Maximizing Mobility (Let's Just Not)

 

As we saw in the last installment, it's pretty easy to get distracted from the core "job to be done" and instead focus on bright, shiny, nicely-marketed pseudo-solutions. But what if it's not just us, the individual citizens, who are also focused on the wrong goals? What if the reason we have a Dept of Transportation is because we actually think that vehicle mobility is what we need to optimize, instead of individual accessibility? What if we had a Federal DoT and NHTSA (Nat'l Highway Traffic Safety Administration) but no Safe Accessible City Administration?   What if NTSB investigated serious car and truck crash deaths but issued directives only to car manufacturers?

 
Does anywhere actually have a Department of Accessibility of any form? Why not?

If we made the poor choice to focus on mobility instead of accessibility, what might result?

• We might assign engineers and bureaucrats to support mobility as our core goal, and to optimize our mobility system. We could have success theater and vanity metrics for mobility then, too.
• We could mistakenly prioritize high-mobility cars over low-mobility people, and end up with odd inversions where those driving through a neighborhood are a higher priority than those living in it.
• We could see class structures of mobility, where 'haves and have-nots' are based on mobility. Do it right, and everybody will want to have mobility peacock feathers to demonstrate their virility and social success, and car-ownership becomes necessary for "good neighborhood living".
• We could have purposeful anti-mobility, as a social fence for undesirables.
• We could further distract from mobility itself, to the means of mobility, as a proxy for all the above. After all, companies prefer to sell cars, or better still SUVs and trucks, not just options for personal mobility. We could easily have car sales as a positive, with walking seen as a negative value.

Once we focused on mobility as the priority for government, what might occur?:

• Bureaucratic patterns of vanity metrics and fostered externalities, like centralizing accolades and shedding possible blame. 
  
• Entrenched car-centric engineering guidelines, which create vast inertia to change.
• Feedback loops between various elements, like cars and parking perks for the rich and powerful, but also some non-obvious ones like suburban zoning and sprawl -> big box stores at the city edges -> more driving -> more suburban prawl....lather, rinse, repeat
• No obvious end to the optimization cycle -- how much mobility or VMT is "enough"? Always a push to be a little faster to go a little further, and to spend a little more time in cars

Result:

 

As an aside, think back to cartoons from decades past, specifically Flintstones and Jetsons. Really these are similar shows except for the settings -- family sit-coms via cartoon. One had a pedal-car with rock wheels, and the other flying cars. Obviously the Jetson's had higher mobility with a neighborhood looked more like a city, but even the Flintstones had car culture mobility with a SFU neighborhood. Rarely if ever was the transportation mode the key point of an episode, but dreary time-clock punching jobs and modern stresses often were.

Double aside: nobody ever says "where is my rock-wheel car?", but I hear people say "where is the flying car I was promised?" quite often. We think we have pollution and hazard now...do you really want cars flying around with the same freedom, failure rate, and quality of piloting that we seen in cars today?

 
If instead we start thinking about Optimizing Accessibility over Auto Mobility, where would we start? There are good examples around the world, and some at home. We should focus on the trips we routinely have to make and have use cases for each, starting with the most prevalent and critical, then working down the list. Ideally most would have options for multiple modes of travel, with trade-offs and balancing possible.  Then we need design decisions, and for a while this means real design work and not just stock engineering guidelines, at least until we get patterns that clearly meet the broader societal needs.

 

As we weigh options, we should think about door-to-door trip characteristics and decision criterial. Maybe we can borrow from work already done. This isn't rocket science!

• If we take a look at Jeff Speck's Walkable City approach, walkable trips should be safe, useful, interesting, and comfortable.
• If instead we look at cycling, the Crow Manual (NL) has five similar points: safe, coherent, direct, attractive, and comfortable.

We must stop maximizing mobility for mobility's sake while ignoring impacts on other modes of transport and aspects of life, and instead focus holistically first on accessibility and then on the various modes and destination point-pairings of end-to-end trips. Frequent trips should ideally be close, and we have a lot of good thinking for this with the 15-minute neighborhood ideas. It is fair to re-think the structure of our neighborhoods -- scale, granularity, and zoning -- to improve accessibility, and to revisit telecommuting and delivery services to shift or obviate the need for some trips.

We should stop viewing the car as the "one-size-fits-all mobility solution", as we already see that in actuality cars are an invasive species that tends to drive out other transportation modes while also fitting few needs optimally.  Instead, we should press for safe multi-modality with multiple transportation options for most trips.

We must weigh each trip in terms of impact (utility) to traveler, and impact (side effects) to society overall.

• Safety: My trips cannot add significant risk to your life, and vice-versa. My convenience cannot trump your safety. Accessibility MUST be egalitarian for all critical functions, and while cars may have a place the view must be that cars are guests at best and predators at worst in neighborhoods.
• Usefulness: Useful trips should be as short and convenient as possible, with core amenities near to home.  Longer trips will have mobility considerations which are valid, but these trips should be relatively less frequent.
  
• Interesting: Slabs of concrete are not interesting or attractive, whether vertical or horizontal, and our view should be that if we can afford to build something then we can afford to make it look nice.  Streets can be designed for human scales to be both useful and attractive places to be instead of places to pass by expeditiously.
• Comfortable: We must take into account the gestalt of the user experiences, and manage noise, noxious pollutants, hazards, sun, wind, and visual intrusions so that all street users can enjoy their journeys.

Note that safety is just one component of an acceptable accessibility trip, but it's a non-negotiable one. Certainly, we can weigh other design values to an extent, but it's not acceptable to have more than negligible risk for routine trips. Safety will remain a core focus of the next few blogs, though other related accessibility topics will of course be treated as well.