The automobile has been pitched as a machine for freedom. But you travel caged inside a small metal box, strapped to your chair, while your life is being threatened randomly by high speed two-ton projectiles, forced to keep eyes focused on the road and obliged to place hands at the 10 and 2 o’clock positions on the wheel, with your foot constrained to a small area on the floor. This doesn’t sound like freedom to me.
1925 Studebaker Patrol (Paddy) Wagon. Source: Wikipedia
If you choose to enter a freeway, you are not even permitted to leave your car til you exit the road.
On streets, your behavior is governed by inanimate traffic lights, signs, and paint, which are violated at penalty of automatically generated fine or imprisonment.
This is all self-imposed, so it is more like committing yourself to an institution, the automobility asylum, perhaps, than prison which is imposed by others.
An alternative view is that freedom is not ensconced in a machine but in a way you can interact with the world. If you can, at your whim, when you want to, do what you want, engage in the activities you want, without fearing for your life, that is closer to freedom.
Jarrett Walker argues frequency is freedom. This is closer to the truth. While on a bus or train I am still caged in a metal box, it is a larger box, I am not strapped in, and I am much safer. I am also now free to do something with my time while in motion, not constrained to monitor the road.
‘But I can reach more places in a car than on transit in the same amount of time, almost everywhere,’ you argue. This is true, if you ignore the costs you impose on society, if you ignore the fixed costs of that opportunity to you, and if you ignore the ability to use time in some other way, as is available when not driving.
Freedom from car ownership, freedom from the obligation of driving, and freedom from negative externalities borne by the community at large are how we should reframe transport and land use goals. What can we do to give people those freedoms?
I am pleased to have now completed my Access Quartet of books. These are artisanally selected from the last decade or so of my popular writings, including for the Transportist blog and elsewhere, along with new words to enhance their completeness.
They are organized so that they can be read independently, though an astute reader will identify several themes that run through them all, most obviously the need to privilege considerations of access when considering behavior, deploying technologies, designing infrastructure and networks, and deciding what to fund.
The books are beautifully laid out in the Tufte-latex template for clear information presentation and ease of reading. All are available in hardcover, paper, and PDF.
Is the purpose of bollards to keep people in or keep cars out? A reader writes:
Bollards done wrong. It’s a long pedestrian street, would you bollard the entire street, because they are proposing low risers. You will end caging the people like in Egypt.
So the moral question: should we change our planning for pedestrians to ensure safety from a crazy person in a van, terrorists, drunk drivers, just incapacitated drivers. This is not the first, and will not be the last, time a driver plows down pedestrians. By doing so we show weakness to terrorists? Are we converting the outdoors to a Zoo placing pedestrians in cages. Should the woonerf, for example, be like an open zoo.
It’s a moral and ethical question how much separation should we have in an era when crazy people uses cars as weapons to kill random humans. How many incidents and deaths will it take to change the approach for pedestrian environments to make it as safe as air travel. If we add more small obstacles, how much will they spoil the pedestrian environment and sense of freedom.
The crazy person in a van problem is only going to get worse with automation and especially connectivity, a remote control car bomb is even easier than a suicide.
This Delft Bollard is a casualty of the Car Wars.
In my view, cars should be in the cages, the people should be free. And then the cages need to be made smaller and smaller.
All urban streets in heavily pedestrian trafficked areas should have bollards or equivalent to keep the cars away from the people. Woonerfs are fine for residential streets, and if people want to encroach on shared space that is also fine, but cars should not encroach on people space. Just as we don’t let cars in most buildings, there should be outdoor public spaces where they are also prohibited.
We don’t need fences or chains like in the photo of Egypt, just lots of posts (trees, bike racks, benches, bus stops, street furniture, planters etc.) that make it impossible for a car to run down the sidewalk or into buildings. This furniture of course should not interfere with the free flowing movement of people, and might require taking lanes from the storage, or even movement, of cars. As with all good urban design, examples of this are in Delft, with some lowerable Bollards to allow service, emergency, and freight vehicles in when needed.
Delft defining Pedestrian domain.Delft, lowerable Bollards on a bridge
How about an ambiguous hump to start your Valentine’s Day ? Pedestrian / street interfaces in Sydney are needlessly inconsistent. When is a Speed Hump (Speed Table) also a Pedestrian Crossing? When is a Pedestrian Crossing also a Speed Hump? When the traffic engineer felt like it.
Walking about Sydney, we see all sorts of cases. I propose a simpler rule: All high demand pedestrian crossings should be speed humps on the road (the should rise to the sidewalk level). All low demand roadway/sidewalk crossings should be speed humps so that these road and especially laneway (alley) crossings extend the sidewalk across the road (so the pedestrian is not lowering themself crossing the street, but rather the car is slowing and rising while crossing the sidewalk). I have photos illustrating good, bad, and ambiguous examples from Sydney.
A midblock raised crosswalk/speed hump at the busy entrance to the Broadway Shopping Center. This is excellent, and cars reluctantly yield to the dominant pedestrian. The walk leads to escalators. (Mid-right)A raised sidewalk across a laneway (alley) at Broadway Shopping Center. This is also excellent, and should be ubiquitous at every laneway in Sydney. The pedestrian is giving me the side eye for taking his picture, but he is important to illustrate traffic safety.Raised pedestrian crosswalk in Cronulla. Similar to the first example at Broadway, but a much less trafficked intersection, with a too narrow bikelane on the side. The sidewalk comes down to the street before the pedestrian rises above the street, and then returns to grade before the next accessibility ramp. Not quite an elegant solution.Redfern Station Entrance. There is no marked crosswalk, much less a speed hump or raised sidewalk here, despite the huge demand. There is however a speedhump just to the east (left) of the picture for some reason. A missed opportunity. No marked crosswalk means pedestrians must yield to cars.The intersection of Abercrombie Street and Cleveland Street in Darlington (Chippendale is across Cleveland) sees a speed hump on Abercrombie between Hudson Street (the lower right) and Cleveland (upper right). Pedestrians are continuously crossing in this stretch, but the speed hump aligns with neither unmarked crosswalk (at Hudson/Abercrombie nor Cleveland/Abercrombie). Still, it’s begging for pedestrians to use it, and they do.A signalized but porkchop-islanded crosswalk at a Free Left (Free Right for those in the right-side drive countries) (Broadway and City Road). Notice the pedestrian light is red (don’t walk) but the pedestrians cross anyway. If the free left is not eliminated in a more comprehensive redesign, it could easily be de-signaled and the crosswalk raised, so pedestrians dominate, and cars travel when they can.This speed bump in Alexandria Park does not want to be mistaken for a pedestrian crossing, so it is landscaped wherever a pedestrian might think of crossing. This is just before the actual intersection, on an extensively calmed street. Cars race from calming device to calming device, treating the chicanes the way a skier might.
It remains available as an eBook on Kindle Editions and at the iBookstore. If you have the option, I encourage you to get it on Apple’s iBooks, where it has additional features, like pop-up references and image galleries, as it was designed in ePub3.
Great Britain doesn’t have an Americans with Disabilities Act
Designs serve varied and sometimes conflicting interests
A vision of visions
A faster horse
The Ant and the Grasshopper
Deconstructing Busytown
Spontaneity in a can, spontaneity in a plan
Building the city spontaneous
Framing regional development
First do no harm
There are several themes in the book:
Cities and their networks operate on multiple timescales simultaneously. Traffic lights change by the second, rights-of-way last millennia. Cities see massive daily flows of people in and out. The core, timeless, enduring elements contrast with the faddish ephemera that too much effort is focused on. The future is emerging, but determining what we are looking forward to will be enduring or ephemeral should be the critical focus of anyone involved with transport and city design.
This book does not shy away from the normative and prescriptive. In this it differs from much academic work, including my own, which tends to the positive and descriptive. Principles are laid out, which I believe to be true and correct, many of which are not scientific in the way they are framed. They of course may lead to testable hypotheses, but they are also value-based.
The idea of the ‘spontaneous city,’ one that serves needs and wants in real-time, is a theme running through both the title and the text. What conditions encourage people to take advantage of their city (and therefore make it stronger)? What conditions worsen life for the users of the city?
The emergence of new transport technologies gives us a chance to restore and correct, to right what is wrong with the places we live. From the railroad and electric streetcar creating separation between places where people lived and where they worked, to the elevator enabling high rise construction, to the motorcar which put suburbanization into over- drive, all significant transport innovations reshape cities. The new autonomous vehicle, the new electric vehicle, the new shared vehicle, the vehicle form, shape, and size are a transformation of similar scale and scope. These changes will create opportunities over the coming decades, which we can seize or reject.
This book is about how cities do work, how cities can work, and how cities should work. In part it is about traditional fields of planning and engineering, but takes a much broader concept of design principles than those fields usually do. This is because it is also about evolution and it is about opportunism. The world is changing fast. We can make it a more humane place than it has ever been, or we can allow it to devolve into a more brutish environment, where we remain a victim of our collectively built environments, rather than their master.
When the book speaks of ‘cities’ it really means the entire metropolitan ‘urban system,’ not just the historic core city (or the central business district). Downtown is but a part of the city, and the central city in many metropolises is not even a plurality of residents.
Much of this book includes complaint, and it may feel like shouting into the wind. But every complaint is about a design failure, either with intention or by accident, that degrades experience for everyone, or degrades the experience of some for the benefit of others. Life is comprised of tradeoffs, but not all tradeoffs are made at the appropriate rate of exchange. Both cities and their transport networks are the product of thoughtful human actions and unconscious emergent processes, where systematic behavior drives the underlying logic of designs.
The optimal design of transport networks to serve the goal of spontaneous access cannot be determined in the absence of knowledge about the actual development pattern. The optimal development pattern cannot be known without regards to the plan of the network. Discovering the right combinations of networks, land use, and other urban features is what makes cities successful. The measure of their success is their population, their wealth, their happiness.
But even more importantly, the optimal transport network for the technology of one era is not necessarily the optimal network of the future, and the same is true for development.
Much of Spontaneous Access is drawn from my blog transportist.org, or streets.mn, although it has been significantly edited and reorganized from posts that may have appeared there. In that sense, it is a younger sibling to the recent (2015) book The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport with Kevin Krizek. It is a collection of reflexions (a somewhat archaic British way of spelling “reflections”), short essays that collectively give insight into today’s design problems and some possible solutions.
Great Britain doesn’t have an Americans with Disabilities Act
Designs serve varied and sometimes conflicting interests
A vision of visions
A faster horse
The Ant and the Grasshopper
Deconstructing Busytown
Spontaneity in a can, spontaneity in a plan
Building the city spontaneous
Framing regional development
First do no harm
There are several themes in the book:
Cities and their networks operate on multiple timescales simultaneously. Traffic lights change by the second, rights-of-way last millennia. Cities see massive daily flows of people in and out. The core, timeless, enduring elements contrast with the faddish ephemera that too much effort is focused on. The future is emerging, but determining what we are looking forward to will be enduring or ephemeral should be the critical focus of anyone involved with transport and city design.
This book does not shy away from the normative and prescriptive. In this it differs from much academic work, including my own, which tends to the positive and descriptive. Principles are laid out, which I believe to be true and correct, many of which are not scientific in the way they are framed. They of course may lead to testable hypotheses, but they are also value-based.
The idea of the ‘spontaneous city,’ one that serves needs and wants in real-time, is a theme running through both the title and the text. What conditions encourage people to take advantage of their city (and therefore make it stronger)? What conditions worsen life for the users of the city?
The emergence of new transport technologies gives us a chance to restore and correct, to right what is wrong with the places we live. From the railroad and electric streetcar creating separation between places where people lived and where they worked, to the elevator enabling high rise construction, to the motorcar which put suburbanization into over-drive, all significant transport innovations reshape cities. The new autonomous vehicle, the new electric vehicle, the new shared vehicle, the vehicle form, shape, and size are a transformation of similar scale and scope. These changes will create opportunities over the coming decades, which we can seize or reject.
This book is about how cities do work, how cities can work, and how cities should work. In part it is about traditional fields of planning and engineering, but takes a much broader concept of design principles than those fields usually do. This is because it is also about evolution and it is about opportunism. The world is changing fast. We can make it a more humane place than it has ever been, or we can allow it to devolve into a more brutish environment, where we remain a victim of our collectively built environments, rather than their master.
When the book speaks of ‘cities’ it really means the entire metropolitan ‘urban system,’ not just the historic core city (or the central business district). Downtown is but a part of the city, and the central city in many metropolises is not even a plurality of residents.
Much of this book includes complaint, and it may feel like shouting into the wind. But every complaint is about a design failure, either with intention or by accident, that degrades experience for everyone, or degrades the experience of some for the benefit of others. Life is comprised of tradeoffs, but not all tradeoffs are made at the appropriate rate of exchange. Both cities and their transport networks are the product of thoughtful human actions and unconscious emergent processes, where systematic behavior drives the underlying logic of designs.
The optimal design of transport networks to serve the goal of spontaneous access cannot be determined in the absence of knowledge about the actual development pattern. The optimal development pattern cannot be known without regards to the plan of the network. Discovering the right combinations of networks, land use, and other urban features is what makes cities successful. The measure of their success is their population, their wealth, their happiness.
But even more importantly, the optimal transport network for the technology of one era is not necessarily the optimal network of the future, and the same is true for development.
Much of Spontaneous Access is drawn from my blog transportist.org, or streets.mn, although it has been significantly edited and reorganized from posts that may have appeared there. In that sense, it is a younger sibling to the recent (2015) book The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport with Kevin Krizek. It is a collection of reflexions (a somewhat archaic British way of spelling “reflections”), short essays that collectively give insight into today’s design problems and some possible solutions.
Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport is now on sale via a Countdown Promotion on Amazon’s Kindle Editions for a limited time only. Act quickly.
SPONTANEOUS ACCESS: REFLEXIONS ON DESIGNING CITIES AND TRANSPORT
I am pleased to announce the publication of my latest book: Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport on Kindle Editions and at the iBookstore. The list price is $8.99. If you have the option, I encourage you to get it on Apple’s iBooks, where it has additional features, like pop-up references and image galleries, as it was designed in ePub3.
Great Britain doesn’t have an Americans with Disabilities Act
Designs serve varied and sometimes conflicting interests
A vision of visions
A faster horse
The Ant and the Grasshopper
Deconstructing Busytown
Spontaneity in a can, spontaneity in a plan
Building the city spontaneous
Framing regional development
First do no harm
There are several themes in the book:
Cities and their networks operate on multiple timescales simultaneously. Traffic lights change by the second, rights-of-way last millennia. Cities see massive daily flows of people in and out. The core, timeless, enduring elements contrast with the faddish ephemera that too much effort is focused on. The future is emerging, but determining what we are looking forward to will be enduring or ephemeral should be the critical focus of anyone involved with transport and city design.
This book does not shy away from the normative and prescriptive. In this it differs from much academic work, including my own, which tends to the positive and descriptive. Principles are laid out, which I believe to be true and correct, many of which are not scientific in the way they are framed. They of course may lead to testable hypotheses, but they are also value-based.
The idea of the ‘spontaneous city,’ one that serves needs and wants in real-time, is a theme running through both the title and the text. What conditions encourage people to take advantage of their city (and therefore make it stronger)? What conditions worsen life for the users of the city?
The emergence of new transport technologies gives us a chance to restore and correct, to right what is wrong with the places we live. From the railroad and electric streetcar creating separation between places where people lived and where they worked, to the elevator enabling high rise construction, to the motorcar which put suburbanization into over- drive, all significant transport innovations reshape cities. The new autonomous vehicle, the new electric vehicle, the new shared vehicle, the vehicle form, shape, and size are a transformation of similar scale and scope. These changes will create opportunities over the coming decades, which we can seize or reject.
This book is about how cities do work, how cities can work, and how cities should work. In part it is about traditional fields of planning and engineering, but takes a much broader concept of design principles than those fields usually do. This is because it is also about evolution and it is about opportunism. The world is changing fast. We can make it a more humane place than it has ever been, or we can allow it to devolve into a more brutish environment, where we remain a victim of our collectively built environments, rather than their master.
When the book speaks of ‘cities’ it really means the entire metropolitan ‘urban system,’ not just the historic core city (or the central business district). Downtown is but a part of the city, and the central city in many metropolises is not even a plurality of residents.
Much of this book includes complaint, and it may feel like shouting into the wind. But every complaint is about a design failure, either with intention or by accident, that degrades experience for everyone, or degrades the experience of some for the benefit of others. Life is comprised of tradeoffs, but not all tradeoffs are made at the appropriate rate of exchange. Both cities and their transport networks are the product of thoughtful human actions and unconscious emergent processes, where systematic behavior drives the underlying logic of designs.
The optimal design of transport networks to serve the goal of spontaneous access cannot be determined in the absence of knowledge about the actual development pattern. The optimal development pattern cannot be known without regards to the plan of the network. Discovering the right combinations of networks, land use, and other urban features is what makes cities successful. The measure of their success is their population, their wealth, their happiness.
But even more importantly, the optimal transport network for the technology of one era is not necessarily the optimal network of the future, and the same is true for development.
Much of Spontaneous Access is drawn from my blog transportist.org, or streets.mn, although it has been significantly edited and reorganized from posts that may have appeared there. In that sense, it is a younger sibling to the recent (2015) book The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport with Kevin Krizek. It is a collection of reflexions (a somewhat archaic British way of spelling “reflections”), short essays that collectively give insight into today’s design problems and some possible solutions.
Election news got you down? Escape with Spontaneous Accessthis weekend. It’s 50,000 or so mostly non-fiction, yet highly entertaining, words which have essentially nothing to do with national politics.
Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transportby David Levinson is now available at the iBookstore (best for Apple Mac/iPad/iPhone users) or Kindle Editions (everyone else). On sale for only $4.99, it will let you will travel much further than the two gallons of gas it would otherwise buy. To motivate you even more, the first chapter: The City Spontaneous, is available for free. (link below)
Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport by David Levinson
I am pleased to announce the publication of my latest book: Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport on Kindle Editions and at the iBookstore. The price is $4.99. If you have the option, I encourage you to get it on Apple’s iBooks, it has additional features.
Table of Contents
The city spontaneous
The 60-Year Line
Community without dendricity
The pint-of-milk test
The timeless way of building networks
Axioms about roads
Garden streets
Vitality
An archipelago of walkability
Filling in
Leapin’ frogs
The reorganization of road function
Beyond the plan view
Interfaces of freedom
Instruments of control
Shared space
Winter is coming
Diversity as insurance
Differentiate city and country
Don’t confuse the place for the time
Great Britain doesn’t have an Americans with Disabilities Act
Designs serve varied and sometimes conflicting interests
A vision of visions
A faster horse
The Ant and the Grasshopper
Deconstructing Busytown
Spontaneity in a can, spontaneity in a plan
Building the city spontaneous
Framing regional development
First do no harm
There are several themes in the book:
Cities and their networks operate on multiple timescales simultaneously. Traffic lights change by the second, rights-of-way last millennia. Cities see massive daily flows of people in and out. The core, timeless, enduring elements contrast with the faddish ephemera that too much effort is focused on. The future is emerging, but determining what we are looking forward to will be enduring or ephemeral should be the critical focus of anyone involved with transport and city design.
This book does not shy away from the normative and prescriptive. In this it differs from much academic work, including my own, which tends to the positive and descriptive. Principles are laid out, which I believe to be true and correct, many of which are not scientific in the way they are framed. They of course may lead to testable hypotheses, but they are also value-based.
The idea of the ‘spontaneous city,’ one that serves needs and wants in real-time, is a theme running through both the title and the text. What conditions encourage people to take advantage of their city (and therefore make it stronger)? What conditions worsen life for the users of the city?
The emergence of new transport technologies gives us a chance to restore and correct, to right what is wrong with the places we live. From the railroad and electric streetcar creating separation between places where people lived and where they worked, to the elevator enabling high rise construction, to the motorcar which put suburbanization into over- drive, all significant transport innovations reshape cities. The new autonomous vehicle, the new electric vehicle, the new shared vehicle, the vehicle form, shape, and size are a transformation of similar scale and scope. These changes will create opportunities over the coming decades, which we can seize or reject.
This book is about how cities do work, how cities can work, and how cities should work. In part it is about traditional fields of planning and engineering, but takes a much broader concept of design principles than those fields usually do. This is because it is also about evolution and it is about opportunism. The world is changing fast. We can make it a more humane place than it has ever been, or we can allow it to devolve into a more brutish environment, where we remain a victim of our collectively built environments, rather than their master.
When the book speaks of ‘cities’ it really means the entire metropolitan ‘urban system,’ not just the historic core city (or the central business district). Downtown is but a part of the city, and the central city in many metropolises is not even a plurality of residents.
Much of this book includes complaint, and it may feel like shouting into the wind. But every complaint is about a design failure, either with intention or by accident, that degrades experience for everyone, or degrades the experience of some for the benefit of others. Life is comprised of tradeoffs, but not all tradeoffs are made at the appropriate rate of exchange. Both cities and their transport networks are the product of thoughtful human actions and unconscious emergent processes, where systematic behavior drives the underlying logic of designs.
The optimal design of transport networks to serve the goal of spontaneous access cannot be determined in the absence of knowledge about the actual development pattern. The optimal development pattern cannot be known without regards to the plan of the network. Discovering the right combinations of networks, land use, and other urban features is what makes cities successful. The measure of their success is their population, their wealth, their happiness.
But even more importantly, the optimal transport network for the technology of one era is not necessarily the optimal network of the future, and the same is true for development.
Much of Spontaneous Access is drawn from my blog transportist.org, or streets.mn, although it has been significantly edited and reorganized from posts that may have appeared there. In that sense, it is a younger sibling to the recent (2015) book The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport with Kevin Krizek. This book too talks about access, that is why we build transport in the first place. It is a collection of reflexions (a somewhat archaic British way of spelling “reflections”)
David Levinson, Transportist 
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