Cars: parking evils and three-wheeled Christiania bikes

January 10th, 2007 | J Lee | Day In Day Out, Trends, Scenarios, Cars

I had bookmarked two NYT articles but just now got around to fully reading them.

The articles are centered on the rise of traffic in cities; its implications depend on which part of the globe you are in. The first is about parking in San Francisco and the other of rising vehicular traffic and emissions in Europe.

San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and New York City all have parking nightmares. San Francisco, however, is “too dense for people to drive easily and not dense enough for really great public transit” — sets it apart from NYC. Imagine an estimated 740,000 residents in 49 square miles, with most fighting over parking spots.

Quite literally, San Franciscans are fighting to have access to cheap, curb parking. San Francisco has “cheap on-street parking and expensive garages and lots, a dynamic that encourages drivers to look endlessly for meters rather than pay for the privelege of parking off the street”, says Donald Shoup, professor of urban planning at UCLA. Interesting enough there is an entire blog, Parking Today, dedicated to all things automotive and parking. It’s truly worth checking out.

In the booming areas of Europe, such as Dublin, “where the number of cars has doubled in the last 15 years…no trains run to the new suburbs where hundreds of Dubliners now live, and the few buses going there overflow with people. So nearly everyone drives. They are not worried over where to park while going to work or shopping, but the rise in vehicular gas emissions.

The NYT article stately details the European situation:

Urban sprawl and cars are the chicken and egg of the environmental debate. Cars make it easier for people to live and shop outside the center city. As traffic increases, governments build more roads, encouraging people to buy more cars and move yet farther away. In Europe alone, 6,200 miles of motorways were built from 1990 to 2003 and, with the European Union’s enlargement, 7,500 more are planned. Government enthusiasm for spending on public transportation, which is costly and takes years to build, generally lags far behind.

For instance, Dublin and Beijing are building trams and subways, but they will not reach out to the new commuter communities where so many people now live.

The trend is strongest in newly rich societies, where cars are “caught up in the aspirations of the 21st century,” said Peder Jensen, lead author of the European Environmental Agency report on traffic.

Peter Daley, a Dublin retiree who has five children, said: “We used to be a poor country and all the kids used to leave to find work. Now they stay and they need a car when they’re 17. So families that would have had one car 15 years ago, now have three or four.”

A surprising statistic from the European Environmental Agency:

23% growth in vehicular emissions in Europe since 1990 has “offset” the effect of cleaner factories - aided by rise in car ownership and the steadily larger

In response, a few places are fighting this trend with “sometimes draconian measures” like in Denmark. Cars are considered as luxury items and imposed with purchase taxes that are sometimes 200% of the cost of the vehicle. For a Skoda that costs $18,400 in Italy or Sweden, it costs more than $34,000 here. With the stiff economic measures to curb traffic, buying and operating a car is surely a luxury as compared to the US, the number of bicycles have risen over the years. Many Danish families have turned to three-wheeled multipurpose Christiania bikes that can carry children, and/or groceries. Smoggy Beijing, meanwhile, has restricted the use of traditional three-wheeled bikes. Go figure.

Memo to myself: the diversifying mobility lifestyles as seen with the rise of the Christiania bike…and its far-reaching impact on urban lifestyles and communications.