My name is Derek Edwards, and I am an electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech. My educational background is in computer engineering, telecommunications, and software engineering. However, my passion is for developing progressive transportation technology to build better communities and improve our quality of life.
Check me out using the Capital Bikeshare system in Washington D.C. What a great application of technology to attack the urban transportation problem.
Progressive Transit 
Dear Derek,
Your new blog is great. I’ve just posted a message about it on my Google+ page: https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/109226704922743056236/
There are a few articles posted there that might interest you, including ‘A Scientist Pushes Urban Planners to Put People First’, which appeared in a recent The Chronicle of Higher Education e-bulletin.
Cheers from Spain,
Jenni Lukac
Indeed!!! Jenni has said it all, great blog! I see you’ve just started it, good luck with your research (I’m also a PhD student, but not in this area LOL)!
We really desperately need more people thinking like you, otherwise…I live in São Paulo (Brazil), one of the biggest cities in the world, and circulation here has always been awful, but now it’s getting simply unbearable!!! And there’s an ENORMOUS pressure on middle-class and high-class teenagers – when they turn 18, everybody simply EXPECTS them to run right away and take driving lessons, get their license and buy a car (or get one as a gift from their loving parents ;)). When you belong to one of those social classes and do not do what’s “expected” of you, you’re “weird” (when not pointed out as “irrational”…). Of course you are weird for choosing to go places on foot or with a bike or bus or subway, because the city is simply unfriendly to all sorts of public transportation…
The entire city seems to be designed for car users, not for bikers, or pedestrians, or bus-catchers…of course here it’s not as bad as in the US (I’ve visited your country twice, and I have to say…MY GOD! LOL), even why our population would simply RIOT if conditions were worse than it already is! The buses are nowhere near enough – long waits at poorly-conserved bus stops are commonplace (sometimes the bus stop consists of a piece of wood signaling it’s a stop, you don’t have any place to sit while you’re waiting for the bus; when it starts raining not having a shelter is even better 😉 LOL But even when the weather’s sunny it’s horrible…I mean, try standing for 30-40 minutes or more under a boiling tropical sun! Holding your books, shopping bags or anything you might be carrying – surely people carry stuff when going from one place to another, right…); when your bus FINALLY arrives, it is, of course, crowded like a tuna can!!! Again: try getting into a very very very crowded bus or subway trying to hold a bunch of stuff while, at the same time, you have to hold on to the handles, because the drivers are soooo well-trained and educated and patient that they rush off even at curbs and all…falling over someone else, or even on the floor (depending on your balance and on the speed) isn’t that hard, either 😉 Oh, I’m sorry, I said they speed too much, but I forgot to say that traffic in São Paulo is not always free-flowing…that only happens when it’s not raining (and parts of the city flood, generating monster traffic jams, or when it’s not rush-hour (every hour is becoming rush-hour :P) 😉 If you’re a pedestrian, sometimes you have to walk A LOT MORE in order to find a proper place to cross the street (and even if there are lights and a pedestrian track – pedestrian strips, you have to be careful, because cars WILL run over you if they can, because the drivers are always in such a hurry, because they’re late for work because they got stuck in so many traffic jams…they seem to think they’re in Grand Theft Auto or some other violent videogame). So…yeah, life in a big city with “alternative” means of transportation is definitely a big adventure…but I’ve been observing a change of mentality (thankfully!!), especially among people from my generation and younger generations…they might get their license at 18 (which was also my case), but they choose not to have a car, or drive sporadically (during weekends, for example, when they have to go to the grocery and buy a ton of stuff they couldn’t possibly carry other than in the trunks of their cars); when they have to go out or return late at night, or go to any gala event (such as an opera, classical concert, wedding, etc.), they prefer to take a taxi (not that there’s much choice, for buses stop circulating at midnight and start again at 5 am) instead of going there with their own car. I’m sorry I’ve written so much, and for the eventual mistakes, English isn’t my first language and I’m not familiar with the specific vocabulary related to this subject (I think I’ll become more acquainted with it now, reading your blog ;))
What city did you visit in the U.S.? I’ve lived in São Paulo and have never seen worse traffic in my life! LOL
Nice piece on “Cars Kill Cities”. I would like to point out that many of those vacant lots around the Federal Reserve building which you redlined are parking lots because that is their current best use. As the real estate market heats back up again, more than a few of those vacant lots which are currently car parks will become urban structures. There will be some parking spaces in the basement, but because it is expensive construction, those spaces will be more expensive to construct and thus more expensive to rent. There will be those who will rent those spaces at the higher rates, but others will opt out for public transit. Not as quick as you would like, but just as effective.
One real example is to be found at the Arts Alliance structure @Peachtree and 15th. In earlier days, there were asphalt parking lots around the west side of the facility, which are now gone. In their stead, you have the basement parking lot. There are spaces there to be sure, but for many of us, it is easier to take the train and get off at Arts Center station rather than fight the traffic getting out of the Alliance parking lot after an event. In the time it takes to get out of the parking lot, you can be getting off the train at Brookhaven and heading home.
It’s an example of “things take time”, with the market eventually resolving a problem, but in its own time. Best regards.
Hi Again, Im doing my phd on the health impacts of climate change, and transportation is a massive issue, best of luck with your research 🙂
Brilliant piece, ‘Cars Kill Cities’. The current state of the City of Detroit, and surrounding suburbs, totally car-centered or driven, says it all…
Canada is not perfect either. Toronto these days is terrible to get in and out of, thanks, to commuters. In my view, trains are the solution to get people off roads, walking more, in and out of regions to cities, et cetera. Bikes, with proper bikes lanes, is another solution all cities must adopt, sooner than later. (Just look at how well organized Copenhagen is for pedestrians, cyclists, and cars using the streets in unison, with equal rights, and one sees how terrible at planning we are here in North America, and how we made the mistake of putting cars first.)
Cheers,
Richard
The best way to tackle the car and its imposition on peoples lives is too push the disadvantages of the metal box on rotating wheels back onto itself. Make the driving of the car expensive, do away with its exorbitant over the top part of the economy.
In The Netherlands and during the oil crisis of 1974/75 the driving of cars was limited to being allowed to drive only every second day with a system of even and uneven registration numbers, and Sundays were car free. It worked like a dream and had amazing little impact on peoples lives. In fact, it became the catalyst in pushing the car back to a much more modest and acceptable level.
In Amsterdam they are slowly taking parking spaces for cars away and replacing those with trees. If you want to live in Amsterdam you can’t have a car except by leaving the car well away from where you live.
Of course, with this punishing regime on the metal box, the government has been spending big on public transport. A win win for The Netherlands.
Here in Australia as I suspect is the case in the US, a low taxation pared with the manically adherance to the mantra of ‘ letting The Market’ decide everything, it becomes a jungle and people just get obese from spending entire lives sitting in a metal box rolling around aimlessly…
We make choices, don’t we?
Gerard, I loved your use of the expression “metal box” heheehe I shall adopt it from now on 😛 (sorry, the message turned out to be huge, I’m not very economic with words…I’ll totally understand if you don’t read it :P)
Here in my city cars are very expensive to buy, but people buy them anyway! Some people have no home of their own, or barely any food, but they have to have a car, even if it’s very old and crappy…as if it were an essential thing, as much as food or water. And well, to tell you the truth…it kinda is, in a city like mine. The city’s SO big, things are so far away…it’s impossible to go to places walking: depending on where you’re going, it would take 3, 4 or 5 hours…riding a bike is almost equal to suicide, I don’t recommend it not even to my worst enemy! The death rates among people who use bikes (except those inside green parks) are just ridiculous (in the worst sense possible) – oh, the death rates among motorbike riders are also extremely high, by the way…the subway, which is the ONLY public transportation system that really works (when it doesn’t collapse due to technical difficulties, of course :P), is nooooowhere near enough…
For me to get from my house to my university everyday, for example, I have the following choices:
1- walking for 3 blocks (5 minutes), taking a bus, then taking the subways (I put it in the plural because you have to change subways), then taking another bus (notice that the buses are very inefficient, so…each bus you have to take means *at least* a 15 or a 20-minute, and as for the subway, it takes around 45 minutes, not counting the ENORMOUS amount of stairs you have to climb…
OR
2- walking those 3 blocks (5 minutes), taking a bus (15-20 minutes waiting plus 20 to 40 minutes in it), walking for 5-10 minutes and then taking a train (20 minutes) and then the subway (10 minutes) and another bus (20 minutes).
OR
3- walking those 3 blocks (5 minutes) and taking a single bus – yes, you got it right, this is what I do to get to my university – I’ve been doing this for the past 13 years. And still, people call me crazy. Want to know why? 😉 Of course there’s a catch! hahahahha 😛
The bus is very nice, very comfortable, unlike the regular buses. This one isn’t regular, it comes from another city…so, it has very comfortable benches to sit on and curtains on the windows – which are SO useful when it’s sunny, thank God I have those curtains (the regular ones don’t have any such things, obviously 😛 They look more like stuff to transport cattle…). Even if it comes from another city, and even if the whole itinerary is long like hell, it doesn’t have a toilet. So…too bad if your intestine isn’t well one day, or if your blatter doesn’t hold a billion litres of pee, or if you start feeling sick for any reason (it’s common to feel sick after many hours inside a bus in the middle of a cloud of yucky air pollution, by the way). It doesn’t have a toilet, which it should (by law, probably, I’m not sure)! And it costs more than twice the fees of the regular buses…which means the round trip costs $ 13,20 instead of the usual $6 that you’d pay to catch regular buses. You’re going to say I’m a cheap person, but think $13,20 multiplied by 5 days of the week multiplied by the days in a month. Considering the largest part of the Brazilian population earns a monthly salary of around $ 600 (when they’re legally employed, of course :P)…of course, not everybody goes from my house to my university…some people live closer to their destination, but others live even further 😛
Ok, but suppose the cost doesn’t matter that much because I’m middle-class. Taking one single bus that is 3 blocks from your place and that leaves you at the door of your university is a great privilege, so, why would anyone consider me crazy? Because it doesn’t really have a schedule…if you’re lucky, the bus will be there 2 minutes after you’ve arrived, or 15 minutes. And if you’re even more lucky, it’ll face no traffic and get there in 40 minutes (which means you’ve spent about 50 to 60 minutes in traffic, even if you’re VERY lucky). But…it usually does face traffic. Then it can take from 1 hour to 3 or even 4 hours…PLUS the 40 minutes or 1 hour or 2 or 3 hours that you spend at the bus stop waiting for it…still, I prefer to take it, that one single bus, instead of having to walk carrying a bunch of stuff and taking those many subways/buses and running more risks of being mugged.
Another option I have (but I only do it after waiting for the bus for over an hour) is to take a twin bus (it belongs to the same bus company and it costs the same) that doesn’t go exactly to my destination…then once I leave it, I can take a taxi and spent $20 for a 5-minute taxi ride 😛 (true, a 5-minute taxi ride means I could walk…but that’s just because you don’t know the risks…and the bridge and the roads I have to cross in order to get there…trust me, 20 dollars is nothing :P)
So…you basically have to be a VERY PATIENT (basically a budhist :P) person in order to depend on the very very crappy and inefficient public transportation if you live in a city like mine instead of Amsterdam, or even in an Australian city like Melbourne. And you have to leave like…3 hours in advance, and still risk arriving late!!! It’s sooooo much easier to go to your garage, put all those books and stuff you have to carry in the back of your car, and go. If you face traffic, you can take a short cut. And even if you decide staying in those traffic jams, you’ll spend an hour or two there at most! A person in a car only spends over 1 or 2 hours inside their car in my city if they have to cross the whole city and face a monster traffic jam. To get from my house to my university by car with normal traffic, it takes from 20 to 50 minutes. When there’s heavy (but not waaay too abnormal) traffic, it takes an hour, an hour twenty…but it would never take 3 hours. Not even when the city floods. And it would certainly never take those 6 hours (which is my personal record :P) that it took one day when the city did flood and I had to wait for the bus for 3 hours and spend another 3 inside it. Were I not loaded with stuff that day, I would certainly have come walking. Better to walk for 6 hours than to stand in a bus stop bored to death and sitting in a bus bored to death 😛
My city has very scary numbers when traffic’s concerned…we have like 11 million inhabitants and around 6 million cars (!!!). And I don’t remember the figures correctly, but it was something along 110.000 buses…which is SO LITTLE compared to 6 million, right???? Ok, so each bus transports, what, an average of 40 people? Or even 60 if you carry them like cattle, let’s say…still, not enough!!! And the subway, as you can guess, does not serve the entire city, it’s soooo far from that…and the trains are the scariest places you’ve ever been to. Here there’s only one “civilized” (trust me, I am not being prejudiced here) train line. The rest is like…well, the trains are literally falling to pieces, and the worst kind of marginals use it as a means of transportation, it’s scary, especially if you’re a woman.
The city has implemented a rotative system – on Mondays cars that have license plates finishing in 1 and 2 can’t circulate from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. and from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Then on Tuesdays cars with plates that end with the numbers 3 and 4 can’t circulate and so on. The government thought this would help circulation…it didn’t. People either borrow a car (suppose your mother doesn’t have to use the car on Mondays, which is when your car can’t circulate – and then when Thursday comes, and hers can’t be out on the streets, she’ll borrow your car) or…buy another! Yes! Many people have 2 cars, with different license plates of course ;), just in order to be able to go out on that specific day. Sure, they’re not gonna buy a brand new car, any junk will do, it’s only 1 day out of 7 anyway…:P
The city has also implemented a mandatory measure called “Control-Air”…suuuuuch a smart idea 😉 (not!!!) This is how it works: each year every car that is 10 years old or less (that’s right, I said LESS!! Oh and it goes for cars that have just been bought brand new as well…) has to pass a test that measures the quantity of pollution it emits. Of course you have to pay the government to be able to pass the test, because it has a cost…and of course it has been found out that that money didn’t get invested where it should have (instead it mysteriously “disappeared” in some politician’s pockets LOL)…and OF COURSE cars that are over 10 years old, and trucks, and buses, don’t have to be submitted to the test, because cars produced over 10 years ago used to be soooooooo much more technologically advanced (nottttt!!!!), and are now better than never, considering their drivers are always very worried about maintaining them (NOT!!!)…
@ Josh (and anyone else who’s wondering the same as he is :)) – I’ve only been to New York (and another place very near NY, Secaucus I think the name was…), Washington D.C. and Mount Laurel (NJ). I thought traffic in D.C. was very good, but the one in NY (and to go from Secaucus to NY as well) reminded me of São Paulo veeeeeryyy much LOL
But Mount Laurel & nearby places in New Jersey scared me. No, there are no traffic jams and all that terrible metropolitan mess, true. But neither are there places for pedestrians to walk!!!!
As a tourist, all I could think of was basically: “WHERE THE FUCK AM I??????” – that whole state is weird. I mean, all I’ve seen were houses – beautiful houses, with beautiful laws and gardens, but…WHERE THE HELL IS THE SIDEWALK????? ***ANY*** sidewalk!!!!
I felt like I was in a horror movie…the cities looked like ghost cities, there was simply NOBODY in the streets, not a soul except, of course, my brother and I. That was just creepy! We noticed a few people inside their homes looking at us through the window panes, with a very suspicious look, as if thinking “Who the hell are those weirdos and why are they walking? Are they dangerous psychos?” – we felt as if walking were a forbidden activity, really, I’m not joking 😛
Buses?!? What are those??? 😛 On the other hand, one SUV after the other came speeding like mad one after the other…we had nowhere to walk…it was either the road (and being killed by one of those at that speed must be very unpleasant :P) or the gardens. We obviously decided to ruin people’s lawns + gardens by walking over them 😛 Got nice photos of rabbits and other silvester aninals because of that, though 😀
And so we walked and walked, and it was house after house after house…it started raining, and we were still walking without getting nowhere. And without having seen a single bus to catch. And we obviously didn’t want to rent a car LOL So..finally we got to a place which was like a mall, but we couldn’t really find anything remotely similar to what we call “downtown” 😛 I suppose it’s all pulverized/descentralized…we took a taxi anytime we wanted to go far (and everything seemed far :P), because it was dangerous to walk in a place where not only there are barely any sidewalks, but also almost no traffic lights…how to cross a road with speeding cars without risking your life??? (again, in SP it **is** dangerous to do that too, even with traffic lights that are supposed to guarantee all cars and motorbikes and buses and bikers are going to stop once the lights turn red…oh sweet dellusion LOL)
Anyway…we thought that wasn’t a nice experience, and while mentioning it to our acquaintances & friends, we’ve heard similar stories, but those people went to other cities in the US! So…I suppose it’s a general condition?? Except, of course, big cities such as San Francisco, NY, D.C., etc? Or am I completely wrong and visited the one single state where things are designed exclusively for private cars?
Gerard, I loved your use of the expression “metal box” heheehe I shall adopt it from now on 😛 (sorry, the message turned out to be huge, I’m not very economic with words…I’ll totally understand if you don’t read it :P)
Here in my city cars are very expensive to buy, but people buy them anyway! Some people have no home of their own, or barely any food, but they have to have a car, even if it’s very old and crappy…as if it were an essential thing, as much as food or water. And well, to tell you the truth…it kinda is, in a city like mine. The city’s SO big, things are so far away…it’s impossible to go to places walking: depending on where you’re going, it would take 3, 4 or 5 hours…riding a bike is almost equal to suicide, I don’t recommend it not even to my worst enemy! The death rates among people who use bikes (except those inside green parks) are just ridiculous (in the worst sense possible) – oh, the death rates among motorbike riders are also extremely high, by the way…the subway, which is the ONLY public transportation system that really works (when it doesn’t collapse due to technical difficulties, of course :P), is nooooowhere near enough…
For me to get from my house to my university everyday, for example, I have the following choices:
1- walking for 3 blocks (5 minutes), taking a bus, then taking the subways (I put it in the plural because you have to change subways), then taking another bus (notice that the buses are very inefficient, so…each bus you have to take means *at least* a 15 or a 20-minute, and as for the subway, it takes around 45 minutes, not counting the ENORMOUS amount of stairs you have to climb…
OR
2- walking those 3 blocks (5 minutes), taking a bus (15-20 minutes waiting plus 20 to 40 minutes in it), walking for 5-10 minutes and then taking a train (20 minutes) and then the subway (10 minutes) and another bus (20 minutes).
OR
3- walking those 3 blocks (5 minutes) and taking a single bus – yes, you got it right, this is what I do to get to my university – I’ve been doing this for the past 13 years. And still, people call me crazy. Want to know why? 😉 Of course there’s a catch! hahahahha 😛
The bus is very nice, very comfortable, unlike the regular buses. This one isn’t regular, it comes from another city…so, it has very comfortable benches to sit on and curtains on the windows – which are SO useful when it’s sunny, thank God I have those curtains (the regular ones don’t have any such things, obviously 😛 They look more like stuff to transport cattle…). Even if it comes from another city, and even if the whole itinerary is long like hell, it doesn’t have a toilet. So…too bad if your intestine isn’t well one day, or if your blatter doesn’t hold a billion litres of pee, or if you start feeling sick for any reason (it’s common to feel sick after many hours inside a bus in the middle of a cloud of yucky air pollution, by the way). It doesn’t have a toilet, which it should (by law, probably, I’m not sure)! And it costs more than twice the fees of the regular buses…which means the round trip costs $ 13,20 instead of the usual $6 that you’d pay to catch regular buses. You’re going to say I’m a cheap person, but think $13,20 multiplied by 5 days of the week multiplied by the days in a month. Considering the largest part of the Brazilian population earns a monthly salary of around $ 600 (when they’re legally employed, of course :P)…of course, not everybody goes from my house to my university…some people live closer to their destination, but others live even further 😛
Ok, but suppose the cost doesn’t matter that much because I’m middle-class. Taking one single bus that is 3 blocks from your place and that leaves you at the door of your university is a great privilege, so, why would anyone consider me crazy? Because it doesn’t really have a schedule…if you’re lucky, the bus will be there 2 minutes after you’ve arrived, or 15 minutes. And if you’re even more lucky, it’ll face no traffic and get there in 40 minutes (which means you’ve spent about 50 to 60 minutes in traffic, even if you’re VERY lucky). But…it usually does face traffic. Then it can take from 1 hour to 3 or even 4 hours…PLUS the 40 minutes or 1 hour or 2 or 3 hours that you spend at the bus stop waiting for it…still, I prefer to take it, that one single bus, instead of having to walk carrying a bunch of stuff and taking those many subways/buses and running more risks of being mugged.
Another option I have (but I only do it after waiting for the bus for over an hour) is to take a twin bus (it belongs to the same bus company and it costs the same) that doesn’t go exactly to my destination…then once I leave it, I can take a taxi and spent $20 for a 5-minute taxi ride 😛 (true, a 5-minute taxi ride means I could walk…but that’s just because you don’t know the risks…and the bridge and the roads I have to cross in order to get there…trust me, 20 dollars is nothing :P)
So…you basically have to be a VERY PATIENT (basically a budhist :P) person in order to depend on the very very crappy and inefficient public transportation if you live in a city like mine instead of Amsterdam, or even in an Australian city like Melbourne. And you have to leave like…3 hours in advance, and still risk arriving late!!! It’s sooooo much easier to go to your garage, put all those books and stuff you have to carry in the back of your car, and go. If you face traffic, you can take a short cut. And even if you decide staying in those traffic jams, you’ll spend an hour or two there at most! A person in a car only spends over 1 or 2 hours inside their car in my city if they have to cross the whole city and face a monster traffic jam. To get from my house to my university by car with normal traffic, it takes from 20 to 50 minutes. When there’s heavy (but not waaay too abnormal) traffic, it takes an hour, an hour twenty…but it would never take 3 hours. Not even when the city floods. And it would certainly never take those 6 hours (which is my personal record :P) that it took one day when the city did flood and I had to wait for the bus for 3 hours and spend another 3 inside it. Were I not loaded with stuff that day, I would certainly have come walking. Better to walk for 6 hours than to stand in a bus stop bored to death and sitting in a bus bored to death 😛
My city has very scary numbers when traffic’s concerned…we have like 11 million inhabitants and around 6 million cars (!!!). And I don’t remember the figures correctly, but it was something along 110.000 buses…which is SO LITTLE compared to 6 million, right???? Ok, so each bus transports, what, an average of 40 people? Or even 60 if you carry them like cattle, let’s say…still, not enough!!! And the subway, as you can guess, does not serve the entire city, it’s soooo far from that…and the trains are the scariest places you’ve ever been to. Here there’s only one “civilized” (trust me, I am not being prejudiced here) train line. The rest is like…well, the trains are literally falling to pieces, and the worst kind of marginals use it as a means of transportation, it’s scary, especially if you’re a woman.
The city has implemented a rotative system – on Mondays cars that have license plates finishing in 1 and 2 can’t circulate from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. and from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Then on Tuesdays cars with plates that end with the numbers 3 and 4 can’t circulate and so on. The government thought this would help circulation…it didn’t. People either borrow a car (suppose your mother doesn’t have to use the car on Mondays, which is when your car can’t circulate – and then when Thursday comes, and hers can’t be out on the streets, she’ll borrow your car) or…buy another! Yes! Many people have 2 cars, with different license plates of course ;), just in order to be able to go out on that specific day. Sure, they’re not gonna buy a brand new car, any junk will do, it’s only 1 day out of 7 anyway…:P
The city has also implemented a mandatory measure called “Control-Air”…suuuuuch a smart idea 😉 (not!!!) This is how it works: each year every car that is 10 years old or less (that’s right, I said LESS!! Oh and it goes for cars that have just been bought brand new as well…) has to pass a test that measures the quantity of pollution it emits. Of course you have to pay a tax to the government to be able to pass the test, because it has a cost…and of course it has been found out that that money didn’t get invested where it should have (instead it mysteriously “disappeared” in some politician’s pockets LOL)…and OF COURSE cars that are over 10 years old, and trucks, and buses, don’t have to be submitted to the test, because cars produced over 10 years ago used to be soooooooo much more technologically advanced (nottttt!!!!), and are now better than never, considering their drivers are always very worried about maintaining them (NOT!!!)…
Hi. I really enjoy reading your thoughts on transportation and cities. Have you read the book, Hungry City? http://www.hungrycitybook.co.uk/ The architect gives a nice study on how cities are shaped through food. Although she doesn’t discuss transportation much, it is side-effect. We go where the food goes and food is now found in supermarkets. Supermarkets (and now huge clubs like Costco) are found on the fringes of towns – not in the city center. Cars are utilized to get to the food. A bad cycle has sprung up. Check out the book if you have time. 🙂