[This content first appeared on LinkedIn on 4 December 2024]
I note this week The New Economics Foundation have recently published a report entitled: Trapped Behind The Wheel – How England’s New Builds Lock Us Into Car Dependency.
The UDG have conveniently summarized some of the main findings in their latest Urban Update. The drivers (no pun intended) behind this trend include:
- Land value and condition, which favour cheaper greenfield land in a profit-driven housing development system
- Relatively lower levels of local political opposition to new developments in more remote areas
- A lack of early, integrated planning of transport, housing, and development sites, reinforced by substantial underfunding of public planning departments
- Top-down local housing targets that act in combination with the factors above to produce development in the wrong places for sustainable transport
To my mind, the third bullet is the kicker.
You simply cannot retrofit joined up active travel or public transport provision into a development. It has to be done upfront, at pre-app, in collaboration with all the relevant placemaking specialists who have hopefully read and understand Manual for Streets.
There is clearly a huge disconnect between the incessant call for sustainable development and the regular use in a DAS of the words ‘active travel’ on the one hand and, the fact that, on the other, despite all the rhetoric, we still keep building in unsustainable locations, that are first and foremost car parks with houses squeezed in between. Any DAS that proudly proclaims a dual carriageway into a site as a ‘… formally designed… gateway’ is *checks notes* missing the point.
Too much of what we’re approving and building just isn’t fit for sustainable purposes.
I remember Jan Gehl in his ‘How to Build a Good City’ interview explaining how his then seven-year-old granddaughter, living in Copenhagen, could walk on her own all the way from home to school without ever having to step on a road due to the installation of continuous footways across side streets. What freedom and independence!
Also, that his ten-year-old grandchildren are: “… allowed to go from one end of the city to the other because it is deemed safe for a little one who is ten and who has been bicycling around with mum and dad since they were five, now they can do it themselves. And that is very nice that you can be mobile early and also you can stay mobile a long time after the doctor has taken away your driver’s licence.” Something to ponder.
Yet seven years on from his interview, we still can’t negotiate a dedicated cycle lane or 3m radii on a side road junction or a 20mph design speed (BfHL) let alone a continuous pavement, because a driver might get mad or a bin lorry might have to *gasp* cross into the opposite lane to make a turn.
We have a long way to go, folks. Or maybe we should just move to Copenhagen.
#placemaking #streets #streetdesign #cycling #cyclelanes #publictransport #jangehl #udg