Mobility policy demands undogmatic thinking

The political debate about mobility following the regional elections in June 2009 can hardly be referred to as being of high quality. The parties have bent over backwards either to sharpen their knives to cut past policy to shreds, or have gone the populist route to try to make motorists happy.

Fortunately there are exceptions. The Greens have tried to stimulate debate about the logistical future of Flanders. De Lijn has published an ambitious plan for the future. Its reasoning is multi-modal and – at last – draws a distinction between levels of spatial scale and the types of travel patterns associated therewith.

In this contribution I would like to plead in favour of abandoning a policy of continued trouble-shooting (read: more road infrastructure, parking facilities, ...) and putting effort into developing overall spatial-traffic concepts for the medium and long term. Back to basics.

Transport systems and spatial development go together

Our historical cities are custom-built for the pedestrian. High density, great proximity and multi-functionality.  The train has created opportunities for urban growth around the stations. The HST (high speed train) is now doing it again, but on a larger scale.  The car has drastically changed this relationship between regional development and transport systems. An individual motorised means of transport, of course, provides enormous freedom. In this country we have translated this into spatial atomisation: we became a-topical, placeless. The car takes us to the bakery-round-the-corner, to Brussels and to Provence.

This development has been going on for 50 years. We have seen the vehicle fleet grow from 350.000 passenger cars in 1958 to more than 6 million in 2009. Naturally we are coming up against limitations. Networks do after all have capacity limitations. We never realised or never “wanted” to realise this. But the car is a prime example of the “Tragedy of the Commons”. Individual short-term advantage takes precedence over the public interest in the longer term. Congestion, danger, environmental quality, climate, ... everyone knows the facts and the reports.

Must we decry the car? No, it remains an excellent machine for making journeys of a certain distance and/or at a time when public transport is not available. Or to a remote destination.

Locally-oriented travel concepts

For other transport flows we should – taking into account scale and mass – dare to take the plunge and opt for effective transport systems. Is this something new? No. Look abroad, look at Ghent.  A city centre becomes far more interesting if you make room for the pedestrian and the cyclist, linked to public transport networks.  Ghent chose to go that way and, as a city, is visibly improving.

In Maastricht only 13% of all journeys by residents are made by car. The rest are on foot, by bicycle or by bus. An effective parking policy ensures that residents leave their car at home, but visitors find parking.

 Also at a metropolitan district level we must dare to make that leap in terms of transport systems. If in Hasselt 50.000 cars drive on the Kempische Steenweg each day, then sooner or later this will become impossible to manage. The express tram (Spartacus) provides a good alternative for such a quantity.  

The Brussels-Brabant regional net in Flemish Brabant also represents an interwoven public transport network. Radial lines to Brussels, tangential lines between the cities of Brabant, linked to environmental development projects at the junctions. Leuven station is a good example of this. But also in Aalst, Halle, Mechelen, ... we see this trend.  In professional literature this is called Transit-Oriented Design, or TOD. Make networks of lines and focus on concentrated development around the transport junctions.

This concept has been around for decades in the countries around us. München, Kopenhagen, Freiburg, Basel, Nantes, Montpellier, London Docklands,…

Give these concepts more time

Does this solve everything at a stroke? Of course not. The existing environmental planning and behavioural patterns of people will play their part for some time.  But, and this I hear too little in debates, in 10 to 20 years hundreds of thousands of people, families, organisations and businesses make choices of where to locate. If these are TOD-oriented, it will give you a different mobility landscape.  The history of Basel, Zürich, Freiburg demonstrates that 30 years is peanuts in urban history.  Even now we see young families thinking more critically about place of residence and relocation. Just wait another generation.

Honey and Vinegar: the infrastructure footprint

In this country we have been subsidising the Tragedy of the Commons for some decades. Those who went to live in isolated areas were rewarded with cheap infrastructure: roads, sewage pipelines, cable, post, refuse collection. An equal price for an unequal social burden. But even worse. The subdividing and ribbon-building Fleming is rewarded with a lower rateable value. He is extremely space-extensive and infrastructure-extensive, but is rewarded under the guise of social “equality”. An unequal social footprint must be treated unequally, that goes without saying.  Let the city centre resident benefit from his favourable footprint. He is efficient in terms of the use of infrastructure, makes fewer journeys by car, ...

A reversal of this treatment could bring about enormous planning and transport changes over a 30-year period. The property market will also respond to this, that much is certain.

Example. A residential street of 100 meters provides space for 10 houses if I subdivide plots that are 20 meters wide. All the costs of road construction, utilities, services must be recovered from those 10.  In a city I can get at least 24 dwellings per 100 meters because I can even build upwards. Calculate your profit.

New? Once again: no. Look around you in the EU. Must be doable in the year 2009.