Creating Tomorrow - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 476

costs are paid largely by users, who buy, maintain, and insure their own cars and who
fund a good part of highway construction and repair costs through gas taxes. 11
By contrast, public transit routes do not go everywhere and service usually emphasizes
weekday commutes, with abbreviated schedules and longer headways for nights and
weekends. Moreover, the costs of equipment, operations, maintenance, insurance, and
employee wages and benefits are publicly funded, with fares reimbursing only a fraction
of total cost.
This sets up a chicken-and-egg situation. On the one hand, public transit cannot be con-
sidered a serious alternative unless it is at least reasonably convenient. On the other hand,
building transit routes to a reasonable degree of convenience that attracts patronage is
prohibitively expensive in many regional situations. Rail transit requires large amounts of
energy, so a partly filled train—which is unavoidable until a reasonably complete system
is in place—is the mass transit equivalent of a single-occupant SUV. Many of these down-
sides to public transit are overcome by buses. Buses are the unappreciated workhorses of
regional transit.
Considering the multitude of operating examples that exist around the world and, in
particular, the demonstrated relationships between urban form, density, and transporta-
tion hardware, we should have long ago stopped looking for any simple either-or answers.
In summary, seven ways to increase the efficiency of urban mobility and individual
vehicular trips include (1) car and van-pooling, (2) strategic scheduling to lessen traffic
during peak demand, (3) delivery systems that distribute goods and services more effi-
ciently than individual back-and-forth trips, (4) teleconferencing, telemedicine, and tele-
commuting, in which one “travels” with zero hulk at the speed of light, (5) a redesign of
the present automobile, including its size, guidance systems, and fuel source, (6) more
compact, interrelated land-use patterns with provisions that make walking or riding a
bicycle a viable option, and (7) going beyond ownership to shared use in the form of taxis
or the subscription use of shared vehicles and, where appropriate, public transit.
Although rail and bus-ways potentially offer superiority in speed over cars, for urban
commuting, each transit stop along a rail or bus line unavoidably reduces possible time
advantages compared with driving a private automobile or taking a taxi. Ideally then, the
most effective, time-competitive public transit would accommodate the largest number
of passengers with the smallest number of stops. In the United States, this ideal situation
occurs in only a handful of places like the Manhattan subways and the BART corridors in
the San Francisco Bay area. 12
27.1.6 Technology, Awareness, and Behavior
The sixth challenge concerns our ecological understanding and response. The first decade
of the twenty-first century combines unprecedented advances in technology with greater
than ever human awareness and comparatively little change in human behavior. The prob-
lem is that everything to do with creating ecologically sustainable environments is at least
75% dependent on changes in human behavior with the contribution of innovative tech-
nology, contributing 25% or less.
High strength steel and the invention of the elevator created the possibility for central-
ized, high density, cities. Moving in the other direction, the technology of vehicles, ships,
aircraft, first wire then wireless transmission, the computer, and the Internet, all greatly
increased the possibility for decentralization. Human behavior has opted in favor of the
latter, all in the direction of what Frank Lloyd Wright called Broadacre City, the city that
would be “everywhere and nowhere.” Three-quarters of a century after Wright published