Reinventing Transport

Singapore's National Day is this week (9 August). So I decided to share Singapore's urban transport story - or my slightly  unusual take on it .  It is   a unique city in various ways but its urban transport policies are well worth your attention even if you don't live in Singapore. This is a warts-and-all version of the story, and it is my own view, not any kind of official one. It's also a little wonkish in parts. [Hi all you policy wonks!] But I hope to keep your interest with some surprising twists, such as: Why was the bus-only public transport system in an awful state by the early 1970s? If the buses were awful in early 1974, how was Singapore able to impose drastic increases to the cost of motoring in 1975? You will have guessed that the buses must have been drastically improved in 1974/75. But how was that achieved? Singapore urban transport enjoyed success through the 1980s and 1990s but its core social bargain (cars for the rich; decent but bas...

Shared space street design is a fantastic innovation. But most excitement about shared space (or “naked streets”) seems to focus on the counter-intuitive phenomenon of “ safety through uncertainty ”. I think another important lesson from shared space has been neglected. A key benefit of shared space is that it expands the urban public realm. And this is done with little or no loss of transport utility. This point was emphasized by shared-space pioneer, Hans Monderman , but is often forgotten or under-emphasised. This "public space dividend" is also relevant to many more streets than shared space itself will ever be applied to. Many street-design innovations can yield such a dividend if they create spaces where speeds stay below about 30 km/h. This would allow a surprising amount of what we now think of as traffic space to become part of the low-speed public realm. How? I try to explain in an article, " Earning a Public Space Dividend in the Streets " ( pdf ), ju...

LOS? Was ist LOS? The traffic engineering concept of traffic Level of Service (LOS) is used to rate the acceptability of traffic flow on a road, using scores of A, B, C, D, E and F. Try typing " LOS level of service traffic " and almost ANY country name into your favourite search engine. You will quickly see that LOS is very widely used. OK but so what? The problem is, LOS is a disaster when clumsily applied to cities. It is one of the key ways that traffic planners stumble into the habit of making motor vehicle flows their highest priority. LOS is a key tool that blinds our decision-making processes to the possibility of having smarter goals such as those of the New Mobility Agenda , like accessibility , moving people and goods efficiently not vehicles, or making places great . The San Francisco StreetsBlog has a wonderful series of articles by Matthew Roth on LOS thinking and its alternatives: Paradise LOSt (Part I): How Long Will the City Keep Us Stuck in Our Cars? Para...

The US has started trials for distance-based charging mechanisms aimed at ultimately replacing the gasoline tax. Motorists in several US cities are being recruited to try out a new mileage-based road user charge system . The Public Policy Center of the University of Iowa is leading the trial. This is very good news (although I realise this trial is only the first step in a very long process with no gurantee of political success). Smart folks like Bern Grush and Robin Chase have been calling for usage-based pricing for a long time and pointing out that motor fuel taxes are gradually failing us. The Netherlands, Singapore and the UK apparently have plans for distance-based charging too. Germany and Switzerland already charge heavy vehicles based on distance and weight. There are spin-off opportunities here. I hope they don't get missed! It would be natural for people to be suspicious about having 'extras' that piggy-back on a new user charging system. But I think it would b...

A new blog on transport innovations has appeared. SMART's Inspire Mobility blog started in June. It is billed as "the official on-line innovations library of SMART (Sustainable Mobility & Accessibility Research & Transformation) at the University of Michigan". The blog depends on contributions from readers, so head over there if you think you have a transport innovation to submit. What is SMART? More information here . It also has a lively series of events and speakers and a useful e-newsletter . I like their 'five themes' approach to 'sustainable transportation'. The diagram above is from the SMART website here .

It's interesting to see the ideal of universal car ownership gradually eroding. Don't believe me? There have been several books in recent years along the lines of " Divorce your car! " and " How to live well without a car ". The rise of car-sharing has prompted some to see it as a potential alternative to car ownership. The car-free housing movement seems to be gathering pace and entering the mainstream of real estate development in certain places. Meanwhile, Shoupista parking policy reformists are increasingly questioning parking entitlements, including (gasp!) residential parking entitlements. Even William Ford Jr . of Ford Motor Company seems willing to contemplate a future in which cars provide a service rather than being primarily a product . So more and more people seem to be asking the question, 'are our cars dispensable' or 'could we make our cars more dispensable?' But maybe a more positive way to ask the same question is, 'can...

Here I am starting a new blog on urban transport. It is the successor to my older, now-dormant effort at Urban Transport Issues Asia . I am starting over because I don't want to be limited to Asian cities. Why the name 'reinventing'? One reason is that I see a wave of innovation breaking and opening up important new possibilities to be seized. These are interesting times to be thinking about urban transport policy. More soon.