Changing of the Blog

This blog has been spent following the California High Speed Rail.  To simply comment on a government caused impending train wreck is masochistic; this blog will turn to discussing the importance of sustainable transportation.

Impacts of Automobile Centric Urban Growth

Automobiles serve as the center of our car culture society.  In the US, nearly every aspect of one’s life is affected by the car.  At the foundation of urban design is transportation; how a person gets from one place to another.  The automobile, however, is wholly unsustainable.  To base a society on an unsustainable foundation is problematic.  With the automobile centric urban land-use design (urban growth centered around the automobile) based on unsustainability; its effects are seen environmentally, economically and socially.   

In Western Society, today’s Car Culture is the victim of its own doing.  Automobile and related industries have far reaching cultural effects beyond what is easily seen from environmental damage.  Throughout the 100 year history of the automobile and the aggregate of related industries producers; financial success has been its primary goal, a reasonable business objective.  In an automobile centric society, however, there are further reaching consequences that effect its participants to this car culture and the simple goals aspired by product manufactures to increase sales.    

These negative impacts of an automobile’s inefficient nature are magnified over time when used as the base of society.  An automobile centric car culture is an amalgamation of inefficiencies that include land consumption for urban growth.  

In considering what makes the automobile unsustainable, one measure is its basic energy inefficiency.  An average car weighs three thousand pounds.  In terms of inefficient, this says it takes a 3,000 pound car to carry a 200 pound load (one occupant).  The larger the vehicle, the heavier it is and the more energy is spent carrying its own weight. 

The impact of a car’s ability to become more energy efficient regarding its fuel consumption, however, has no bearing on the inefficiency of travel time to society in traffic congestion and the reflecting lower local economic productivity.  This again, complies with the nature of building a society on an unsustainable foundation.

In an automobile centric society, land consumption is engulfed by the automobile. Including freeways, surface streets, driveways, shopping mall parking and other parking, a staggering seventy percent of all land in automobile centric urban land use design (sprawl) is consumed by the automobile.  The human component is insignificant and the automobile is parked 95% of its life.

In his book, The High Cost of Free Parking; UCLA Professor of Urban Planning, Donald Shoup, explains the many negative design issues associated with automobile parking.  He reasons that free parking is a terribly expensive public subsidy.

The result of basing our culture on an un-sustainable single source for mobility gives us uncontrollable traffic congestion, destructive stress-related behavior, reduced productivity due to commute time, increasingly negative social impacts from the isolationism of single-occupancy vehicles, sky-rocketing fuel costs, declining air quality, and loss of prime production farm land.

Automobile oriented areas are unfriendly to any other form of transportation.  Not only is walking on a freeway hazardous, it is illegal.  Freeway systems are visually intrusive, noisy, stressful to navigate, the vehicles generate negative impacts of poor air quality, and with the increase in fuel costs at the pump; have produced negative impacts to local economies.  Society needs transportation methods that alleviate all levels of harm to reach sustainability.  

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics there were 22,707 automobile fatalities in 2007.   Combining figures from the National Safety Council (NSA) show that for every 100 million miles traveled in 2007, there were 182.5 accidents and 2.19 fatalities.  (www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/) 

An October 21, 2004 article by Health Editor, Jeremy Laurance, in The Independent, a London newspaper headline states: “Car fumes and traffic stress trigger heart attacks”.  The article goes on to state: “Fumes from car exhausts, noise and stress brought on by traffic congestion are likely to be the main causes of the increase in risk, researchers say. Air pollution is known to be a factor in heart disease, which develops slowly over decades, and research has shown that people living close to a main road have twice the risk of dying from the condition.”

The air quality in the San Joaquin Valley is being worsened by a higher car count.  This higher car count has been concluded as the primary factor in air pollution.  In The Fresno Bee newspaper article: published 04/29/04, Barbara Anderson writes:

“Smog and tiny particles make area one of nation's worst, lung association finds”

“Smog in the Valley is blamed for contributing to asthma rates that are among the highest in the state and for increases in the number of people with lung diseases, such as emphysema and chronic bronchitis.”

As these regulations attend to the environmental aspects of an automobile’s inefficient nature there are two other aspects which have gone un-noticed.  Consider the automobile’s negative economic and social impacts.   

In reference to the unsustainable social aspects to an automobile centric society, there are situations that occur constantly while at the steering wheel of a car: for every driver.  The most common occurrence is the reassurance that everyone else is a bad driver.