Shared, Smaller, Slower

Sometime in late 2011, according to the U.N. Population Division, there will be seven billion of us.  With the population still growing by about 80 million each year, it's hard not to be alarmed.  Right now on Earth, water tables are falling, soil is eroding, glaciers are melting, and fish stocks are vanishing.  Close to a billion people go hungry each day.  Decades from now, there will likely be two billion more mouths to feed, mostly in poor countries.  All of these "wicked problems" will pose challenges to engineers.

We will also see opportunities and challenges associated with the "600/60 Global Club" - - some 600 cities will account for 60 percent of the world's economic growth over the next two decades.  The central role of cities in global growth is due to the benefits of agglomeration - - industry and service sectors cites having a higher productivity than in a rural setting.  It is also around 30 percent to 50 percent cheaper to deliver basic services such as water, housing, and education in cities than in a rural setting.  Managed correctly, the 600/60 Global Club has the opportunity to make huge advances in sustainable living in urban environments - - with a focus on living smaller, living closer, and driving less.

Transportation planners and engineers along with representatives from the automobile industry have key roles in the world of living smaller, living closer, and driving less.  Tom Vanderlit is the author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (2009) and he has several insightful comments in the Winter 2010 issue of the World Policy Journal - -

We spent much of the twentieth century engaged in a campaign to retrofit our cities for the car.  However much this may have seemed to make sense at the time, it now looks more like a misdirected effort to save the city by destroying it.  As plentiful as the benefits of individual vehicular mobility may be, the large metropolis can never comfortably accommodate any more than a fraction of its citizens in this manner, and we have learned the consequences of trying to do so.  Every-lengthening commutes have meant degraded public space, negative health outcomes, social fragmentation and infrastructure whose maintenance goes underfunded.

In the city of the future, we need to pursue policies that allow for safe, efficient and affordable transport of the many, while recognizing that market-based approaches that so rationally apportion space in the private sector can and should be applied to the valuable urban space - - that cities essentially give away.  We need to recognize that streets are public spaces too, and not merely, in the old view of 1930s utopian modernism, channels for moving as many vehicles as quickly as possible.  The car will continue to exist, but should be treated as a "renter" of the city, not its landlord.  The urban car of the future should be shared, smaller, and slower.

Engineering will have several key objectives during the next several decades - - one will be integrating and implementing the interplay between the city (living smaller, living closer, driving less) and the car (shared, smaller, slower).