelming majority of the US population NEEDS a car.

Philly, and the other big cities can accept a few million new people....but how about the other hundred mil or so? Do you think we are going to rebuild the entire infrastructure of the world...or just figure out a way to make cars run on renewable fuel? The smarter/cheaper choice is clearly the latter.

Do you realize how big the auto industry is? How many millions of people it employs? In 2006, almost 70,000,000 vehicles were produced. Of that 70mil, only 15mil were passenger vehicles sold in the US. Yep, just one year. They say 300mil cars are in the US currently. Do the math...cars ain't going anywhere.

I wouldn't make a bet that cars will "go away"...but I will point out that we did rebuild the entire infrastructure of the world to accommodate them.

So it's not impossible to imagine that we might someday rebuild our infrastructure to accommodate a different form of transportation...whatever that may be.

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be aware that what the GOP says does not mean what it reads and what We perceive as to what THEY say is or isn't, is not what THEY mean. You dig....Great! (ms. e)

No shore house for you then?

A few people on PB have mentioned that no one should have cars, especially in the city -- I don't know how many city people own / rent / visit shore destinations, but it's probably a lot. Not to mention all the other things people travel to do that are not work related....

when I lived in NY, we used to rent a house in Bay Head. NJ Transit to the end of the line, walk to the house, hello weekend of sun, fun and sand...and as much booze as we wanted with no worries about DWI.

I'd be in favor of more of that and less of sitting in traffic on a hot summer afternoon.

But of course there are lots of times you need/want a car. I thought we were talking hypothetically.

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be aware that what the GOP says does not mean what it reads and what We perceive as to what THEY say is or isn't, is not what THEY mean. You dig....Great! (ms. e)

If we retained the passenger rail network Philly & South Jersey had 100 years ago I could very easily have a shore house & not need a car - I could hop a train & be down there quicker than I could drive the distance. We as a nation chose to dismantle that system, so now we're stuck.

No, of course cars won't "go away." The desire to own them might begin to atrophy once they become more of a liability than a pleasure, but I agree that the US as it's currently configured makes car ownership necessary to get most places. But that's "as currently configured."

In the course of many trips to Europe I've traveled all over, from urban areas to fairly remote country regions, and never once felt even the slightest need to rent a car. European countries have dense networks of public transit: intercity express trains; regional trains; commuter trains; subway and trolley lines; and very substantial regional bus networks for more rural areas. I would venture that it is possible to travel to more than 95 percent of the destinations in Europe, including rural ones, without needing a car. Now of course Europe is much more densely populated than the US, so I know that wouldn't work here, at least not nationally and not right now. But keep watching the density of the NE, the W Coast, the SE, build higher and higher, and perhaps someday it will make sense.

As Malloy knows, we've gone over this many times before. I just like to bang the drum a bit, get people thinking about alternative ways of living. That's what being an urbanite is all about, isn't it?

What I want to know is: What cost my neighborhood two points? (Like thunda, my address got a 98 score.)

I see the Independence project is their first outside metropolitan Philadelphia.


Actually, it's suburbia with a twist -- the projects look to me like what's known as "neotraditional" development. The term the company itself uses is "Traditional Neighborhood Development", which is another term for the same set of principles. Neotraditional developments are kissing cousins of New Urbanist developments, but they often lack the mix of uses that make for true urbanism.

Several elements distinguish "neotraditional" from "conventional" suburban development. One is a network of interconnected streets -- not necessarily a grid, but not the tree-like system of single main streets off which cul-de-sacs sprout, either; the streets in neotrad developments offer multiple paths around, and sometimes through, the subdivision. Another is more closely spaced houses, more like what you would find in what I consider the ideal community form, the traditional American Small Town. Take a look at this picture of a street in Arcadia's Woodmont development, for instance.



Note that the houses stand close to one another on smaller lots and are designed in the style of 19th-century Pennsylvania homes, with porches, even. Those are the "neotraditional" elements that distinguish this from conventional suburban developments.

It's not New Urbanism, though: You still can't walk to most essential services or shopping. Doesn't look to me like they've gone that far yet -- and that's partly because New Urbanist thinking remains a tough sell to the folks in charge of municipal zoning and to local residents, who often fail to grasp how building denser urbanist projects means more open space can be preserved on the fringes.

The sort of New Sub-Urbanism that gets to me are those monocultural "Main Street at ______" developments that recreate the look of Main Street without the context in which Main Street is placed. Instead, as with Main Street at Exton, what you get is essentially a mall with no roof and a street rather than a pedestrian arcade in its middle. There's still the sea of parking; the traffic skirts the site rather than runs through it; and there's no residential component.





The car won't go away because no other form of transport offers the same combination of versatility and convenience that it does.

And throughout history, cities have been shaped by the dominant modes of transport. Had Philadelphia been built to Penn's vision of a "greene countrie towne that will always be wholesome and never burnt," the city would have looked like nothing so much as a gridded suburb, with one structure surrounded by lawns and trees on every city block. But the transport of the day made this development pattern highly impractical to say the least, so the city developed close to the Delaware, which was the main artery of commerce, and extended about as far as a person could walk in 15 minutes.

The car obliterated the requirement that things be close to one another, and Auto Age builders have exploited that. Nothing wrong with that, really; what was wrong was reshaping the land so that there was no alternative to driving, not even for short errands or things like getting to school. The reason I keep pointing you all in the direction of the Country Club Plaza in my hometown is because it represents an alternative vision of Auto Age urbanity, one we could still replicate today: convenient for cars yet highly walkable, serviceable by mass transit, and interwoven with the fabric of the city itself rather than an isolated island off the highway.

Hate to break this to you all, but European transport usage patterns are heading more in the direction of American ones than the other way around, although rail and bus transport still commands a bigger share of European travel.

In 2004, passenger cars accounted for 81.5 percent of all the surface passenger-km traveled in the EU 15. Buses (local and intercity) logged 8.4 percent of the total, intercity railways 6.2 percent, powered two-wheelers (motorcycles and motor scooters) 2.6 percent, and local rail transit (tram and metro) 1.2 percent. Those figures aren't that much different from the US modal splits, except rail has a slightly larger share of the passenger-km total.

European suburbs are more compact than their American counterparts, but there are lots of cars in them too.

I think that ultimately we will see "the attrition of cars by cities" instead of "the erosion of cities by cars" (points to the person who can tell me who framed the choice this way), but the car will prove no less "sustainable" than what preceded it, especially as alternate fuels are more widely adopted.

I think that people will, however, discover once again that urban living offers as much or as little sociability as they care to get, and that will help solidify the back-to-the-city trend.

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Sandy Smith, Exile on Market Street, Philadelphia
"Jazz and blogging are both intimate, improvisational, and individual -- but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both." --Andrew Sullivan, "Why I Blog," The Atlantic, November 2008

I agree that some form of personal transportation isn't going away. We might not have "cars" in their contemporary form forever, but we're never going to get to an all-public-transit future. Even in the pre-automobile era, trains, trams, and trolleys were supplemented by personal carriages, wagons, and even horses. People have always needed and will always need individualized ways to get around for some purposes. We just have to shift the balance somewhat back in favor of mass transit.

Thanks. I was looking for something recent, and this works. For some odd reason, people tend to fantasize that 'Europeans' don't drive... well they do. They pay 2+x more than we do for fuel as well. Crazy, eh?


Here are some 2005 numbers to stay close to the stats posted by MktStEl:
http://money.cnn.com/pf/features/lis...bal_gasprices/

NOTE: US 2005 gas prices started just under $2.00 in Jan and topped out after Katrina at just about $3.00.

Nation City Price in USD Regular/Gallon
Netherlands Amsterdam $6.48
Norway Oslo $6.27
Italy Milan $5.96
Denmark Copenhagen $5.93
Belgium Brussels $5.91
Sweden Stockholm $5.80
United Kingdom London $5.79
Germany Frankfurt $5.57
France Paris $5.54
Portugal Lisbon $5.35
Hungary Budapest $4.94
Luxembourg $4.82
Croatia Zagreb $4.81
Ireland Dublin $4.78
Switzerland Geneva $4.74
Spain Madrid $4.55
Japan Tokyo $4.24
Czech Republic Prague $4.19
Romania Bucharest $4.09
Andorra $4.08
Estonia Tallinn $3.62
Bulgaria Sofia $3.52
Brazil Brasilia $3.12
Cuba Havana $3.03
Taiwan Taipei $2.84
Lebanon Beirut $2.63
South Africa Johannesburg $2.62
Nicaragua Managua $2.61
Panama Panama City $2.19
Russia Moscow $2.10
Puerto Rico San Juan $1.74
Saudi Arabia Riyadh $0.91

Some other fun stuff:

I don't think the argument is that people who move back to the city will instantly give up their cars. It's more along the lines that their overall dependence will decrease with the availability of public transportation and amenities within walking distance. I would also argue that the cost of living in the city is considered higher only if you take into account the neighborhoods where people with money are willing to live. So once you expand that sphere and the amenities that come with it, it should probably even out. It's not like the cost of living in the Northeast or North Philly is substantially higher then Buck County (or maybe it is, does anyone have some data on this?). This is not taking into account that urban homes are typically smaller, thus requiring less energy to heat/cool.

As far as alternative fuels, I'm still on the fence. There are plenty of studies showing that fuels like ethanol do more damage to the environment and require more energy to produce, then any benefits they provide. Hydrogen, for all the billions in R&D that have been invested is still a long way off and would require further billions of investments in infrastructure. I'm big on biodiesel, since it makes use of what's already there, but is there enough of it to make a substantial impact? Probably not. Maybe electric cars are the wave of the future, but they have their own set of problems. Any mechanical engineers out there eager to set me straight?

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"What's up Pops!" - Lebron James to Bush 41.

Going back to the Brookings report that started this thread, I'd dispute one of the initial statements. It said that historically, people have looked for alternatives to walking once distances reach 1,500 feet. Graphing that on Google Maps, it seems like an extremely short distance. My former commute was a 12-15 minute walk, but that was 3,000 feet; the 1,500 mentioned in the report is less than four Philadelphia blocks. I'd say that the distance that inspires people to give up walking is probably closer to 4,500-5,000 feet.

I grew up in a "real traditional" suburb - Havertown - and that's more or less what it was like: interconnected streets, close together houses, great enough density to support several bus routes and the 100 trolley.

Every neighborhood group trying to fight a big development trots out this quote, but Penn also wanted Philadelphia to be a "thriving port city," a goal inconsistent with a green country town.

You might be able to get to the places, but it would probably be much harder to get around once there. Like others have said, Europeans drive a lot, too. It's just that they don't necessarily design their communities around highways and negate any transportation other than cars.