A fascinating take on the congestion charge in the British Medical Journal this week: the “charge tackles road danger at its source” instead of using the typical “blame the victim” approach of lecturing at pedestrians. It’s worth quoting at length:

Two hundred years ago London was a cesspit. Its streets were awash with sewage and infectious disease was a deadly scourge of the urban poor. The man credited for cleaning up the mess was a tenacious London politician called Edwin Chadwick. His 1842 report Survey into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Classes was a landmark in public health with its graphic descriptions of how filthy living conditions were a key factor in the spread of infectious disease. Chadwick battled hard for sanitary reform, waging political war against those opposed to central government intervention in public health matters. His opponents argued that people were clever enough to manage their own affairs, claiming there was “insanity in sanity.” But Chadwick won through and is now acclaimed as the instigator of the most important public health reform of the 19th century.

The sewage has long gone, but now the streets of London are in gridlock and traffic is the deadly scourge. Each year in inner London there are some 4000 pedestrian and 2000 cycle casualties, air pollution is a serious health threat, and much of inner London is a noisy dirty mess… The [charging] scheme is based on the simple economic premise that if people have to pay more for car travel they will buy less of it. Schemes in Singapore and Norway have resulted in substantial reduction in traffic. Less car travel will result in fewer crashes, reduced emissions, and may encourage drivers to use healthier transportation options such as walking and cycling. If the revenues from charges and fines are ploughed back into other healthy transport initiatives then the scene is set for a major advance in public health.

One hundred years later it is still the poor who face the greatest risk on the roads. Children from families without a car, because they walk more than children from car owning families, have substantially higher pedestrian death rates… With increasing traffic volume, walking has become more hazardous, leading to a vicious cycle of more car use leading to increased road danger leading to more car use… A survey of parents in two inner London primary schools found that 85% were worried about traffic danger on the journey to school…

Congestion charging tackles road danger at its source and is a refreshing change from the usual efforts to influence the behaviour of the potential victims of road traffic crashes. The scheme will no doubt meet with fierce opposition from the usual line up of vested interests but if it reduces deaths and injuries of pedestrians and cyclists, encourages walking, and reduces car use, then it will be a major public health reform, and Ken Livingstone will be to the walking classes what Edwin Chadwick was to the working classes.

Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology and public health. Public Health Intervention Research Unit, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Full cite: British Medical Journal 2003;326:345-346 ( 15 February ).

[sent to CCM list]

Well, why not?

The auto industry spends nearly $10,000,000,000 a year on marketing cars to
Americans. (Put aside for a moment the opportunity costs exacted by just
that sum, a small portion of the industry’s total expenditures.) At this
stage in capitalism, advertising no longer just tells you about stuff you
never knew you needed; it manufactures consumer desire for objects that
just plain aren’t needed. And when said objects, in the course of normal
use:
– poison the air and water, belching out half of the nation’s smog and a
fourth of its greenhouse gas emissions (and, through the manufacture of
their components and fuel, are directly responsible for far more) and
collectively leaking out enough toxins to be the nation’s second largest
non-point-source source of runoff;
– kill over 42,000 Americans a year, including over 6,000 walkers and
cyclists, just in crashes (the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every 3.5
days, or a front-page terrorist attack [30 dead] every 6 hours; the annual
pedestrian and cyclist death toll alone is equivalent to the crowd which
would fill a half-acre plaza), AND kill thirty times more animals in the
U.S. than the fur industry;
– create endless traffic jams, causing endless frustration and costing the
U.S. economy $100 billion in wasted time; and
– seize, for their own purposes, half the land in our cities and towns from
humans, flora, and fauna, to the tune of nearly one million acres a year,
I think that any sane human being would indeed question exactly whether
we’re getting our money’s worth from these things.

I don’t believe that many people realistically think that horseless
carriages, regardless of their power source, are going away anytime soon.
They are, indeed, too damn convenient, and we’re a wealthy enough country
that we can afford the convenience. However, at what point in the
proliferation of the automobile do the diminishing returns result in
negative marginal utility — do the social costs begin outweighing the
private benefits? Especially in terms of congestion and land consumption,
since a growing fleet of cars is competing for a limited amount of roads
and parking, we may well have gone past the point where each new car out on
the road is a net drag on our economy, society, and environment.

Given all that, why not protest against a ruinous machine’s highest form of
spectacle, this most blatant display of capitalism cannibalizing itself?
Why not counteract that with some festivities?

The far happier responses to this question have a point, as well, but this
is merely my own thinking. I’m extrinsically motivated — minimizing social
cost and providing/taking fair shares are personally important — and I
realize that not everyone thinks the same way. Your mileage may vary.

Also, there’s a reason why the Auto Show ride is not on the last Friday of
the month. (First, because there’s no Auto Show then, but that aside….)
It’s not a Critical Mass event per se; indeed, nothing that we do outside
of assembling on the last Friday of the month — including this list! —
can actually be called “Critical Mass,” since CM is nothing more than the
happy coincidence of bicyclists converging for a periodic bike ride. The
people of Critical Mass use the energy from the ride to spark all sorts of
events. Some will interest you more than others, but none of them “are”
Critical Mass.

CCM list post.

“Even if you were able to
convince 50% of the population to ride a bike, the other stubborn 50% of us
are just going to be more like to hit one of you since you will be all over
the place and are harder to see.”

True and false. Say that the mode split is 95% cars and 5% bikes, and that
10% crash in any given year. The odds of any given crash (indeed, any
interaction of any sort between two vehicles on the road) being between two
cars is 90.25%, between a bike and a car 4.75%, the odds being between two
bikes 0.25%. If that ratio changes to 50/50, then those percentages go to
25%, 50%, and 25%. That means that car-car crashes will fall by 72.3%
(percentage-wise), bike-car crashes will increase by 1053%, and bike-bike
crashes will increase by 10000%. The last bit is crucial, because very few
deaths occur from bike-bike crashes due to the relatively small momentum of
a light vehicle + generally lower speeds. And since mortality rates for
bicyclists *per trip* (not per passenger mile, which is misleading since
bicycle trips are shorter) is actually lower than for motorists, the nation
would see a major reduction in fatalities from transportation crashes. That
reduction pales in comparison to the lives that will be saved through
improved cardiovascular health and reduced air pollution, though.

This model is, however, ridiculous because it removes one crucial factor:
social change. In rich-country (OECD/Annex 1) cities where more than 50% of
all trips are made by walking and cycling, as in Stockholm, Copenhagen,
Freiburg, Geneva, or even Davis, California, citizens — since the majority
of citizens are walking and cycling — demand improved cycling and walking
facilities for greater safety, and often demand commensurate limits to the
speed and access granted to motorists. Bicycle lanes and paths, bollards
along sidewalks, pedestrian-only streets, speed bumps, special traffic
signals for cyclists and pedestrians — if demand for cycling and walking
facilities increases, democratic governments are quick to implement these
and other measures to improve safety for pedestrians and cyclists.

An increase in the number of bicyclists on the roads leads to improved
driver awareness of cyclists and to lower bike-car crash rates. If a driver
knows that many cars and bikes use a given street, s/he will look for both
cars and bikes before turning onto that street. This is hard to prove, since
cities with high numbers of cyclists tend to have extensive bicycle facility
networks (and any improvement in safety could be due to either human or
physical differences), but both drivers and cyclists have pointed this out.

I don’t deny that there’s a thrill to speed — sustaining 30 mph on a
straightaway is absolutely exhilirating, even more so because you know that
*you* are providing that power (not some abstract machine). However, anyone
who truly loves the power and speed of cars should be aching to get all
those other drivers off the roads. How many chances does one get to go from
0 to 60 on roads that are always congested with millions of drivers who
don’t see the beauty of speed — who are driving as drudgery, because
there’s no other way to get from A to B? Driving might be fun, but is
driving in traffic fun? Given a fixed road network, cars are a “privative
good” with a “negative marginal utility”: an increase in the number of cars
decreases the utility (say, fun) of everyone who owns a car, by increasing
traffic congestion. So, it’s in every *real* car lover’s best interest to
have fewer cars out there on the road.

Think of it like flying: some people fly airplanes purely for fun, and
because they love planes. Yet “general aviation” gets shunted out to tiny
satellite airports far away from major cities, and is restricted to a tiny
slice of airspace. The rest is given to big commercial jets that are mostly
hauling miserable people around between miserable airports. I suspect that
many of the people riding those jets, especially on shorter flights, would
rather teleport themselves, or maybe take a high-speed train from city to
city. If America eliminated 50% of the commercial air traffic from its
airspace, we could open up vast new skies for general aviators, the people
who fly planes for fun. And those folks could fly from airports closer to
home, since the jets are no longer hogging up all the low-level airspace
near the cities.

Lisa Rochon of the Globe & Mail looks forward to Toronto’s first car-free day.

In Copenhagen, 80 per cent of the movement through the city centre is foot
traffic. It took 40 years of systematic removal of vehicular lanes and car
parking to get to this point. During that time, 100,000 square metres once
dominated by traffic have been turned over to 100,000 square metres of
public squares and promenades dedicated to pedestrians.

On Sundays in Tokyo, some of the major shopping districts are closed to
automobile traffic. They’re known as “pedestrian paradises.” Heaps of
bicycles are left unlocked along the sidewalks of major intersections.

These cities are nurturing the mobility culture — people who want to move
with ease through the city. They expect public transportation to be fast,
efficient and elegant. They want to ride their bicycles to work without
fear of amputation by a passing car — they want to walk because it’s part
of a daily pleasure. In 1996, the Copenhagen Declaration was presented at
the Car-Free Cities annual general meeting. Mobility was defined as “an
expression of freedom and an integral part of modern society. Mobility is
part of our culture.”

What kind of city do you belong to — one designed for mobility? Or do you
have a sense of paralysis, like you’ve been spending too many years
sitting in traffic?

Ten million Canadians drive to work alone each workday. But, in this
country, there is a mobility city where people walk and bike to their
downtown destinations about as much as they drive. There are generous bike
lanes and greenways for pedestrians to travel through much of the city.
There are traffic signals that privilege the wish of the pedestrian or the
biker to cross immediately. This is the mobility city called Vancouver.
Since 1994, walking and biking into the downtown — largely because of the
increase of condominiums in the core — has dramatically risen to
represent nearly one-third of all traffic…

There comes a point when the invasion
of cars is so great — on our streets, in our front yards, in parking
lots — that it triggers a collective “Enough already.” Car owners are not
a legally protected class of people. Why should their rights be privileged
over others? Even Americans are starting to reconsider their marriage to
the vehicle.