Car Sick

Solutions for Our Car-addicted Culture

Lynn Sloman

• Publisher: Green Books
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781907448539
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica pubblica di pianificazione locale e regionale

The twenty-first century is gridlocked. Mass motorisation has ruptured community ties, bankrupted a nation of family shops, and bred a nation of obese children and adults. Politicians stumble from one transport crisis to the next. Lynn Sloman proposes a novel way forward - not through the big-bang civil engineering projects, but by getting people to think about their choices, rather than reaching for their car keys. She shows how de-motorisation works: in place of traffic, it offers neighbourly streets and vibrant city centres. Copenhagen's decision to createpedestrian streets in the city centre has made it an outdoor theatre, filled with celebration and spectacle even in winter. From small towns like Langenlois in Austria, to the centre of London, de-motorisation is transforming urban surroundings. We do not need to get rid of cars altogether. What we do need is to change the way we think about travel. Car Sick is a passionate, well-argued case for moving away from a car-centred to a people-centred society.

Chapter 1

Cars ’R’ Us

“The typical American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls, insurance, taxes and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only three to eight per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent.”

So wrote Ivan Illich in his book Energy and Equity, published in 1974.¹ Today, in Britain, the cost of running a car is lower, compared with typical annual salaries, than it was in America in the 1970s. But still, if you rerun Ivan Illich’s calculation, the result is a startling one. The typical carowning Briton today devotes nearly 1,300 hours a year to his or her car. It takes him over 500 hours to earn the money first to buy the car and then to pay for petrol, insurance, repairs and parking. He spends another 400 hours every year sitting in his car while it goes and while it waits in traffic jams. More than 250 hours are devoted to a myriad small tasks associated with a car: washing it, taking it to the garage for repair, filling it with petrol, looking for the car keys and walking to the car, de-icing the windscreen in winter, and finding a parking space at the end of every trip. Finally, he has to work about 100 hours every year to earn the money to pay the extra building society interest because he has chosen a house with a garage rather than one without.²

All in all, the typical British car driver in 2005 devoted three and a half of his sixteen waking hours to his car. For this time, he travels a little less than 10,000 miles per year.His average speed is less than 8 miles an hour— roughly the same as the speed at which he could travel on a bicycle.

Cars have come to dominate our culture and our daily lives. It is not simply a question of the amount of time we devote to driving them, earning the money to pay for them and attending to them. We are bombarded by images of cars from billboards, television screens and newspaper colour supplements. The imagery is preposterous: cars in the wilderness, parked on the rim of the Grand Canyon or driving across the sea like a hovercraft. Often the associations are with lifestyle choices and fashion: “It’s so every season”; “. . . every season’s must-have accessory”; “Think of all the stylish gadgets you can’t leave the house without . . .”; “. . . You’ll find that the inside is worthy of an interiors magazine.” Advertising instils a sense that you are what you drive: that your car reveals to other people your status and outlook in life.

Cars permeate our society to such a degree that it is easy to forget what a recent phenomenon they are. Henry Ford may have started the production line rolling before the First World War,but it was not until the 1970s that the process of organising society around the car picked up pace. When the first stretch of the M1 motorway in Britain was being constructed in 1959, the 5,000 men who laboured to build it were brought to work in double-decker buses. Clearly, they were not part of the shiny new car-driving democracy that the road that they were building was intended for. Described by Transport Minister Ernest Marples as a “magnificent motorway opening up a new era in road travel”, the M1 was at first only of any use to about one in four households, as three quarters of the population had no regular access to a car.

The opening of that first section of the M1 marked the start of a phenomenal and concentrated period of motorway construction, involving a scale of expenditure which seems inconceivable now. The pouring of concrete accelerated from the mid-1960s, and most of the motorway network was constructed in a brief period of just fifteen years. By the early 1980s, Britain’s motorway network was substantially complete.

The new motorways, and other roads designed for travel at speed, paved the way for more change. Out-of-town supermarkets, located for easy access by car, began to appear during the 1970s. They were followed a decade later by non-food retail parks on the North American model, selling flat-pack furniture, DIY goods, electrical appliances and even children’s toys. Then the massive regional shopping centres arrived, offering a whole-day shopping experience, including places to eat and children’s play areas as well as hundreds of so-called ‘high street’ stores. The first multiplex cinema was opened in Milton Keynes in 1985, and followed by over a hundred more in out-of-town sites with acres of car parking close to motorway junctions.

In less than forty years, the car has become so intrinsic to the way we work, shop and spend our leisure time that it is almost inconceivable that we once managed without it. It is practically unimaginable that we might be able to use it less. To adapt the name of a famous store, itself a retail park product of the revolution in the way we travel, Cars ’R’ Us.

The story of how we came to devote so much of our time, money and lives to the car is the story of a generation for whom car travel symbolised a new, high-tech, scientific age. They invested billions in the infrastructure to make it easy to travel fast by car. Civil engineers were the new gods, responsible for the design of grandiose schemes: Spaghetti Junction, hundreds of flyovers, thousands of concrete bridges. Houses were demolished and towns ripped apart to make space for cars to drive and be parked. In London, Bristol and elsewhere, fine Georgian squares were dug up, the plane trees uprooted, to make way for dual carriageways and underground car parks.

Pedestrian as an endangered species.

Old cuttings from local newspapers of the 1960s and 1970s show that there was often popular support for this bulldozing of towns and countryside, because people believed that it would solve the problems already being caused by traffic in their communities. In Kent, the county where I grew up, villagers from Swanley marched up the A20 to demand a bypass. I remember a street party in the village of Bridge to celebrate the opening of another bypass, for which the villagers had campaigned hard. There was bunting and cake, and a speech from the localMP. Everyone was jubilant. A bypass of Maidstone was celebrated for the same reason, that traffic would no longer plague the town centre. No one foresaw that the new roads would lead to huge increases in traffic. In May 1963, the first section of the M2 motorway was opened and the local newspapers reported that:

The people of the Medway Towns can hardly believe their eyes. Traffic is flowing freely through Rochester and Chatham for the first time in many years. There are no long queues at the traffic lights in Strood and the volume of cars on the old Rochester bridge is remarkably light. All North Kent knows the reason; the first half of the M2 motorway has been opened and the Medway Towns will never be gridlocked by traffic again.³

The civil engineers and technocrats who were responsible for those grand schemes that were supposed to solve the traffic problem and ensure we would “never be gridlocked by traffic again” are still, today, an influential force. The reputation of their professions has survived surprisingly untarnished. Their message has been a little modified by events, but it is essentially the same. In the face of the fifteenfold increase in car traffic since 1950, and the incontrovertible damage that this has done, these powerful men have begun to whisper, at least some of the time, that we must do what we can to restrain the growth in car use. Not, you note, to reduce car use, but just to make it grow slightly more slowly. They no longer only argue for billions of pounds to be spent solely on motorways and flyovers. Now, they are arguing for billions to be spent on high-speed trains and trams as well. Some car journeys, they argue, could be replaced by public transport if we had faster trains for long-distance city-to-city trips, and radial tram networks shuttling between city centres and suburbs.

But then the same technocrats shake their heads. Unfortunately, they say, most car journeys are now too dispersed to multitudinous destinations for public transport to be an alternative. It is too late. There is nothing we can do about it. The only solution is more road construction, to ease congestion in the places where it is worst. In other words, more of the same, although with the bitter and expensive pill sweetened a little by the construction of some new trams and high-speed railways. Sometimes they suggest that road pricing, or congestion charging, could be used to combat the growth in traffic in city centres and on motorways, but they have no suggestion of what to do outside these hotspots—in the suburbs, small towns and countryside.

The technocrats have had forty years to show what they can do, and not only have they failed to civilise the car, they have made matters much worse. If you ask them now what their vision is, and where their new recommendations will lead us, they have little to say. But if you probe, it becomes clear that they say little because they know that the outcome of their recommended policies is an unpleasant and unsavoury one. Under their policy prescription, traffic will carry on getting worse. There will be more congestion—even if new roads are built at a rate far in excess of what can be afforded. There will be more concrete and tarmac. There will be more lifeless places where no one wants to be.

This is madness. The problem for the technocrats is that they have come to believe that increasing car use is an immutable fact of modern life. They fail to recognise that it is the policy choices made in the last 40 years that have created the world we live in today. They look at historic traffic trends—the result of the disastrous policies of the last 40 years—and extend those trends indefinitely into the future, and then they say, ‘If traffic is going to rise, we will have to make room for it.’ What they have done is to confuse cause and effect. They see traffic growth as a natural phenomenon, to which their bypasses and relief roads and multi-storey car parks were a response. They do not recognise that the bypasses and relief roads and multi-storey car parks, and the rash of car-scale development that they enabled, made driving more attractive and other means of travel more unpleasant.

* * *

This book is about an alternative approach. It is based on the evidence of some hundreds of quiet experiments, in Britain and elsewhere. These are not big-bang civil engineering schemes costing billions of pounds. They do not require massive construction sites (unlike new roads or railways), but they can be diffused across an entire city, improving the daily lives of millions of people. This approach involves cajoling people out of their cars for journeys where there is already a good alternative. It requires many thousands of small changes to the design of roads in and between towns to make them human-friendly again, instead of human-hostile. It also requires ambitious investment in simple forms of transport, especially buses and bicycles, which have the potential to meet at least 80 per cent of our daily travel needs. In gradual, and probably halting, steps, this approach leads to a reappraisal of the role of cars in our society, so that we think twice before hopping behind the steering wheel.

The focus of our effort should switch from a few grandiose engineering schemes to thousands of small initiatives. There is still a place for some of the light rail schemes advocated by today’s technocrats, but it is a subsidiary place. This is because rather few of the 150 million or so journeys that are made in Britain every day lie along straight lines between suburbs and town centres that could be served by new tram networks. The technocrats were right when they pointed out that our journeys are much more complex than that. But their conclusion—that only the car could serve these other journeys—was fundamentally wrong.

Take London as an example. I recently sat in a meeting with the people who will decide the future transport strategy for the capital city. These people are talented and they care a great deal about making public transport in London better. But at heart they are engineers and they therefore tend to devote a disproportionate effort to new railways and tram lines.

One slide stood out amongst the hundreds that their teams presented to us, crammed with facts and figures. It showed the journey length profile for different types of travel: by car, bus, train, cycling and walking. Not surprisingly, most walking journeys are really quite short, and most train journeys are quite long. But if you look at journeys by car, bus and bicycle, they have an almost identical profile. Roughly half of all car trips in London are shorter than two miles, as are roughly half of all bus and cycle trips. Another third of car trips are between two and five miles long, and again, the same is true for bus and bike trips. In other words, most car journeys are very local, and of a similar length to the journeys that we make by bus or bicycle. And unlike tram lines, buses and bicycles can take you pretty well where you want.

Car dependence and its consequences are not simply technical problems, which can be solved by engineers with surveying poles and bulldozers. We

Figure 1: Trip lengths in London. The graph shows what percentage of trips is under
a particular distance. Roughly half of bus, cycle and car trips are less than 2 miles.

need traffic engineers and civil engineers, but working at a smaller scale than that which some of them are accustomed to. Rather than using their skills on billion-pound projects to build wider faster roads, or on schemes to squeeze the largest possible number of cars through our city streets, we need them to work alongside urban designers to rehumanise the roads we already have. We need barefoot engineers, if you like, responding to the needs of local communities, using simple and inexpensive remedies to make it easier for people to get about on bike and bus and by foot. Many of these engineers are already employed by local councils. Some are very good at the job of rehumanising our streets; others would really rather that the human beings did not get in the way of their traffic-flow computer models.

But even the better engineers and urban designers need help to tackle the problem of car dependence. The problem is not just one of road design; it is also a problem of our own thoughtlessness. Driving has become the normal, habitual, expected means of transport, and other options are not even considered. Engineers cannot tackle this. The sort of people who might be able to tackle it—schooled in psychology and behavioural science, familiar with the techniques of marketing and advertising, skilled in the art of persuasion—are few and far between in local council transport departments, and are employed on short-term contracts with little back-up.

The evidence for the potential of this new approach, combining barefoot engineering with the softer skills of persuasion, is set out in the following pages. We will look at successful trial projects and city-wide initiatives in the UK, in the rest of Europe and across the world. The lessons are not just for developed, car-dependent countries. They are also important for countries where car ownership has not yet reached critical levels. In China and India, the civil engineers and technical men from the World Bank and the multinational consulting firms rule the roost. Billions of dollars of development money are spent on elevated highways and expressways, and low-tech, sustainable, efficient means of transport are ignored or despised. These countries are making the same mistakes that we made in the 1970s, with even more far-reaching consequences for their societies and for the global environment.

* * *

Ivan Illich showed that, far from saving time, the car consumes a quarter of our waking lives. Instead of enabling us to do more, it constrains us to doing less. Car-orientated transport policies have gobbled up time and effort and money. The consequences of carrying on with the same old policies are grim. It is no good paying lip service to sustainable travel while still devoting 90 per cent of the cash to more cars and more roads.

Cars have come to control us, rather than the other way around, and it is about time that we got back in charge again. There is no law that says that traffic levels will always rise. As we will see later in this book, there are towns where people now use their ca...