As sustainability and transportation sustainability become a bigger and bigger issue, urban planning, along with land use planning and design, is becoming much more common in many areas. At one point everything naturally happened and evolved, if there was a thoroughfare, a population increased and all the needs of a population such as stores, entertainment and amenities would pop-up as well nearby and communities would become, to a certain level, self-sustaining. But with the change in the world economy and how our civilization runs itself, such communities now must be planned to try to make transportation more sustainable. One of the biggest ways that planners try and make transportation more sustainable is by reducing the number or required trips, or the number of wasted trips.
William R. Black goes into great detail about this Urban Planning in chapter 11 of his book Sustainable Transportation. Black discusses the different models, including the gravity model, that have been used to model traffic flow and how people will move. But as Black points out, there are new theories every day and no model as been definitively proven as one that works right. It seems that it is pretty much impossible to affecting and accurately predict or model how people will move. For example, a model can not accurately predict that I may need to first drive over to Giant, then get a call and have to drive across to a friends house to pick them up, then once again go back to Giant because I forgot something, then head across town to a different store, then go to work...you see where this is going. Along with this modeling, urban planners are now attempting to use zoning and new construction to build sustainable communities that harbor more sustainable transportation such as walking and can basically be self sustaining.
One example of this is the currently under construction City Center in Washington, DC. The several block site will have apartments, condos, offices and retail. It is being designed to be a green community type area that would have a lot of foot traffic and could potentially have people living, working and shopping in a several block area that self sustains itself. the problem with this is that you can not decide who lives there and the rent is high because it is in downtown DC. This will attract the upper class who can easily afford to travel wherever they wish.
This brings us to another issue that Black brought up. Black brought up the issue that no matter how close you build what someone may need in a trip or how short you make the travel time, a human still may not go there or may take a longer travel time just by human error, a want to move about more, or the necessity to make multiple trips to different areas.
So the basic question is, can Urban Planning even help? I do think that Urban Planning can help. For example there are communities that area able to be relatively self sustaining such as Celebration, Florida which was built by Walt Disney Corporation. While the community is based as close to the workplace of almost all of its residence and it has many of the amenities such as retail and health services, each house still has a 2-3 car garage which leads one to believe that there are many more trips leaving, or even around Celebration then initially designed. I think that planing such as this can help, but it is impossible to plan for the human factor and impossible to plan and model the human races ever changing needs, especially when any infrastructure change can change those needs.
What do you think?
William R. Black goes into great detail about this Urban Planning in chapter 11 of his book Sustainable Transportation. Black discusses the different models, including the gravity model, that have been used to model traffic flow and how people will move. But as Black points out, there are new theories every day and no model as been definitively proven as one that works right. It seems that it is pretty much impossible to affecting and accurately predict or model how people will move. For example, a model can not accurately predict that I may need to first drive over to Giant, then get a call and have to drive across to a friends house to pick them up, then once again go back to Giant because I forgot something, then head across town to a different store, then go to work...you see where this is going. Along with this modeling, urban planners are now attempting to use zoning and new construction to build sustainable communities that harbor more sustainable transportation such as walking and can basically be self sustaining.
One example of this is the currently under construction City Center in Washington, DC. The several block site will have apartments, condos, offices and retail. It is being designed to be a green community type area that would have a lot of foot traffic and could potentially have people living, working and shopping in a several block area that self sustains itself. the problem with this is that you can not decide who lives there and the rent is high because it is in downtown DC. This will attract the upper class who can easily afford to travel wherever they wish.
This brings us to another issue that Black brought up. Black brought up the issue that no matter how close you build what someone may need in a trip or how short you make the travel time, a human still may not go there or may take a longer travel time just by human error, a want to move about more, or the necessity to make multiple trips to different areas.
So the basic question is, can Urban Planning even help? I do think that Urban Planning can help. For example there are communities that area able to be relatively self sustaining such as Celebration, Florida which was built by Walt Disney Corporation. While the community is based as close to the workplace of almost all of its residence and it has many of the amenities such as retail and health services, each house still has a 2-3 car garage which leads one to believe that there are many more trips leaving, or even around Celebration then initially designed. I think that planing such as this can help, but it is impossible to plan for the human factor and impossible to plan and model the human races ever changing needs, especially when any infrastructure change can change those needs.
What do you think?
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