Design Observer :: Join the Discussion http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/from-autobahn-to-bioregion/36968/ en-us Design Observer Group 2012-10-31T05:59:30-05:00 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0
A 'Factor 20' reduction in transport resource intensity is achievable if we all travel by foot, bike, jjtney, and coach. As the visionary Dr Alan Storkey has pointed out, coaches in particular give a 90 percent cut in greenhouse gases per passenger km: They use existing road space fifteen times more efficiently than cars, and a coach with 30 occupants requires six wheels and one engine compared with cars carrying the same number of people that require eighty wheels and twenty engines.

There's a ton of design work needed to make such systems easier and better to use - but it's a more plausible option than the wildly over-complex and high entropy 'smart' solutions being promoted elsewhere.

If we can only persuade our friends at Audi to get out of the one-man-one-limo business, and into the foot-bike-jitney-coach space, there'd be a rosy future for them, too!]]> http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/from-autobahn-to-bioregion/36968/#comments 2012-10-31T05:59:30-05:00
I've been struggling to articulate the ground of my resistance since getting back to New York. Here's the best I've been able to come up with so far — I don't know if I quite nailed it, but it seemed worth the effort of signing up here to leave it as a comment.

The substance of the rights discourse, as I understand it, is that any meaningful construction of citizenship has to be predicated on one's ability to be physically present in all of the nodes and links that constitute place. But nowhere in any rhetoric around a right to mobility that I'm aware of is private, personal transportation specified.

I don't think anybody is arguing that every last person on earth has the right to a private passenger automobile, to take them wherever they want to go, whenever they want to go there. I do think people are arguing that unimpeded physical mobility is an absolute precondition for full participation in a community, a polity and an economy.

Given extant patterns of land use and habitation, and the ways in which power has traditionally been inscribed in these patterns, people cannot be expected to fulfill all their obligations (let alone their desires) within easy walking distance of their homes. Under any such circumstances, mobility is non-negotiable — the alternative is unconscionable.

I'd argue, further, that mobility performs valuable functions (at the psychic level as well as the social) beyond simply getting people from point A to point B. It's, precisely, inseparable from realizing a place's transactive capacity at scale. If nothing else, buses and subways and commuter trains expose us to the unavoidable presence of the human other, generally in the most intimate way.

I think this teaches us to negotiate difference, in ways that are hard to come by without being compelled to share the space of mobility. Against a backdrop of what I would argue is our decreasing ability to tolerate other people, and our declining inclination (or even capacity) to perform mutual civil inattention, we need all the lessons in such negotiation we can get.

I don't dispute the notion that our current ways of accommodating the human demand for mobility are imposing an unsustainable burden on the planetary ecosystem. I do think that any call to limit mobility that does not acknowledge, account for and attempt to ameliorate the ways in which such calls have traditionally been used to keep people quite literally in their place is intolerable. Maybe that's just me.

[Full disclosure: I was on the jury of the 2012 Audi Urban Future Award as well.]]]> http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/from-autobahn-to-bioregion/36968/#comments 2012-10-25T13:27:39-05:00