Abstract
This article provides a personal reflection 30 years after we created the concept of automobile dependence. The paper entitled “Gasoline Consumption and Cities: A Comparison of US Cities with a Global Survey and Its Implications” and an associated book “Cities and Automobile Dependence” stirred up transport planning, especially in the US. We examine the criticisms, this evoked at the time within the perspective of what has happened in cities since then. Key policy prescriptions of re-urbanizing cities and prioritizing transit, walking and cycling, have been largely mainstreamed, though not without some painful changes in professional practice such as road capacity increases being seen as the only solution to traffic. Urban planning and transport policies adopted in innumerable cities worldwide have moved to reduce automobile dependence, though academic and policy debate continues. The future is likely to continue this debate, especially over autonomous cars where there will remain a fundamental need to keep cities on a path of reduced automobile dependence by ensuring that hard-won principles of reurbanization of corridors, integrated with new transit alternatives and walkability at precincts/stations, are given the highest priority.
Highlights
The concept of “automobile dependence”, which we introduced in the 1989 article and book, has become a part of the language of planning and our responses to the problem, especially “urban compactness” that were so ridiculed at the time, have become basic pillars in most future thinking about mobility and planning in cities (see Schiller and Kenworthy (2018) and Newman and Kenworthy (2015) for many examples
The idea has often stuck that we only talk about density in our work but we always had a range of parameters to describe automobile dependence that relate to urban design and walkability in cities and have written a lot on these topics over the years and Matan and Newman (2016)
This cultural shift is reflected in the titles of our three main books which as stated above have become like a trilogy: the first (Newman & Kenworthy, 1989b) is where we introduced the empire of automobile dependence and how it needed to be fought; the second (Newman & Kenworthy, 1999) is where the war was being conducted and some battles were being won; and the third (Newman & Kenworthy, 2015) is where the war is over but many battles remain
Summary
In 1989 we published “Gasoline Consumption and Cities: A Comparison of US Cities with a Global Survey and Its Implications” (Newman & Kenworthy, 1989a) along with a parallel book “Cities and Automobile Dependence: An International. We have continued to work in this area and have published papers and a trilogy of books on the topic and related issues (Newman & Kenworthy, 1989a; 1999; 2015); but we no longer maintain the substantial database on global cities which requires significant resources and a great deal more youthful energy It would be good if it was restarted as such global data are not being produced on a standardized and transparent basis though the Demographia database (Cox & Pavletich, 2020), on density is coming closer to providing the land use trends; the infrastructure, transport and energy trends are not collected. This paper will revisit the reaction to our research, look at some data trends, examine some better understandings that perhaps we have, including our new Theory of Urban Fabrics, and briefly suggest some key priorities we may need to follow in our cities as we plan the thirty years with issues like autonomous vehicles and the need for Net Zero Cities in the age of climate change
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