Transport is the main source of air pollution in cities, in Moscow cars create 90% of all emissions. Why are innovative ways to save cities from transport and environmental problems not working?
About the expert: Arkady Gershman is an urbanist, author of the City for People blog. Participated in the transport project of the high-speed tram Verkhnyaya Pyshma-Ekaterinburg; railway section of the Saint Petersburg transport plan until 2030. He was engaged in the development of a bicycle route and a priority passage for public transport in Veliky Novgorod; updated national regulations on urban mobility. One of the authors of the youth development strategy for our country until 2035 at the Center for Strategic Development.
About once a year, the news is about an innovative method to overcome traffic jams: cable car, Uber-powered self-driving cars, string transport, hyperloop, and even a gyroscopic monorail. All this is very similar to a sweet pill for all diseases: give us money, and we will solve all issues in just a couple of years. But the reality turns out to be much more boring and practical: cities are launching trams, making convenient city trains and building bike paths.
Cable metro is a marketing name for the construction of cable car lines.
Self-driving cars powered by Uber and other aggregators – the merger of taxi and carsharing, you just call a car and drive without a driver to the right place.
Unitsky String Transport, also known as “SkyWay” – elevated rail transport with capsules. Served under the guise of an innovation that does not require large investments and is about to take over the world, but does not work anywhere. Some see in this project signs of a financial pyramid.
Gyroscopic monorail – the concept of a tram-train moving on one rail, sometimes the train itself is located at the level of the second or third floor of buildings with long highways and a rail between rows of cars.
Hyperloop – the name of a system of underground tunnels with a vacuum, where vehicles move at ultra-high speeds in capsules or without them.
The history of traffic jams
Mass motorization of the 2020th century affected almost all cities of the world. Even in Amsterdam, which today is a model cycling city, just half a century ago, parking lots were made on the site of squares and canals, and entire blocks were demolished for the sake of interchanges. It’s hard to imagine today, but archival photographs are very reminiscent of cities in XNUMX.
At first, cities tried to beat traffic jams with simple means: more lanes and more space for cars. It got easier for a while, but then the effect of provoked demand appeared, known as the Lewis-Mogridge Postulate: the more space for personal cars we make, the more cars we get. People changed from trams, trains and bicycles to cars, filling up new spaces. This couldn’t go on indefinitely, so cities changed their transportation strategies.
It became clear that the issue of transport is a matter of mathematics and geometry: you need to transport as many people as possible in a limited space. Cars are the least suitable for this, because they take up too much space and carry too few people. Therefore, increasing the capacity of streets for cars was abandoned, cities began to develop more efficient forms of mobility, with an emphasis on pedestrians, cyclists and public transport.
Paid parking has existed for almost 100 years and has long been an integral practice of cities, and now more and more municipalities are introducing tolls. Often, cities physically close transit through their hubs to cars so that the journey by car is longer and longer than by bicycle or public transport. The main investments are directed to the improvement of public transport, and not to road construction. Some cities have parking limits for new homes to encourage people not to drive.
The impact of transport projects is not limited to the issue of traffic jams – this area affects many aspects. For example, a sedentary lifestyle is responsible for many deaths from stroke, diabetes, and heart disease. Transport emissions are the main source of air pollution, only in Moscow motor vehicles account for 90% of emissions. Deaths and injuries from accidents cause great economic and social damage to cities. Only for our country the cost of an accident is from 2% to 5% of GDP.
There are many tools for managing the movement of people, but they all boil down to limiting car travel in the city with a quality alternative in the form of fast and reliable public transport and safe cycling infrastructure.
New Technologies
Despite the successful experience of dealing with congestion by the usual methods, there are still cities and countries without a clear transport policy. This includes almost any major city of the former USSR. It is these cities that are most often targeted by business projects to introduce innovative modes of transport — politicians and officials are convinced of a quick and easy solution to the problem of traffic jams without a comprehensive assessment of the situation.
For example, cable line projects (“cable metro”) are now being discussed in Moscow, Krasnodar, Yekaterinburg and other cities of our country. They are seriously considered as an alternative to conventional buses, trams and even the subway. But such systems have low carrying capacity even when compared to a dedicated bus route. Ground transport also has the ability to launch different routes and make short transfers, which cable systems do not have. In addition, there are issues of accessibility and security – how to pull people out of the booths above the five-story building? Therefore, such systems are used all over the world as shuttles across rivers or mountains, where it is almost impossible to start up conventional transport.
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If we take the Elon Musk hyperloop, then we are faced with extremely high construction costs to serve an extremely small percentage of residents – such expenses are contrary to common sense. But even with the construction, the question of evacuating people from the vacuum tunnels remains – no one knows how to answer it yet.
The development of electric cars, self-driving technologies and the sharing economy will change the usual image of the car, removing the need to park along the streets and buy a car. But this will not solve the main problem of the car: it will still take up a lot of space and carry very few people. From an environmental point of view, a massive switch to batteries could cause a new crisis – no one knows how to recycle them.
There are also positive examples. Car sharing and bike rental services – new technologies have made familiar things smarter and easier to ride. If 10-20 years ago such services were an exception to the rule, now they have become part of everyday life.
New strategies
There are a lot of such subtleties, and the emergence of new solutions can devalue a transport strategy with an eye on any one mode of transport. Therefore, the transport strategies of cities have moved from quantitative indicators of mileage or the purchase of new units to quality – the availability of the city.
🇫🇷 The new strategy of Paris creates a city within walking distance: within a radius of 15 minutes from home, a person should have everything necessary for life. Urban planning and transport solutions of the city will be correlated with this parameter. This does not cancel the development of public transport or bike paths, but it eliminates the need for unnecessary trips and saves human time – a resource that is limited for each of us.
🇸🇬 A similar parameter is embedded in Singapore’s strategy: by 2040, 9 out of 10 people at rush hour should move around the city without a private car. The time of any trip within the city should be no more than 45 minutes. To achieve these goals, compact districts are being built, bike paths, subways, dedicated lanes for buses, and so on.
🇬🇧 The cornerstone of London’s transport strategy is ecology and safety. Urban solutions are aimed at reducing the level of pollution from transport and reducing the number of victims of accidents. To achieve these goals, they introduce ecological zones, increased fares for old cars, speed limits and develop cycling.
These and other strategies are united by one approach – flexibility. Implementation can be achieved both by standard methods and by new ones when they appear. At the same time, the focus is not on the use of individual technologies, but on a person and his quality of life in the city.
Such comprehensive strategies are sorely lacking in Russian cities. We still have the approaches of the 1960s with plans for the massive construction of interchanges and underpasses, the priority of personal cars in planning and the development of only certain types of transport. Often, when reading strategies and viewing projects of metro stations in an empty field, the thought arises that the development of transport in our cities is not aimed at making people’s lives easier, but at loading builders with work and budget money.
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