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Cars Are Driving Us Nuts
An interview with Hermann Knoflacher via Carfree Times
Martin Hablesreiter and Sonja Stummerer, Die Zeit (Germany)
We drive ever longer distances in order to satisfy the same needs
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Martin Hablesreiter and Sonja Stummerer recently interviewed one of the leading traffic scientists, Professor Hermann Knoflacher. He has taught at the Institut fuer Verkehrsplanung und Verkehrstechnik at the Technische Universitaet in Vienna for more than 30 years. The 67-year-old professor became well known in Vienna for his innovative thinking on traffic issues. He developed pedestrian areas, put trams on separate roadways, and advocated a separate network of bicycle paths.
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… Q: So, what impact does motorization have on our society?
HK: An incredible one. The car is like a virus that beds in your brain and totally subverts behaviour, values, and perception. A normal person would call our present living space completely insane. We move into sealed houses more or less voluntarily, with noise-protected windows and leave the outside to the noise, dust, and exhaust of the cars. That is a full reversal of values, and we don’t even notice it any more.
… Q: In your opinion what should mobility in our society look like then?
HK: Every society needs mobility to satisfy its needs. If we could meet our needs locally we would be plants, not humans. Human mobility always emerges from local shortcomings.
Q: Why are we so proud of our mobility?
HK: You are talking about technical mobility. In historic terms we never were especially proud of mobility. On the contrary: mobility has always been a ballast. Settling down means getting rid of enforced mobility. Our mental mobility was enough to allow us to cultivate plants or domesticate animals.
… Q: You are both a critic of our traffic system and a planner. How does that work?
HK: At the start of my career I discovered that traditional traffic planning is merely based on assumptions. For a long time there was no consideration for the consequences for the society or the environment. Nobody cared about noise or pollution, about fatalities, about the economy being altered or unemployment being created. My goal is traffic planning on a scientific basis. Under this aspect it is my opinion that transportation is one of the most fascinating scientific areas.
… As a traffic planner you ought to create arrangements that unburden people from the necessity to drive!
Q: That sounds like a conflict-laden job.
HK: At that time, my proposal of turning the Viennese Kartnerstrasse into a pedestrian zone was predicted to lead to its economical death. Later I was told that cycling was totally unwanted by the Viennese and that speeding up public transit by laying cobblestones near the stops would cause motorist uproar. All that was allegedly unpopular. Yet the Viennese have embraced these ideas and the city’s living standard rose in international rankings. You can’t only satisfy voters wishes. You don’t give drug addicts tax-free drugs, even though the desire certainly exists.
Q: Could this problem, in your opinion, be solved with the gas price?
HK: No! Every gas price rise is a purely symbolic action and automatically leads into a social trap. When only the wealthy can afford filling up and the poor don’t, there is still an unsolved traffic problem, with a social injustice added to it. The approach must be parking and the way to it. When you organise parking space properly, carfree spaces with a high value of living will be created. Who wants to sleep quietly must accept a longer walk to his car. And who prefers the car must live in noisy and stinky environment. Parking lots should be organised the same way as transit stops.
… Q: Do you expect European cities to look like those much ridiculed US cities, with sprawling suburban homes, giant shopping centres, and poor public transit?
HK: No, since there is a re-urbanisation taking place in many European cities. That is related to an ageing society. Elderly people just cannot get the needed services on the edge of a city. They simply have to move back into the city. Apart from that it’s the energy issue that will make people move back into the cities.
Q: You mean gas prices?
HK: No, I mean energy prices in general. They will definitely rise and affect all areas of life. This means heating, electricity, transport – and all that carries more weight in the isolation of a suburban home than in a city centre. And elderly people need a lot of energy-rich services that become very expensive at price hikes. I don’t just think of “meals-on-wheels” and the like. The more scattered people live, the more energy is needed. And we won’t be able to afford that any more within a short period of time. This means we will have to create sustainable urban structures in order to be able to pay for them in the future. The actual cities with their suburbs aren’t like this.
Translated by Ulrich Nehls with help from Sarah Whelan in Galway, Ireland.
(20 May 2008)
Let’s fix the cities now? (Ecocities review)
Jan Lundberg, Culture Change
This report contains the author’s address at the Ecocity World Summit, April 25, 2008 in San Francisco. Richard Register, the Summit’s co-convener and Ecocity Builders founder, responds to this report at the end.
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While cities have in the past few years become the main habitat for humans (and for pests attracted to filth), and there are sweeping improvements to be made to cities — at a fraction of the cost of wars — I no longer place as top priority “Let’s all fix the cities now.” It’s questionable if not impossible: petrocollapse will be the final deprivation for an energy-poor society that has finally run into limits reflected today by rapidly rising costs.
Part of my change in heart over the years, since I first became aware of the work of Richard Register when he invited me to speak at the first Ecological Cities Conference in 1990, is my growing appreciation for natural living and wild nature. It was the following year that I moved from the Washington, D.C. area to Humboldt County, California, where I lived a car-free life and dabbled in vegetable farming among the redwood forests.
Becoming a musician around that time facilitated my flow of awareness from the subconscious, in part, to reject assumptions that help comprise the indoctrination of Western Civilization: that larger and faster are better, and that “growth” and “progress” are the most desirable and admirable attributes of (our dominant) culture. My appreciation for indigenous, traditional cultures and resistance movements, such as Earth First! and the Zapatista rebellion — with their cooperative social structures — only grows.
… Eventually, my complete support for Richard’s brilliant ideas — as characterized by his art, books, slide-shows and depaving — was undermined by my ongoing interest in smaller communities and local-based food production.
… About the time when peak oil started to become a hot topic in 2003, my attention focused greatly on collapse. I started using the term “petrocollapse” in 2005.
… Since about 1991 I’ve anticipated the industrial world’s energy use and the whole consumer culture coming to an end soon, for no combination of non-petroleum fuels can substitute and maintain the infrastructure and our vast overpopulation in the time necessary to prevent collapse.
So it was with deafer ears that I heard my friend Richard Register continue to stress that cities must always be addressed first and foremost for redesign and activism, “as they are humans’ biggest product and biggest source of problems.” My change in my receptivity for Richard’s work was despite our still seeing eye to eye on the role of the car as completely without merit in city design and allocation of resources. …
[beginning of selections from talk]
… I disagree with Dr. Colin Campbell, peak oil geologist, that we are entering with peak the “Second Half of the Age of Oil.” My view involves my donning my oil-industry analyst hat and discussing the oil market. I formerly ran Lundberg Survey which predicted the Second Oil Shock in 1979.
Peak oil is a geological concept that pictures the dwindling oil left in the ground after the maximum extraction is achieved. But the effects of peak oil mean a tightening shortage must impact the oil market. The curve of peak oil, with a mirror-image of the upswing of supply applying to post peak, no longer works if there is a cessation of global corporate economic activity due to a severe shortage of oil.
First, there will be the sudden effects of sky-rocketing prices, panic buying and hording, the abrupt termination of mass employment, and the unavailability of products and services we have foolishly been taking for granted.
… Second, the ability of the oil industry to scale down gradually to provide less and less product is not there. A refinery needs to operate at an ideal utilization of capacity, and there is also a balance required for the basic types of product output (light, medium and heavy). As to extraction, wells that don’t do well are permanently capped. The oil industry, like the whole economy, is built only on growth. …
… So, for these reasons, a transition to a renewable-energy future for anything like today’s consumer economy, is just an assumption that is an article of faith for “fundable environmentalism.” The substitutes for petroleum are not here on a scale necessary to maintain this economy or the petroleum infrastructure.
[end of selections from talk]
… My presentation and overall attitude were colored by the presentations I had seen earlier that day at the Summit, on high-tech city design. I did appreciate that fewer cars was the enlightened goal of some speakers, but the element of urgency was lacking. The underlying hope among Ecocity activists and the consultants presenting in the main hall was for transitional, public-sector-funded change without the total disruption that some of us foresee. …
Richard Register responds:
I don’t hold with the view of cities being the total wave of the future, partially because “cities” are so ill defined, and I’m talking about the built infrastructure of cities, towns and villages, all of which are disastrously distorted by cars where influenced by them and that’s practically everywhere.
… I think the viewpoint that collapse is inevitable and better-sooner-than-later is not only not fundable (mine doesn’t seem to be either) but also flawed in many ways. The population you recognize as over-scaled many times over won’t let even an early collapse be anything less that the worst experience of death and destruction the planet has seen if it is completely unmitigated by sane changes in peacefully reducing population, shifting to much less meat, reshaping cities and getting on to solar and wind. Biofuels are delusional as they compete with food and biodiversity for uses massively more energy consuming than needed for human nutrition. We also need to get on to ways of building that radically reduce energy demand and demand for land too. The chance of convincing many people of this — with conferences, drawings, books and hands-on projects — is pretty small, but Peak Oil people’s abandoning this message is a large part of the problem.
The principles of permaculture are pretty profound, as I say in my book Ecocities. But they work even better applied at greater than the scale/density of the single house, which is unfortunately what 90% of the focus in permaculture circles is.
(22 May 2008)
