Cars Almost Killed Our Cities, But Here's How We Can Bring Them Back | Gabe Klein | TEDxMidAtlantic

[Music] [Music] [Applause] we fundamentally are building cities that make us sick this is such a stark image this is Beijing in 2008 when the government shut down power plants and factories and asked people to stop driving for 12 days and look at the impact visually on the environment that's the effect of our choices and we now know in 2016 that greenhouse gases emitted by transportation is the number one cause of our pollution problem the other thing that motivates me and I think is a serious problem that people overlook is this number of deaths on our roadways worldwide every single year it's a health crisis it's an epidemic it's a number one killer of young people worldwide and in the United States and it's going up not down because we have cheap gas free highways and pretty inexpensive or free parking let's take a step back and look at history let's go way back 5,000 years Mauri Syria cities have been fundamentally the same since the beginning of time they're built around transportation and trade and security and fundamentally everything is within five to 15 minutes walk or in this era horse ride what we know is that whether it's Mauri syria or today the denser our infill development is the more people we have per square yard per square mile there's a disproportionate increase in productivity we had two billion people on the planet in 1900 we're at 7 billion today we're on our way to 9 billion but we can't keep consuming at the same rate now skip ahead let's look at the turn of the last century this is what cities look like people ruled the streets in places like New York City or in Seattle on First Avenue people also ruled the streets and congestion was not viewed as a bad thing more congestion meant more business how many people think these stores are doing well or raise your hand you don't need to be an economist or a sociologist to figure that out or right down the street in Washington DC look at our balanced transportation system with people walking biking taking high-capacity street cars the pedestrian who fundamentally ruled now skipping ahead to the 1950s the federal aid Highway Act or the National interstate and defense act as it came to be known post-war was supposed to be a jobs program it's supposed to facilitate interstate commerce and it did but we very quickly took it too far this 25 billion dollar infrastructure project started to tear the heart and the soul out of our cities instead of linking our cities we drove highways right through our cities we segregated people within our cities and we changed the very fabric and this is the dawn of suburbia we push people out to the suburbs the government policies combined with the business models created a land-use problem as much as a transportation problem and fundamentally it also created a cultural problem where people became less tolerant and I would argue less creative as a result in industry sold us on this American dream this great future with all these machines and it looks beautiful except for the machines and this was the birth of the American car culture but what people don't think about is we started spending our money differently a car was half of a year's income and we started buy more cars than houses houses are an appreciating asset cars are a depreciating asset and with every vehicle that was sold there was a direct correlation to the fatalities that we saw on our roads and not everybody benefited equally by this flight to the suburbs Detroit is one of the starkest Sande greatest examples during the 1920s the black population swelled from 41,000 to 120,000 as people came from the south to work in the auto industry and black bottom was a historic predominantly Africa Amerika neighborhood and when we drove the highway through we killed 350 black owned businesses and we also destroyed the fabric of the community and so at the same time we were doing that driving the highways through our cities what else were we doing we're shutting down all the streetcar systems which is the way that people got around Detroit and other cities and so we were abandoning people in their neighborhoods and you can look almost to the month of the year and you can see that we sent people a clear message get the hell out of the city and that's what people did and white flight took place let's look at parking because now we created an environment where you needed parking spaces so in 1870 the US Congress told Washington DC that you can take up to 50% of your space on your streets and devote it to park space not parking parking was park space back then now it means something else when people started to tie up their horses and then their cars between those trees and we don't even know how many parking spaces we have now we're talking about hundreds of millions the best estimate I've seen is 500 million spaces that's two for every automobile and that's as much space for cars as there is for people so what's the effect of this let's say you want to rent an inexpensive $800 a month unit well guess what because the developer had to build a parking space because the city required it underground guess what happens that becomes a $1,300 apartment even if you don't have a car oh by the way when you are in the car then it's another $900 a month so it's a 62 and a half percent increase meanwhile we have more than 500,000 homeless people in the United States and by the way a quarter of these people are children like this young girl behind me so what's happening now in cities what's happening is that we are getting denser but particularly overseas we sort of leveled off in the United States this is Shanghai and in 26 years the time we would take to plan a metro system or maybe pass a bill for Zika virus here in the US they built a city with more than 24 million people over a thousand bus lines a maglev train that gets to the airport in eight minutes or you can drive but it's gonna take you an hour and three hundred and twenty nine metro stations and when I was over there in June I was talking to the government officials I said with all this technology coming autonomous cars what are you planning they said another three hundred and twenty metro stations people won't build a building there if you don't build a metro station for them so there's increasing understanding that perhaps the transit that we build is not just about moving people that's part of it but it's really about creating the way of life that people want the doctor's office and the stores and the bars and the restaurants and the schools around those nodes and the density and so we're really moving from a post-war hyper-consumption mode if you will to a 21st century collaborative consumption mode and I was lucky enough to work with Robin Chase at Zipcar in the early days and it was the public-private partnerships that we built that facilitated the spreading of services like this but it's not just about services and you know Airbnb and uber and lyft it's also about the space that we have on the streets this is Pennsylvania Avenue again we used to have a very robust streetcar system this was a transit people oriented Street then it became a car oriented street where the Secret Service basically parked and we created a more balanced 8 to 80 complete Street for an eight-year-old or an 80 year old and then we did supply the services to go with it in DC and Chicago bike-share low cost frictionless leverages GPS technology solar modular design and we make it very easy no capital investment less than 30 cents a day you can ride a bike as much as you want and now people in cities are realizing wait a second do I really need to go to the gym is that really necessary or could I just walk or bike to work now of course it depends on your land use right because we have built these places that are making us sick and these places that are making us sick we don't want to get out of our car and so we drive there we go up the escalator down the escalator we run on the treadmill we come out and we go home and then we wonder like when we used to walk and bike everywhere and now we drive everywhere we wonder why a 15 year old is now 15 pounds heavier than they were back then we wonder why the average adult is 24 pounds heavier than they were in 1960 and looking at the fully loaded societal cost and benefit of the choices that we make we now know that walking and biking infrastructure is essentially free it throws off positive dividends to society because the health and the sustainability affects but we keep building roads for cars even though cars the most subsidized form of transportation so in Chicago we said we're gonna call it publicly that the pedestrian is our focus that's our priority it's the indicator species of a healthy city a sustainable city and economically viable city and in New York they've studied this and they found that guess what when you create a place that people want to be what do they do they go there and when they go there they spend money so this is a pro-business strategy so my argument is perhaps we should be looking at the difference between spending and investing in our future we've done a lot of stimulus road projects but they aren't paying dividends they're paying anti dividends with negative ROI and if we think we need more capacity guess what it's counterintuitive we need less capacity if you want people to drive less take the road away take the lanes away and guess what happens they do something else they ride their bike they take the train it's called induced demand and when we are building infrastructure that's Pro people as I learn building the Chicago River Walk guess what the private sector will foot the bill particularly if they're going to benefit they can have long-term leases they can have more customers they've learned the same thing in Alice where they decked over the freeway and now it's the hottest neighborhood in the city with the highest real estate values or Seoul Korea where they went from this ugly double-decker freeway to a beautiful biophilic River and now everybody wants to live there imagine that or in Barcelona where they planned now to get rid of two-thirds of the traffic in their city first phase 1 they're just going to get rid of it in terms of cut through and then phase 2 they're getting rid of it all together and so we have two types of streets basically we have our local streets okay and this is the street that you might live on and the pedestrians should be the priority period and the cars should always be the guest and then we have our bigger arterial streets where we need to segregate traffic is we're gonna have buses we're gonna have trucks and people are only gonna feel safe walking and biking and taking transit if they have their own space now they've been doing this for decades in northern Europe if you've been to Amsterdam or anywhere in the Netherlands or Denmark the car is the guest in most places but for us we have a very hard time in the u.s. getting our heads around the concept of designing around people and so I'm excited about technology which might seem also counterintuitive but I think that the only way we're going to make this cultural shift in the u.s. back to designing around people is through technology because it will give us the cover if you will that it'll be the catalyst to make the change and this technology is coming fast and furious it's happening right now and the beauty of the autonomous vehicle by the way is we can cut ownership rates in half in places that are not dense places like DC 88% of people moving here aren't bringing a car or buying a car now without autonomous technology so you can imagine it'll go to almost a hundred percent we can also cut those traffic fatalities that 1.24 million worldwide the 35,000 number in the u.s. imagine cutting it within 10 years by 90% and as important we can reconfigure our cities on the street and off the street Perkins and will did this mock-up of what 40th Avenue in San Francisco could look like in the future there's only one broken-down Chevette left on this street I was in Indianapolis recently and I was so proud to see that they had taken a lane of traffic and they had built micro-units 300 square foot micro-units and they'd bolted on to what a parking garage so in this autonomous future we can get rid of the parking garages because these vehicles are going to be electric they're going to be shared not owned and they're going to be self driven so we can start using the right tool for the right problem we don't have to use a car for everything 60% of trips less than a mile in the United States are car driven trips that's a 10 minute walk now when you look at what's happening in Northern Europe they're moving to ban cars from their city centers by 2050 in the EU places like Oslo and 2019 cars will be gone in the central core so look we're facing a lot of change a lot of change and I love this kubler-ross model because it's basically about death but then it's about rebirth and the excitement that you get through the rebirth and then once you experiment then you can mainstream concepts and that's what we're going to be doing but I worry that we're not ready I'm not sure that we're ready for this change particularly in cities and in government there's a lot of other change we're gonna be 3d printing iPhones down the street and they're already 3d printing buildings in Denmark and in places like Dubai there are new business models that are super exciting with very small format housing where you can buy it once and take it with you across the country and they'll plug it into different units and slot it in just like a server into a rack and then the biggest change is the coming era of unlimited and free energy which most experts agree is going to happen that's gonna upend our entire economy and might actually save our lives now big picture I know what some of you were thinking what does anybody gonna do for work so the economists did a study on this with McKinsey and the big thing that came out of it was first of all that stem may be overrated because we might need creativity more than stem when all the STEM jobs are automated that's a little scary but the other thing is they said in 15 years jobs will dissolve the way we work will be dissolved now I don't necessarily think that's going to happen or not going to happen but I think when it comes to what we're talking about today about cities and how they work and how they operate it's an important thing to think about what if we're not working anymore or working 80 to 90 percent less that means we're gonna be spending a lot more time at home in our neighborhood growing food in our neighborhood hanging out in our neighborhood with our children and what kind of city are we gonna want to live in and what kind of society are we gonna want to be so thinking back to the parking thing again why are we building these spaces that we don't need there's a hidden cost of parking and if you look at one parking space it's about the same size as a micro unit that can actually house two people so what are we doing particularly when the return on investment is about six times on the micro unit and we could give somebody a place to live for less than $400 a month that's less than most subsidized rental housing yes so why are we doing that we can take point oh five percent of our current parking and put all those homeless people in a house and I think the autonomous vehicles and some of the other technologies are gonna help us get there but we have to admit that we've totally screwed this one up for the last 75 years we've done things that are bad for people bad for our planet and definitely bad for business particularly if you're not focused on quarter to quarter profits which I'm not and so the technology is a key part of the puzzle but we can't get too wrapped up in the technology because think about what happened in the 1920s 30s 40s 50s with the combustion engine in the car we thought that was the solution to everything and we built everything around and look at the mess that we got ourselves in so if we want 50% of trips to be active transportation trips the other have to be shared mobility trips which is ideal whether it's transit or something else we want more density near our transit stuffs we want people to walk and bike then let's fit all this technology into the world that we want to create let's not build a technology and then hope that things work out for us and maybe if we're able to achieve this lasting urban change by the way this is my daughter using the public space I put her in there for that reason for that effect you know I think we'll actually head back to a simpler time we're gonna go back to a simpler time and I certainly hope so and we're gonna leverage the future to get back to that simpler time right now we are the wealthiest country in the world but guess what we are 15th happiest and you look at the countries that are happier their urban planning is a bit different than ours so this big directional shift starts with a a very basic right to safe high-quality public space also to connectivity we should not have to pay for connectivity to others and then fundamentally everybody everybody should have a roof over their head as a basic human right and by the way it's good business thank you so much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 111,938

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Global Issues, AI, Big problems, Cities, Developing World, Future, Illness, Mobility, Population, Technology, Transportation, Trees, Urban Areas, Urban Planning

Id: GXn2Iu8mSWY

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2017