Automatic for the City

Designing for People In the Age of The Driverless Car

Riccardo Bobisse, Andrea Andrea Pavia

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000705263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

How will automated vehicles change our lives? Where are the opportunities and challenges? Future streets require planning today. This timely book envisions ways in which changes to urban mobility and technology will transform city streetscapes and, importantly, how cities can prepare. It is a reflection on the relationship between new technologies and urbanism, as well as an agile urban design manual with pictures illustrating potential spatial arrangements enabled by the new technologies. Two case studies in the central urban cores of London and Los Angeles will be presented to show how neighborhoods can be redesigned for the better and how to apply good urban design principles across towns and cities worldwide.

PART 1 DESIGN, PEOPLE AND AUTOMOBILES

DOI: 10.4324/9780429347849-1

It is a powerful symbol, showing that a citizen on a thirty-dollar bicycle is as important as one in a thirty thousand dollar car. A protected bicycle lane along every street is not a cute architectural fi xture, but a basic democratic right, unless one believes that only those with access to a car have a right to safe mobility.

Enrique Peñalosa, ‘Politics, Power, Cities,’ in The Endless City. Phaidon Press, 2008

Chapter 1 CARS AS MAKERS AND DESTROYERS OF SPACE

DOI: 10.4324/9780429347849-2

The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car. We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work… enough for all.

Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, 1933

Transport innovations have always structured the making of cities but never to the extent brought about first by trains and later by cars. This is particularly evident in analysing the evolution of Western cities from approximately the mid-19th century to today.

ENTER THE CAR

Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke observed that the world has moved on wheels for 6,000 years in an unbroken sequence from the ox cart to the Rolls-Royce and Mercedes-Benz.¹ Yet the impact that a disruptive transportation technology like the automobile has brought to urbanisation and lifestyles is a very recent one. Prior to the appearance of the automobile, horses, walking and streetcars were the major modes of travel within cities, and like a city’s skeleton provided support to the other parts of the city-body.

Walking cities

An interpretation of how cities evolved from walking cities to automobile cities from a transport point of view, and of how an elaborate and powerful ‘car culture’ developed around greater dependence on automobiles, has been provided by Preston, Schiller and Kenworthy.² In their work they identify three types of city: walking cities, transit cities and automobile cities. Cities were mostly dependent upon walking for their circulation needs for most of their existence. In Europe, the walking city was dominant until 1850. Other slow transport modes like horse-drawn or waterways travel were partially available to the masses but in order for the city to remain accessible all destinations had to be within about half an hour’s walk, travelling at about 5 km/h. This meant that urban environments remained for the most part small and dense compact nuclei with a concentrated shape, and with highly mixed land uses.

Transit cities

From the 19th century, railways introduced radical changes to land uses, employment patterns, social interactions, infrastructure and the distribution of goods. At the end of the 17th century most Londoners travelled to work and to shops and markets on foot. By the beginning of the 20th century, the expansion of the metropolis meant that thousands commuted daily from the suburbs by omnibus, tram, railway and even steamboat.³ Transit cities started developing in the new industrial world around 1850 with the advent of new transport technologies like the steam train and the electric tram. These modes facilitated faster travel, with an average jump from 5 km/h to 15 km/h, and allowed for the expansion and realisation of larger cities within fixed development corridors, with smaller satellite communities linked through transit routes to a central nuclei. Most new developments still had to be within walking or cycling distance from public transport to provide access to the larger pool of jobs and services in the city.

FIGURE 1.1 LONDON GROWTH RINGS. THE CIRCLES ARE AN APPROXIMATION OF THE BUILT-UP AREA. AFTER WWII THE CAPITAL CONTINUED TO EXPAND SPATIALLY WHILE THE OVERALL POPULATION REMAINED STATIC, RESULTING IN LOWER DENSITIES IN FACT, LONDON HAS NEVER EXCEEDED ITS PEAK POPULATION OF 1939⁴

Therefore, these cities still presented a high density of mixed-uses and a well-defined edge to urban development. In a world touched by the industrial revolution, particularly in the West, this was according to Preston, Schiller and Kenworthy the dominant type of urban development pattern from approximately 1850 to 1940.

Automobile cities

The first private car appeared on the streets of London in the 1890s, while the first gasoline-powered vehicle appeared on the streets of Los Angeles in 1897. Worldwide, the arrival of the car facilitated the uninhibited outward expansion of cities. The automobile’s speed allowed the city to get much bigger and densities of development dropped dramatically. Thanks to allowing easier access to remote places, the automobile quickly became the most popular mode of transport in developed countries. Passenger cars emerged as the primary means of family transportation, with an estimated 0.75 billion in operation worldwide today. In most North American cities today, the automobile has a typical modal share of all daily trips in the range of 80–95 per cent⁵, with a quarter of all automobiles on the planet being in the United States.⁶

The automobile revolution began around 1890 when car production started rising and investors in both Europe and North America began to back various vehicle production technologies. In the early 20th century, once the initial unreliability issues were solved, gasoline-powered cars entered mass production and emerged as the dominant technology. In 1913 the Ford Model T, created by the Ford Motor Company five years earlier, became the first automobile to be mass produced on a moving assembly line. Henry Ford produced eight models of car before the Model T with which his name became synonymous. By 1927 Ford had produced over 15 million Model T automobiles. In 1904 1,600 motor vehicles cruised the streets of Los Angeles and by 1915 Los Angeles County counted 55,217 motor vehicles, leading the world in per capita ownership of automobiles as it continues to do today.⁷ By the mid-1920s the American internal combustion engine automobile had won the revolution that Ford had begun, and the manufacture and sale of automobiles had become an important component in the American economy.

Ultimately, the automobile made regular medium-distance travel more convenient and affordable, especially in areas without railways. Cars did not require rest, they were faster than horse-drawn conveyances, and soon had a lower total cost of ownership. The new product for mass mobility was successful for a number of reasons: it provided a streamlined journey from beginning to end; a safe environment, protection against the weather and unfamiliar faces and people; and ‘a shield against the insecurity of the outside world’.⁸ Since the beginning of the 20th century, Modernist movements had embraced and promoted the car, from the Italian Futurists’ celebration of speed to Le Corbusier’s ‘road monopolised by cars’.

It is ultimately with mass production that the automobile’s impact on existing and planned city forms became significant. Beginning in the 1940s, most urban environments in the United States – thanks to pro-car policies – lost their streetcars, cable cars, and other forms of light rail to diesel-burning motor coaches and buses. The growing importance of the car contributed decisively to changes in land-use patterns, employment distribution, shopping habits, social interactions and manufacturing priorities, affecting the way that cities were planned. The construction of highways and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, paired with urban renewal policies, further accelerated this process to the point of urban flight. In the decades following World War II, the automobile united with the single-family dwelling to create suburbs. Community standards of the past, driven by scarcity and the need to share public resources, gave way to new credos of self exploration. As the US economy of the 1950s and 60s boomed, car sales grew steadily from 6 million units per year to 10 million. Married women also entered into the economy and two-car households became commonplace.

In addition to public money for roadway construction, car use was also encouraged in many places through new zoning laws that required any new business to construct a certain amount of parking based on the size and type of its facility. The effect was to create many free parking spaces, and to set business spaces further back from the road, leading to more open settlements that made a carless lifestyle increasingly unattractive, or even impossible. In addition many new shopping centres and suburbs did not build pavements, making pedestrian access dangerous. This had the effect of encouraging people to drive, even for short, walkable trips, thus increasing and solidifying American auto-dependency. As a result of this change, employment opportunities for people who were not wealthy enough to own a car or who could not drive due to age or physical disabilities became severely limited. The loss of pedestrian-scale villages also disconnected communities.

The use of cars for transportation started creating barriers by reducing or eliminating open space dedicated to walking and cycling. Initially minor nuances, incrementally over time these barriers became the dominant structure of entire urban landscapes, physically blocking any pedestrian or cycling movement, segregating communities and becoming a major threat to the safety of children and the elderly. Car infrastructure became a major land use allocation, leaving less land available for other purposes. It was the rise of the Automobile City, of cities that facilitate and encourage the movement of people, via private transportation, through ‘physical planning’ such as built environment innovations (street networks, parking spaces, automobile/pedestrian interface technologies and low-density urbanised areas containing detached dwellings with driveways or garages) and ‘soft programming’ such as social policy surrounding city street usage (traffic safety/automobile campaigns, automobile laws and the social reconstruction of streets as reserved public spaces for the automobile).⁹

In many countries, such as the United States, the infrastructure that made car use possible - highways, roads and parking lots, was funded by government and supported through zoning and construction requirements.¹⁰ Zoning laws in many areas required that large free parking lots accompany any new buildings, while municipal parking lots were often free or did not charge a market rate. Hence, the cost of driving a car was subsidised, supported by business and government, which covered the cost of roads and parking. This was in addition to other externalities car users didn’t have to pay for such as accidents or pollution.¹¹

FIGURE 1.2 SUBURBAN DEVELOPMENT PATTERNS IN AUSTIN, TEXAS

PEOPLE AND CARS: A LOVE AFFAIR

The post-war experience of the automobile is perhaps the purest synthesis of national status and identity with a particular consumer product, a love affair largely unsullied by the harsh realities of environmental protest, high petrol prices and choked highways. Then, as now, automobile ownership was aspirational.

Bell, J, Carchitecture, ²⁰⁰¹

Whether you are watching TV, a 5-second YouTube advert or a pre-movie advertisement at the cinema, you are likely to stumble across a car commercial. This will usually follow a predictable script that, when it doesn’t dwell on the safety credentials of the car or its low energy consumption, will titillate the ego of the driver by celebrating the perspective owner’s uniqueness, individuality and freedom.¹²

It has been like this for a least a century, since General Motors’ supreme Sloan applied the ‘model year’ concept to the automobile¹³ thus consecrating it as a product¹⁴ of consumerism par excellence. The history of the car is entangled with that of consumerism at a deep level because its manufacture gave birth to the assembly line which, in turn, enabled mass production and mass consumption – a system that goes under the name ‘Fordism’ after Henry Ford, the most famous of the automobile industrialists.

There is another important connection between the car and consumerism, as the automobile enabled the growth of temples of consumption like the shopping mall as well as new lifestyles involving holidays away from home and leisure trips. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• About the Authours
• Part 1 Cars, People and Urban Design
• Part 2 Visions for the Future
• Appendices
• CAVS Glossary for Designers
• Bibliography and Further Reading
• References
• Index
• Image Credits