Week 6 Lecture II Flashcards
This chapter focusses on
residential parking spaces and explores how they became a normal, legitimate and planned for aspect of everyday life.
embedding of automobility into everyday life have almost exclusively focussed on
cars in motion.
Analysis has privileged the trips, distances and new living arrangements that automobility affords and the institutions and infrastructures that have made possible the emergence and stabilisation of car-dependent lifestyles
debates of sustainability it is car use which impacts greenhouse gas emissions
cars accounted for more than 50% of the UK transport sector’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2015
this chapter focusses on parked cars rather than cars in use
and explores how planning for stationary vehicles has helped to make automobility what it is today. To do so, it conceives of parking space as an interface of infrastructure and systems of practices,’
the original house plans did not include
any parking spaces at all
Forms of mobility, such as driving
ar all social practices
parking spots
the materials of mobility practices (and, in fact, of all practices) are ‘at rest’ in between performances. These resting objects make demands on space, including requirements of size and scale, location and connectivity (e.g., to the road infrastructure).
In recent decades, car parking space in towns and cities has posed similar challenges.
The main focus for those concerned with these challenges has been the aesthetic and environmental consequences of hard surfaces, including the increased difficulty of dealing with rain water and the reduction of green space in the urban environment
the problem is that parking space
stands empty for much of the time and the solution is to make flexible spaces that might be more often in-use as public space. These forms of analysis and intervention focus on improving parking space itself, but without asking what driving is for or challenging the role of parking space in perpetuating private car dependence.
Driving is a practice, but
we can also conceive of it as an outcome of interlocking practices
Across time, temporal and spatial patterns of practice are reflected
in material form - in the road network. Activities become car-dependent because the spatial geography of practice - where we work, live, exercise, take children to school, shop and so on – takes material form
The chapter focuses on one particular interface: between
the road network and people’s homes. It explores how the provision of space for private cars, as close to the home as possible, became a normal aspect of planning and everyday life
parking space should ‘be provided
as near as possible to the home’ (1961: 45). Though the recommendations in the Parker Morris Report to ‘plan with the motor vehicle and not against it’, because ‘motor cars are a universal ideal’
The 1960s saw a shift away from the emphasis on garages that had been the solution up to that point. Gardens and landscaped areas were conceded for the creation of drive-ins (which we now call drives or driveways) and parking bays (hard standings on the grass verges between the front garden and the road)
parking for ever-increasing numbers of vehicles became
a normal and legitimate aspect of housing and neighbourhood design
It reminds us that parking standards
(and thus assumptions about car use and car dependence) are currently embedded in a range of planning domains – for example within house design and neighbourhood planning. Finally, the study demonstrates that approaches to parking are inseparable from ideas and visions of (auto)mobility and its anticipated future.
Intervening to reduce car use:
There is a different approach on new build developments where the ratios of parking space per home have been lowered. Such maximum (rather than minimum) parking standards have been included in a number of new build developments nationally over the past 5-10 years with the aim that new residents will take up car-free (or reduced car) living.
interventions in car use are likely to be most successful if
the intervention is part of a broader series of developments that make car-free living practically possible. The conflicting approaches within the parking strategy suggest that such synergies have not yet been achieved in this case.
Improving the railway commute to central London and accommodating an increased number of ‘park and ride’ commuters is deemed essential.
recent reductions in car-based travel for 18-30 year olds
(a cohort who also make up a sizeable proportion of urban dwellers); changes in shopping and working patterns because of online shopping and working at home or in third spaces; new forms of traffic and parking in the form of light goods vehicles (to deliver online shopping), which require areas for waiting whilst deliveries are made; and finally, a recent emphasis away from private vehicle ownership to the provision of mobility as a service (Commission on Travel Demand, 2017). As such, lower parking provision at home, or the separation of home rental or ownership from parking space rental or ownership (unbundling) might support such shifts. Importing one element of this broad swathe of visions and innovations into the Stevenage context makes little sense.
Mobility: what are the issues? (for u as a student)
• Get an overview of the main issues linking energy, sustainability and
transportation
• Distinguish between mobility and transportation
• Identify main trends in transition in the transportation sector
• Class 1
Mobility practices require
- skills
- meaning
- material aspects
Energy, sustainability and transportation:
what are the issues with homes and cars?
- Transportation and land use
* Transportation and emissions
Main trends affecting mobility
• Increasing urbanization (think back to our discussion of cities
and growing proportion of population living in cities)
• Shift towards sharing/service-based economy also in rel. to
energy
• Technological changes
• Automation
• Electrification
• Greater connectivity
Connections of transportation to other issues
- Land use
- Pollution
- Climate change
- Energy
- Access to education and services
- Access to employment
Have we passed “Peak Car”?
In US and UK, car travel has not increased as expected
Plateau in OECD countries in past 2 decades
Changing demographics (studying longer, aging population)
Changing nature of work (working at home, in different places rather than stable
commute that predictably requires a car)
Changing norms (car as marker of independence or success weakening)
Changes in technology (electrification, automation, micro-mobility)
New paradigms emerging
Demand-responsive transport (DRT)
Think about a situation when transport might change from being private to being
publicly available, for example, a ‘Uber’ becomes a ‘driver’ when and where demand
for transport is high.
Trip purposes in the UK
slide 10
Cars, usually thought of as being in motion
We think about trips, roads needed, fuel, gas stations
But cars also need parking space: privately owned care actually used only about
5 % of time, so 95% of the time they are parked
Spurling encourages us to think about the following:Practice of driving involves the material aspect of cars, at ‘rest’ between
instance of performing driving practice
Her research shows that practices of parking is also important for thinking
about mobility
In NL 8,2 million cars
16 million parking spots
Representing 175 square kilometers ( a bit
more than the surface of Amsterdam)
More than 2/3 are on public property
92 % are free
‘retrofit’ for parking
What happened in Stevenage is a kind of ‘retrofit’ for parking: the town that had
been planned with lots of cycling and walking made more space for cars and for
parking.
Shift in how planners were thinking about parking
Mid-forties: envisioning the ideal daily life and building for that
late 1950s: monitoring and keeping up with the rise of the motor- car
1960s with newly available statistics and forecasts, planners predict demand and
providing for it, even before it happened. àThis is the “predict an provide”
approach, also noted in our book Future of Mobility
Parking standards (and thus assumptions about car use and car dependence) are
currently embedded in a range of planning domains – for example within house
design and neighborhood planning.
Concept: parking standard
• A mandated amount of space that needs to be included for
parking in the design and planning of housing projects
• Creates a ‘hard’ infrastructure for mobility practices through
regulations
• Is based on assumptions about what people ‘need’ in terms of
mobility
• Contributes to creating ‘normality’; you should be able to park on
your own grounds AND there should be a car parked in front of
your house
Recent trends
• reductions in car-based travel for 18 to 30-year-olds (a cohort who
also make up a sizeable proportion of urban dwellers);
• changes in shopping and working patterns because of online
shopping and working at home or in third spaces;
• new forms of traffic and parking in the form of light goods vehicles
(to deliver online shopping), which require areas for waiting whilst
deliveries are made; recent emphasis away from private vehicle
ownership to the provision of mobility as a service (Demand, 2017).
Mobility as service
Towards a ‘practice-based’ conception in policy?
Demand management in transportation to also address
congestion, encourage sustainability and sustainable choices
Move away from transport type planning and governance,
towards ‘end-to-end’ journey
Would also include walking
Health benefits
Congestion benefits
Social cohesion
less need for parking at home
and
potential separation between home rental or ownership
from parking space rental or ownership (in other words,
it raises the question whether we should keep building
housing with integrated parking in the current way, or
whether these should be separated so as to be more
flexible and better represent current mobility trends.)
x and y intersect
Clearly, space and mobility intersect.
Mobility and transport tend to focus on movement measures like
Vehicle miles travelled
• Number of trips per person per year
• Distance travelled per person per year
Planners are often looking for relation between urban form and
these numbers about movement:
- based on the assumption that more compact=smaller numbers
* to serve attempts to reduce per capita driving
There are current calls to focus not solely on the ‘landscape’
the
urban form, but on land use in very concrete terms, as we saw
with the parking story of Spurling: how much room are we
committing to what kind of transportation?
Transportation and land use (2)
Population and housing density do influence how much
people drive,
BUT actual land use has big impact
Where are cars when they are moving and resting?
–>recall, 95% of time, a privately owned car is parked
It is possible to intervene through regulation
For example, changing policy for new developments in London: since 2004, the regulations state: • no more minimum parking spaces, • but a maximum number of parking spaces
Three different ways in which social practice theories can inform sustainable
energy policies:
1) practices re-crafting à materials, competences and meanings (e.g.,
meaning of driving, the types of vehicles bought, and the skills involved in
driving
2) practices substitution à different practices compete for time, space and
resources (e.g. practitioners’ time, space on roads and spending on
infrastructure)
3) change of practices interlocking à spatial and temporal reconfiguration of
practices (e.g. urban plans aiming to reduce distances between home,
work, shops
“fuel vs fuel” debate
Recall from Introduction to Sustainable Energy Transition:
“fuel vs fuel” debate
In the production of biofuels (bioethanol, biodiesel)
there are issues of land use and water resources
Are these used to produce crops for biofuels rather than for food production?
First generation biofuels: rely on about 2-3% of the global water and land used
for agriculture, which could feed about 30% of the malnourished population.
Second generation: rely on a different feedstock, which are potentially less in
competition with food
Are the feedstocks for production of biofuels sustainably produced? Are the
feedstocks used remainders of other (agricultural) processes, like grass
cuttings, or inedible stalks?
Questions to think about:
At different scales, the issues of land use can seem radically different:
How significant is transportation for land-use for transportation at city level?
How significant is transportation for land-use for transportation at a global
level?
Should we still consider transportation in relation to land-use?
If so why? Or why not?
What if we consider transportation in relation to other issues, such as
emissions? Or energy?
