Good Planning and Design — Car Free Communities

“Good Planning and Design” is the title of a Kindle book in progress. Its draft chapters will be published here on Medium. The first book achieved by this means is out. Universal Good and Evil: Parsing The Twenty Values We All Live By http://buff.ly/1MfQz7K

Car Free Communities

A good future will be car-free. By that I mean that we will be able to get around without cars. There will still be cars, but fewer and on the periphery. Draw a circle or square a mile from edge to edge. We will live within it. We will work within it. We will walk within it. If there are any cars, they are outside. Eventually we will move beyond our need for cars.

We cannot afford cars in a good future. They are already responsible for a future that is foreboding. They drive global warming. They kill and maim. They are a needless expense. Their drivers are more and more distracted by the future in the form of gadgets that turn their eyes from the road. Cars are a problem not an answer.

Even if you could refute these assertions, consider the following:

Cars have created sprawl, the very thing we do not need in a good future. A good future involves creating and evolving communities that are fundamentally urban. Such communities must be be walkable. Merely for public health, to end obesity and stasis, this would be necessary.

Future local transportation should be modeled on the rides we see in places like Disney World.

Bikeways? Sure, but not built to coexist with cars.

Density is the key to the future. It is the gold standard. It is exactly what young people seeking as they flock to urban centers. Density makes for cultural vibrancy. Density makes for vital economies. Density enables a mix of work and residence and play and everything else.

The population density I suggest is around 10,000 per square mile. The number of such communities in close proximity could be a few to as many as you like. But the area between communities would be large enough to enable resumption of local agriculture.

What will replace the car once we recognize that it has to go? The space.

What? I said the space. Spaces. The spaces of the future will be pre-fabricated — made somewhere and shipped.

Yes there will be shipping and yes we will keep our interstates and other major arteries. And no I do not know what sort of vehicles will transport the elements of our community to their destinations. Do you? Once we free rights of way we might well have larger transport vehicles than we do now.

I shall deal with spaces in further chapters. The purpose of this starter is to impress on us all the end of the automobile age. Self-driving cars are merely an effort to keep the notion of the car alive. The automobile business itself will try to hold on, but the sheer costs attending the end of oil will finally prove its lack of staying power.

In America the interstate system will enable the growth of car-free cybercommunities in areas least vulnerable to extreme weather. The design of the future will transfer resources from today’s costly sprawl economy to one that supports the prospects you will see developed in this book. The expense of living in a cybercommunity will be vastly less than the expense of owning cars and paying a mortgage, upkeep and maintenance for a house.

The simple answer is under our noses. Mile square car free areas that contain, scaled-down, the necessities of urban existence: work, play, education and residence. Until planners get serious about what a car free world could be, we will perpetuate sprawl, economic injustice and social and racial stratification. That is not planning, that’s societal suicide.

Car free does not mean no cars. It means the age of the automobile is ending along with the age of oil. Plutocrats will finally understand that a society where everyone is fulfilled is the wave of the future. Cars no longer determine how we live. They will no longer dictate design. They will no longer be what’s sexy. The world moves on.

Next Bring Aesthetics into The Mix — Medium http://buff.ly/1zT7QhK

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From Planning and Designing a Good Future: What to Strive for and What to Avoid Stephen C. Rose: Kindle Store http://buff.ly/1DGYTIP

Please visit Slow as Molasses Press at http://buff.ly/1ulPHlK