The Oil Drum

There's a revolution afoot. A revolution in city planning that reinforces the attributes that makes cities great - dense mixed use buildings, pleasant pedestrian friendly streets, efficient mass transportation and interesting mixed use public spaces. This revolution de-emphasizes the role of the automobile in the dense urban environment, challenging the conventional wisdom that cars are essential to moving people around the city.

None of these ideas are new, indeed many point out that this is just going back to the pre-1920s organic urban development that was in place before the automobile obsession of the last 85 years. Cities did pretty much as much they could to open themselves up to the automobile, but issues of traffic congestion, pollution, pedestrian/cyclist deaths and noise/honking have persisted and worsened over time. The tide is now shifting against the automobile in the urban environment. Not because drivers are finally willing to sacrifice their automobile for the public good, but because the public is finally realizing that they have been sacrificing their lives and the quality of their lives for an illusory economic benefit.

A new report released in February at the Urban Center (Madison and 51st Street) gives hard data to support this shift. It showed that passenger automobiles serve little to no economic function in the Manhattan Central Business District (Manhattan CBD = South of 60th Street). Key Findings below: