Staying Put: How to Replace Public Transit with Cars, Part 2
In part 1 of this writing, we explored the idea that an ecological “freedom city” is one where everyone drives electric cars, and no one walks or uses public transit. Now, part 2 imagines what the city might look like if we actually went ahead with this proposal, replacing public transit in urban areas with cars.
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What would happen if we completely replaced pedestrian, cycling, and mass transit infrastructure with cars?
Could it be done?
Would it provide us with more freedom?
If we tried it in a dense urban area, what would that look like?
As mentioned in the first installment of this writing, we need to consider two elements of this question. The first is how people move through a place. The second is, if one of those people moving through a place wants to stop and spend time there, how we allow that to happen at scale.
These questions sound simple, but the illustrations might take the ink of a few pens. To start, I want first to simply imagine the idea of replacing the people-moving capacity of a pedestrian and cycling corridor with cars.
Here is what that might look like.
If we wanted to replicate just the walking and cycling throughput that could be managed within the space of 4 car lanes, we would need a car street at least 24 lanes wide. Note that this is actually wider than the largest street in the world — according to Guinness Book, the widest avenue clocks in at a mere 16 lanes.
If that all sounds slightly ridiculous, hold on.
That was just replacing the capacity of the pedestrian walkway.
We have not talked about replacing the capacity of the metro line yet.
For that, you might need a bigger screen.
To replicate the throughput of both the metro and pedestrian walkways in this multi-modal transit corridor, we would need a 42 lane avenue.1
Now, I know what you are probably thinking. “Great. I am fine with a 42-lane street going through my neighborhood. But Patrick, my man, what if I want to stop and shop, or have dinner, or a drink, or live in this place?”
Well. Technically, the “place” you speak of in the illustration above was bulldozed in order to build a record-breaking road. However, I take your point. Of course. So far we have only talked about moving people through this fictional neighborhood.
Spending Time in a Place
Now we move to the second part, which is how the occupants of those cars can stop and spend time in a place.
The simple answer to this is parking spots.
Many parking spots.
Noting that we already have 42 lanes of cars to help people move through this place, now we are going to need a bit more room to help them stay.
A lot more room.
We first need to knock down all of the buildings along the new street we have just built — noting that we already knocked down a neighborhood the width of a baseball stadium in order to build the Guinness record-breaking 42-lane street. Then we need to add parking garages. Assuming they were six floors high, those parking garages would need a footprint of about 4,000 feet by 600 feet.2 If that sounds big, it is — twice the size of the largest existing parking structure in the world. In fact, the garages do not even fit in the illustration above, we just see the edges of them. We are breaking records everywhere we go with this question. Go cars!
But why so much parking?
If we do the rough math, for a relatively busy subway station by international standards, you would expect more than 50,000 people exiting from that station into the surrounding neighborhood on a typical day — although the system could handle more than this without strain.3 Add another 50,000 people who could theoretically arrive by walking and bicycling.
Now, if that number of people were spread throughout an entire urban core, and arriving on metro/foot/bicycle, we would typically not require any large infrastructure projects in order to accommodate parking demands — the bicycles being the only thing that would require parking, and much of that could be accomplished informally by individual businesses and buildings.
[See the previous writing about Juso for an example of that…]
However, if these 100,000 people were in cars, all of those cars would need parking spots for the duration of the stay in the neighborhood.
If we estimate that car occupancy is 1.5 persons — I am feeling very generous here — and that only around 60,000 of these 100,000 people would be in the area at any one time, then 1.5 x 60,000 gives us an approximate requirement of 40,000 parking spots.4
To replace the efficiency of both our metro station and pedestrian corridor then, the street and garage would need to look something like this.
You probably can’t make out what is going on in that illustration.
After all, the parking garage is more than a mile long. But if you click on it, you can zoom in and check it out. Sorry, it’s a pretty tightly-packed parking garage. There might be a few digital fender-benders in there.
Look closely though, at the top part of that drawing.
It is easy to miss, but for reference, I included the illustration of our multi-modal corridor, to scale, which in theory would easily handle the job of bringing the same number of people into the neighborhood as all of those cars. Seeing these illustrations adjacent to each other, allows us to see the difference in the use of space.
Note that we kindly made the garage six stories in height in the above example. If this were a surface lot, or a garage of just a few stories, you would potentially need to walk three or four miles to get from your car to the place you waned to go.
A Conclusion?
To the logical human being, it should be relatively obvious here, whether or not this kind of urban planning is reasonable.
To answer this question about replacing public transit and walking with cars then, we can say that in order to achieve what a basic multi-model transit corridor does — but using personal motor vehicles instead, electric or otherwise — we would need urban cores consisting mostly of 6-floor parking garages and 42-lane avenues, where residents and shoppers regularly walk — or more likely, take shuttle buses — several miles to where they actually wanted to go, after they found parking. Ironic? Yes, but some cities seem as though they are trying to achieve this reality.
This also seems to reveal why the kind of aliveness and diversity found in cities where public transit, walking, and cycling make up the majority of the personal transportation pie, is literally impossible to replicate at scale using cars. The time/space equation just does not physically seem to work.
While in theory, we could build it, and I guess it would also be ‘freedom’ in some weird way, it is highly suspect that a city filled with only electric cars would provide the kind of freedom we want, let alone be a sane use of our resources, time, and space.
I hope this was a fun exploration. I definitely geeked out on it a bit. I also hope this writing does not give developers any bad ideas. Really.
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Thanks for reading this week, and as always for being a huge positive force by sharing these writings everywhere you can. On another note, it is becoming somewhat difficult to update regularly our construction process here at the studio — that is, while actually still getting a reasonable amount work done on it — so going forward the writings about our space building might be less frequent. They won’t disappear though.
Be well everyone. See you back here in a week or two.
This number is also not accounting for the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lanes in the original multi-modal illustration. The math of figuring that out is honestly taxing my brain!
I use the Disney Mickey and Friend’s Garage as a reference template for the parking garage calculations. One of the largest garages in the world, it still holds just 10,000 cars. You would need four of them for this example.
For reference, Gangnam Station in Seoul, Korea serves 70,000 passengers a day; Xinjiekou Subway Station in Nanjing, China serves a daily average of 200,000 passengers; and Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, Japan, with 12 lines converging in one place, sees an average of 3,590,000 passengers a day. Not a typo. 3.59 million passengers per day. In any case, we are interested here, in how many people could arrive and depart in a day without undue strain on the system — with cars, we would call this gridlock.
This figure is likely an under estimate, and it also does not take into account that most subway stations are capable of bringing in far more people to a neighborhood per day than the 50,000 in our example. See the note above about Shinjuku station, for instance. Anyone who has other thoughts on the numbers, feel free to let me know. I am sure there are many other useful ways to look at this.