I can’t believe we’ve made it this far into a transportation discussion and no-one’s mentioned motorcycles?
The Third World runs on motorcycles. Few people may be able to afford a car, public transport disappears quickly outside of major centres, but everywhere are motorbikes and auto-rickshaws. When I was working in Mumbai I used to see the bread delivery person dropping off the bread for the hotel every morning via motorcycle – with a girl riding on the back seat. The loaves of bread were hung off the handlebars.
One morning there were no cabs or auto-rickshaw cabs to be found, so a teenage boy with two girls picked us up in his. Pink fuzzy dice bouncing off the rearview mirror, Hindi disco blaring from a portable speaker, pouring post-monsoon rain at 7am. One girl shared the front (bicycle-style) seat with him as he drove us to the office; the other one shared the back seat with us. The machine didn’t seem to mind having nearly twice its capacity riding in it.
So there is a big wrinkle in the environmental concerns about shortening commutes, using public transportation, etc. You really don’t want people living near industrial areas, and you really don’t want to change zoning requirements and planning to allow residential areas to grow into industrial areas or vice versa. People will always need to commute to and from these places without living in a dorm in the Chinese model to improve the environment. On top of that, there is a sizable amount of industrial areas that cannot feasibly allow most forms of transportation for security and safety concerns.
So while that’s not something to think about for hundreds of millions of people in the US, it’s definitely something that effects millions. And it’s part of the reason things are really complicated.
Agreed. The solution is never going to be one-size-fits-all.
I would like to see more white-collar workers off the roads, working from home maybe half the week and coming in to the office for meetings. A lot of people have to be at a certain location for their job, but a lot more don’t.
The solution to toxic industrial pollution is to reduce toxic industrial pollution through democratic curbs on pollution, not spreading polluted industrial sprawl across the landscape. That’s insane.
To be fair, I don’t think that @emo_pinata is advocating for the continued spread of industrial production, but rather saying we need to deal with reality. I don’t think that precludes changing our economy from an industrial base too.
I don’t think you know much about urban planning, industry, or pollution to say that. Industrial areas are zoned separate from residential because it doesn’t have noise ordinances, operating hours, heavy traffic (compared to other areas), etc. Not all “industry” is some sort of machination with a cartoonish oil mass voiced by Tim Curry destroying the environment around it, and commercial property taxes are what pay for conservation areas and ensure there is a percentage of preserved natural land in basically every state. Almost every company is compliant with regulations and take them seriously (it tends to be repeat offenders too big to get charged), and most companies pride themselves on exceeding regulation standards (after all, they have to retain their employees who don’t like to work for places that don’t).
On top of that, industry is 12% of the US economy and another 12% is dependent on that industry for its success too. While there are needed changes to how industrial areas do what they do, it’s never going to go away whatsoever and continuing to focus on regulating pollution is probably the least effective means of improving the planet’s environment when it is all tied together.
Then, flatly, your point doesn’t make much sense. Removing personal transport and not designating industrial space will kill far more people and animals than the opposite.
Well, let’s look at real-life places with industry where cars are and always have been rare, or at least more rare than North America.
You mentioned Chinese-style dorms, where essentially there is no commute.
Then there’s the Dutch model, where people may have cars but they don’t necessarily drive them to work. People ride bikes, or use a combination of bikes and public transport.
Or there’s what’s common in India, and to some extent in San Francisco too for software company employees: workers commute by (motor)bike or public transport to a central place by a certain time and then take a private company-owned bus to the work site. One of the gigs I did in India was in a clothing dye factory which was gradually being converted to a call centre, and that’s how all the employees travelled there. It had three shifts with 24-hour uptime.
So industrial zoning and a lack of private cars can and does co-exist already in various configurations around the world. But again, infrastructure is vital.
Ok, but San Francisco tech companies are not really industry they are light-industry office parks. There’s little reason for personal transport in an office park. However, we will always need some form of paper, electricity, wood, medicine (though the end of the medicine production line can be just about anywhere), Metal, etc. And Dutch heavy industrial companies are most famous for shoving their production facilities anywhere but the Netherlands. Dorms mean you must be single or leave your family elsewhere while living on site for at least the business week, India also has one of the largest truck fleets in the world operating all over the place for heavy industrial and construction use.
My entire point is that you can’t just abandoned personal transportation. Even if you shuttle employees onto sites there is an entire commercial vehicle trade that is necessary. I literally brought up an application that impacts millions of people in the US alone that can’t feasibly abandon cars - even if you switch to electric you just push the problem somewhere else.
And my point is that it is feasible – because it is happening right now – to move people from residential areas to industrial zones other than being entirely dependent on personal vehicles.
It doesn’t matter that the San Franciscans are not going to a smelter or a factory, or what the Dutch are up to when they get to work. They live in a residential area and go to a differently-zoned work area, and they don’t use cars to do it.
Again, no one solution will suit all cases and all geographies. It will be possible to show for any case of using common transport that it doesn’t work for all situations.
But that is also true of personal car use, today.
There are far too many places where cars are the only option simply because the area was developed after the advent of the car, most likely in the 1950s-1980s when it was just taken for granted that you could afford one and wanted one, because wasn’t that everyone? And that’s bad planning, no matter how many bona fide cases there are where cars really are necessary, as opposed to just being the default.
