IMAGINE: MAJOR AMERICAN CITIES WITHOUT CARS!

…A section of Paris where automobiles are no longer permanently allowed.

 

The Interstate highway system made the automobile King in America.

 

Being a boomer that was raised mostly in California, I was amazed when I read the latest statistics about Americans holding driver’s licenses today versus 20 or 30 years ago.

 

The numbers show that in 1983, 91% of 20-24 year old Americans held a valid driver’s license.  But by 2014, that percentage for those same ages, both male and female, had dropped to 77%, and it is appearing to continue dropping.

 

As one publication put it, “America’s love affair with cars is cooling off while our obsession with urban living is heating up.”

 

In addition, big cities are growing in America much faster than small communities in the country as a whole.

 

The usually correct Pew Research organization has determined that 48% of Americans would choose living in walkable urban big city areas over suburbs requiring the need to own an automobile.  And this percentage is also growing.

 

There is no doubt that up to the last turn of the century, automobiles shaped our American culture. 

 

I am a perfect example of that fact as I was born in the South, but due to my father’s construction business, we lived all over the country until he settled the family in what eventually became Silicon Valley.  I actually paid my way partially through school by buying up older cars, fixing them up and re-selling them for a profit.  My father was the classic backyard mechanic and I became the classic kid with his head under the hood of a car at an early age.  I was the first kid in my high school with a car, which was an old car I had bought that didn’t run.  I bought it, repaired it and had it repainted.  At the time, it was the all American teenage dream.

 

But today, businesses such as car-sharing services like Zip cars, and with Uber and Lyft along with smaller living spaces w/o garages, and the forth-coming self-driving cars, these are spurring the changes in how the younger people think.   Not to mention the desire to avoid of the high cost of owning a car with the payments, maintenance, insurance and depreciation.

 

More people are using public transportation and more demands are being made to build more light-rail people mover systems in the growing American cities.

 

Major metro areas are beginning to increase their investment in public transit, from D.C.’s much-delayed H Street streetcar line to a potential $4 billion dollar transit expansion in the notoriously car-heavy Atlanta, Georgia.

 

Nationally, President Obama recently signed legislation equalizing the tax breaks for commuters’ public transit and parking benefits, encouraging the use of public transportation as an alternative to private vehicles.

 

Bicycle commuting has also grown 62% from 2000 to 2014, and bike shares in major cities have an increased interest.  More special bike lanes are showing up on city streets and expressways.  Motor scooters, mopeds and small commuter size motorcycles with side cars have also increased.

 

Urban planners are all saying that the future may not revolve around private vehicle ownership. Many of these changes have been supported by advocates under the banner of “New Urbanism”, a movement that has been brewing in cities for the past two decades. New Urbanists emerged as critics of suburban sprawl, emphasizing environmentally friendly and walkable cities and borrowing urban development models.

 

The cities in Europe are also going through these same changes.  Oslo, Norway is the latest city to announce plans to make its downtown completely car-free by 2019.  At least six other European cities have similar car-free goals.   In my past business visits in Europe, Tokyo, Yokohama and Shanghai, many people, as in New York City, have never owned an automobile.

 

Yet making this realistic in the United States means addressing many new challenges: The existing infrastructure of cities have been built for and shaped around private vehicles.  In many cities, such as in Silicon Valley, efficient public transportation remains inaccessible to many citizens, especially low-income and minority populations. Projects to install new infrastructure also often face opposition for their high costs and from those commuting to the city from outside the area.

 

After the Republican American president and former Military General, Dwight Eisenhower made the decisions that made the automobile became the King in America.  He decided that the interstate highway system was important for both travel, and as an emergency transit system in case the country was ever invaded by the soviets.  (As the supreme commander in WWII in Europe, Eisenhower had realized how important it was for a nation's military to have well designed roads and bridges.)

 

But today with the growing emphasis on walkable, personal transit-oriented and less auto-congested metro areas, is it really possible that the city of the future might be car-free?

 

It will be interesting to see what technologies are most likely to dominate such a landscape, and what would be the financial, social and governmental implications?

 

An interesting future for the growth, or the shrinkage, of automobile transportation is in store for rural and urban America.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016