The future of automobility | Nov 7th at 5:19pm
Moderator Charles Waldheim wonders about the future of automobility, and how we will design our city after the car is gone. I must confess that I thought this was the single biggest question of this conference, the issue that defines the nature of urban development in our culture.
Surprisingly, the question has rarely come up so far in the sessions that I have attended. Perhaps it is because not many of the architects at this conference actually believe that we are going to have to live without automobility.
Stephen Kierans suggests that we are not going to get rid of cars, they may be different but without them we will not be able to get to any of the places that we built that depend on them.
Lance Hosey suggests that we think about cars because they are destroying our atmosphere but we can’t forget that we should think about how cars are destroying our cities. He actually thinks that it is crazy to that people hold up the Prius as an example of how technology will save us, when in fact the Smart Car gets better mileage with less input, less technology. It is just smaller. We don’t necessarily need fancy new technologies, just better and smarter distribution of resources. But he still thinks we are going to have cars.
Jason Bregman looks forward to the day that we have all those little cars as storage units that can become part of the national energy grid, we don’t have to get rid of cars, we just have to make them part of the system.
I frankly am a bit shocked. I would have thought that the single biggest factor affecting urban design in the age after oil is the virtual elimination of private cars, replaced by denser, walkable cities, transit and bicycles. I am a bit surprised. Are you?
Lance Hosey on automobility
Lloyd Alter has been an architect, developer, inventor, and builder of prefab housing. He now writes for TreeHugger and Planet Green, is an Associate Professor at Ryerson University teaching sustainable design, and has written for Azure and Ontario Nature magazines.
Zane Selvans in Pasadena, CA on Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 10:21pm
Oil != Cars. Ultralight plug-in biofuel-hybrid, or battery-electric, or fuel cell powered vehicles can, and will step into the void left by today’s cars after oil becomes permanently impractically expensive. If we want dense, walkable, bikable, livable cities, we can’t count on the end of the Oil Age to get us there. It only looks that way now, because we haven’t put much effort into transitioning our fleet vehicles away from oil. People cut back on driving to save money, because they don’t have many other choices. We can seize this opportunity to get transit and livable streets measures enacted, while people are open to change, but if we fail to do so, automotive technology will change, and we’ll be left with the same sprawling mess we’ve got now, only it will be immune to future large commodity price swings, making it all the harder to get rid of.
Ira Winn in san luis obispo, CA on Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 11:48pm
If the U.S. government would notify automakers that starting next year it will buy ONLY fleet or individual government vehicles that get at least 35 miles per gallon, it would go a long way to providing the necessary incentive for change. The government buys hundreds of thousands of vehicles each year. Also, perhaps too much is made of commuting, when the larger problem is getting people out of their vehicles and stopping the habit of driving as a psychological escape from boredom and feeling locked in. Livable, walkable cities will do much to break the auto “habit” . Can’t do that without good transit options.
blackspeak in Washington,DC on Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 2:59pm
This is not rocket science folks. I envision a series of bullet trains traveling norht and south, east and west. They will travel non-stop between major cities or transfer points (every 100 miles). These trains would intersect at these major cities and transfer points to less congested smaller cities and rural towns, with metro-like trains, to take travelers to other mass-transit sources (buses). The car as a source of long distance travel would be impractical or obsolete. Cars would be smaller and fuel efficient and only used for social networking with trips less than 50 miles.