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Will more public transport help future cities thrive?
BY 2050 Americans will have ended their love affair with the automobile, abandoned urban sprawl for high-density living and switched to public transport for more than half their travel.
A pipedream? Not if the American Public Transport Association (APTA) has its say. It has just published its “2050 vision” and claims any business-as-usual alternative to its concept of the future will not only lead to harmful climate change but also “unimaginable highway congestion” that will “impeded economic growth” and degrade the American quality of life.
The APTA has developed its 2050 vision after a 12-month investigation by a taskforce of 60 of America’s top public transport strategists.
Under the direction of Elliot Sander, executive director of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the task force examined how America’s existing and ailing transit sector could be reshaped into an energy efficient and environmentally sustainable system of the future.
Their answer is to seek nothing short of a transit and urban planning revolution and a considerable change in public attitude. In their report the task force urges the new administration of President Barack Obama to implement a series of new federal transportation bills to set a national agenda that starts treating roads, public transport and other elements of surface transportation as one single system.
By 2050, the task force wants to see this single system become “a central strategy in ongoing efforts to curtail and control greenhouse emissions”.
In fact the report suggests that by 2050 new planning laws will have made urban sprawl a thing of the past and made the norm urban infill and higher density developments oriented towards public transport.
The taskforce says such compact development will see metropolitan areas consuming no more land per capita than they did in the 1950s.
In fact they claim it would allow the “preservation and restoration of increased acreage of open space resulting from a smaller urban footprint.” All that extra land would then provide “more recreational opportunities for the growing population, cleaner water and air, and simply more beauty for all.”
The taskforce report says apart from all other pressures like global warming and reliance on imported oil, the US between now and 2050 will face massive demographic change. In forty years, the country’s population will be approaching 440 million - up by a half what it was in 2000 - and the population annually will be increasing by between three and four million people with most living in the cities. The report sees many of those people following existing trends and seeking apartments and owner-occupied homes. Cities and inner suburbs will be the focus, it says - particularly homes close to “high quality transit”.
“Metropolitan areas know that having a community with a feeling of vitality and place is critical to their success in appealing to talent, innovators, knowledge workers and young people,” the report says.
From the 2050 perspective the report predicts: “Transit is an essential element of this ‘place making’ strategy. The stigma that some once associated with public transportation disappeared long ago. Young people like cities, and they like transit.”
The report sees advanced technology being one of the big sales points of 2050 transit. Connections between rail and air services are seamless - and so too is the automatic baggage handling system. Handheld “knowledge system” devices provide real-time trip information about the entire transport system including all the options.
But it is because of climate change that most people in 2050 value and support public transport.
According to the report: “In 2050 public transport continues to be a central strategy in ongoing efforts to curtail and control greenhouse gas emissions. Neither technology nor any single approach alone has been adequate to solve the climate change problem.”
