Professor Peter Jones, my UCL colleague, has been leading an EU funded project concerned with urban mobility, past and future, in five Western European cities – Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Paris and Vienna. The report is now available, as is a short speech by Peter.
A trajectory is identified in which cities start by attempting to accommodate the car, see the difficulties in high density locations and so reallocate road space to walking, cycling and public transport, and subsequently move on to focus on place – the role of streets as public realm for non-mobility activities. The figure above shows how car use peaked and then declined in consequence.
Recognition of place as an important quality of urban streets presents a problem for conventional transport investment appraisal, which only recognises the economic benefits of increased mobility. The report advocates ‘vision and validate’ as an approach, as opposed to the traditional ‘predict and provide’, using cost-effectiveness analysis to justify investment to attain the desired balance between mobility and place.
This report is a valuable synthesis of a considerable amount of data and analysis highly relevant to how we think about the future of cities.