COMMUNITIES WITHOUT CARS

This essay is one of a series called Myopia (correcting our environmental vision) written in or before 1997. The outline and other completed essays are on this site under Environmental Essays on the side bar.


COMMUNITIES WITHOUT CARS

Just try to imagine a place where everything necessary for a good standard of living is within easy walking distance. Certainly not the typical suburban neighborhood. Let us try to plan such a place. Sounds difficult doesn't it; but let's first decide what is most important to have nearest to our doorstep. A safe place for our children to play might be most important for many of us. Other things most of us would want to have close by are somewhere to buy food, a place to work, schools, medical offices, libraries, a place
where we could enjoy nature, a place to worship, athletic fields, and of course somewhere to buy clothing and furniture, hardware, etc. We will need to prioritize locations of each facility according to frequency of use and economy of scale. If we
eliminate the space needed for roads, parking and garages, and we share common space, we can design very livable communities with all of these facilities within a 15 minute walk or 5 minute bike ride.

There could be many basic designs for such compact communities and several levels of density. Some could be planned for retirement and the handicapped with wider pathways to accommodate small electric vehicles. My idea of an efficient community is
based on a cluster of mixed apartments, town-houses, condos etc built in a circle with a large common courtyard with access only to residents. Each home would have back door access to the common courtyard and front door to the outside of cluster. The courtyard would have a diameter of about 200 - 300 feet with playgrounds for small children and picnic areas for adults and families. Access and exit directly from outside to courtyard could be by two or three gates that would be opened by unique codes or even computer recognition of each resident's hand print. A courtyard of this size is large enough to accommodate all residents and small enough that parents could know all the children near their own children's ages. Mothers or fathers could keep watch from their kitchen or home office window.

A community of such clusters with an area about one mile square could easily accommodate from 10 to 20 thousand people, including places of employment, entertainment, sports facilities, schools and shopping. This density can be achieved with no high rise towers; two and three story homes and apartments are all that is required.

A simple sketch I have drawn looks like a tic-tac-toe grid with residential clusters in the corners, a commercial / light industrial area in the center, the top and bottom squares with schools athletic fields and garden plots, the left and right squares contain parks and churches.

The residential squares need not all be of the same design; some clusters could have taller apartments, more suited to singles and childless families, and many other variations. Probably most squares should have a convenience store and a child care center; and possibly a small office complex, and a self storage facility which could also serve as shops for small businesses.

Most people could find work within the community in the schools, parks, churches, the commercial and industrial center. Working out of our own home is rapidly becoming an option for more people than ever before. Most office work, design engineering,
computer programming, and other similar work can be done on home computers and much of the necessary communication with other associates can be done by phone, fax, email or teleconferencing

For those who must work in other communities and for other travel needs we need to develop a transit system. For local community service, there is no more practical mode than busses. To provide frequent convenient service for compact communities, we
would need one forty passenger bus operating about 16 hours a day for approximately every four or five hundred people. Today's sprawling communities would use more than one hundred private automobiles to serve the same population. No subsidies are needed
for an efficient transit system serving such compact medium to high density community. The extent and complexity of such systems would depend upon how many of such communities are close enough to be served by the same system. And the locations of industrial parks, airports, rail terminals, and if traditional suburban developments will also be served.

While every town or community's needs may be somewhat different because of many variables, from size and density to terrain and prevailing weather; ideal systems for a retirement community in central Nevada would not serve well in the diverse
communities of the Puget Sound in Washington with it's much more frequent wet weather. However most local communities in both areas would probably be best served by a system of busses of a variety of sizes from mini-vans up to the largest needed on the most heavily traveled routes. Rush hour schedules may be best served by two or,
in extreme cases more busses, running the same time. With this scheme, only the leading bus would stop at the next stop allowing the following bus to leapfrog past to take the following stop unless someone needed to get off at the previous stop. This
leapfrogging should allow the schedule to be completed in normal time even during periods of heavier than normal traffic. Schedules can be kept much simpler and by far less confusing if they run at the same time all day. Changing the size of busses to fit capacity needs can easily improve overall system efficiency. In a relatively large system this could easily be done by scheduling maintenance on larger busses during slower periods of traffic.