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Cars out as London mayor clears way for Paris-style plage and cycle boulevards
Ben Webster, UK TImes
Visitors to London may not find the streets paved with gold but they could certainly find that a lot more streets have been paved, under proposals for the tourist heart of the capital.
Cars will be banned from some of London’s busiest streets as part of a bold plan to create continental-style boulevards devoted to pedestrians and cyclists.
Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, plans to replicate Paris Plage, the beach created on a highway alongside the Seine each August, on the four-lane Victoria Embankment beside the Thames.
He is also considering a ban on through traffic on a series of roads connecting London’s parks and main shopping areas, including Portland Place, which runs between Regent’s Park and Oxford Street.
Speaking at Mayor’s Question Time at the London Assembly yesterday, Mr Livingstone said that he wanted to create attractive, tree-lined walkways in the style of Las Ramblas in Barcelona. Traffic would be diverted on to alternative routes, but shops and restaurants would still be able to receive deliveries outside peak hours.
(15 November 2007)
City’s Slicker
Clark Williams-Derry, Sightline
Every so often, we get criticized for being too fixated on fostering compact neighborhoods. “Density goes against what the housing market wants,” say some — ignoring the fact that most downtown housing developments around these parts get snapped up pretty quickly. Or, “Density is driving up the cost of middle-class housing,” which is simply backwards — density is a response to high housing prices, not a cause.
So we think there are plenty of good reasons for policymakers to be favorably disposed to fostering more housing close to downtown. But the following chart illustrates another key reason: Living in a dense neighborhood has less impact on the climate.
The chart was taken from this awesome 2006 article* in the Journal of Urban Planning and Development, on the total climate and energy impacts of city vs. suburban living in Toronto, Ontario. The basic finding — living in a dense urban neighborhood cuts your GHG emissions by about 60 percent. Obviously, it’s just one study, for one city. But the authors took a fairly comprehensive look at energy use, and their findings are generally consistent with just about every other piece of literature I’ve seen on the subject.
(15 November 2007)
Also from Clark Wiliams-Derry: Mini-Drivers:
While we’re on the subject of overlooked academic studies, here’s another goodie (pdf link): an analysis of whether cars pay their own way. The basic question: do taxes paid by drivers equal public spending to support driving?
The short answer: Nope!
In fact, we’d have to raise gas taxes by somewhere between 20 to 70 cents per gallon for driving to pay for itself.
