Transport planning policy article critique Essay

Transport planning policy article critique - Essay Example â€Å"Peak everything† is a phrase that Heinberg and other ecological advocates use to indicate that most finite resources are reaching or will reach exploitation limits and will thereafter only give less and less of the resource at higher and higher cost, but peak oil has achieved special attention. Since every element of the economy needs petrochemicals in production (and not just in factories but also in high-intensity Green Revolution agriculture), consumption, transportation and distribution, peak oil means the end of growth, since every element of the society becomes perpetually more expensive. The connection with transportation is obvious: Transportation must be sustainable if it is to be relevant. Hank Dittmar's Transport and Neighbourhoods (2008), and his earlier collaboration with Ditland (2004), emphasizes sustainability in its approach. Dittmar argues that sustainability will have to be part of a ground-up approach to design. It's meaningless, for example, to make it easier to navigate an inner city without a car if the people who work at the inner city commute from a suburb that is designed for urban sprawl. Dittmar argues for sustainable cities. These cities are characterized by a number of factors: 1. Sustainable transportation and sustainable city design being interlinked 2. ... calls â€Å"the five minute pint†, or the five minute trip to a local pub; this means that it's not just walkability for access to essential institutions like groceries and schools, but also walkability to reasonable centers of entertainment and social interaction 5. Accessible public transportation: A subway is meaningless if it takes a car to get there 6. Market-based strategies 7. Scale of problem demands immediate and technological solutions Dittmar's position as a Prince Foundation urban design analyst does provide his claims with authority and plausibility, but I fear as I look at his analysis that perhaps there is the classic problem of an expert analyzing his own issue. First: Experts tend to reduce everything to their core issue. Second: Experts often can only see things within the theoretical blinders of their own profession. Urban planning and transportation are obviously connected, but it seems naive to think that it's just urban planning and its inaccessibility to non-commuting approaches causes driving issues. There are obviously numerous other factors. Gas and oil subsidies in the West, particularly in America, make it artificially easy to drive cars (Geiger and Hamburger, 2010). In general, public investment into research provides corporations with the means to produce antisocial institutions: Research in general should focus on other factors. There's also a culture of car ownership. Cars are signs of independence, prosperity and masculinity: The purr of a Lamborghini still has great pull even in this increasingly green age. It's possible to design a city where no one needs to drive a car, and people will still prefer to. And the problem is that mass transportation not being sexy means that less people ride, which reduces the number of stops the system