“We Are the Majority! The Cars Don’t Vote!”

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Thanks to Clarence at Streetfilms for the heads up on this: the impassioned presentation by transportation reform leader Mark Gorton during this fall’s Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place conference in Long Beach is now available in full online. If you weren’t able to make it to the conference (or if you want to relive the barnstorming closer), you can listen to Mark break down the myriad ways in which decades of car-centric planning has led to a series of unintended consequences with one quick click of the “play” button above.

So does this speech get you fired up? Or could it contribute to engineering bashing as described by Bryan Jones? Or both? Sound off in the comments below!

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  • Jess

    THANK YOU.  I’ve been WAITING and looking for this video since the conference.  SO happy its been put up.  He blew me away.  

  • Bryan Jones

    I came across these two interesting articles that shed light on the community values that are changing in America and how through developing great leadership and fostering innovation in the engineering profession, can help restore America’s competitive position. Many of our old ways of doing things, our policies, procedures, and standards are making engineers less relevant to our communities as these old ways of doing things continue to diverge farther away from the community values, sustainability, and the ever increasing need to do more with less. As an engineering profession, are we up to the challenge of reevaluating the needs and purposes of our policies, procedures, and standards and if they are still as relevant today to others in the community we serve as they were when we developed them.

    Our profession built the largest public works project in history with the United States freeway/highway system in the 20th century. We also solved the continential railroad system in the 19th century. We solved those challenges and problem that were identified for us. There might be new problems that need our attention and focus with all the friction that is occurring between the people and government that serves the people.
     
    Local government has the power, means, ability, and legal right to create outstanding communities. Local municipalities can identify priorities, needs, and wants by engaging the people and developing shared community values. City governments can create quality places and communities where people want to live, work and play. Cities and towns are where the jobs, schools/colleges, and homes are located where people live. As a result, cities and towns are often the center of developing prosperity and quality of life. Therefore, the health and future of the United States cannot be separated from the health and future of each state, which, in turn, cannot be separated from the health and future of its local governments.
     
    City government is often perceived as part of the problem but can be the solution if local agencies are willing to consider new forms of leadership and innovation. Successful communities in the future will develop adaptability through risk taking, innovation and leadership to better serve the people. These areas of focus will help to create quality communities to better align with the ever changing needs and wants of the people. How we communicate with the communities to get their input will need to change as well. Some community members want us to change over night while others like it the way it is or more importantly do not want to prioritize what and where they want funding. Or the tough question…what can they really afford. Only local government, working as a team with the people it serves, can create great communities.
     
    Where challenges exist, opportunities await to those willing to take strategic risks and be innovative while others continue to focus on the past rather than the future. Innovation, however, is not a word commonly used to describe government. Government over time, has created many risk-adverse environments where innovation and risk taking have become non-existent or only a result of responding to crises. This is partly due to the friction in the community, partly due to the legal environments inwhich we exists with lawsuits, and partly due to the transparency demands on government so that failure does not occur. Unfortunately failure is inevitable. Failure means we are trying. It is how we respond to failure that allows us to succeed.
     
     
    http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2012/5/29/engineerings-echo-chamber.html
    Quotes from the article…In the 20th century, U.S. engineers became known for creating much of the basic infrastructure that helped propel the country to economic success. Now in the 21st century, the country is struggling to keep that infrastructure from falling apart. What happened?

    This gives the engineering profession two real options. The first is that they can continue with these delusions, insisting that the profession’s heyday of the 1950′s can be recaptured if we simply spent more money, and watch themselves continue to become less and less relevant. Or, they can start to question themselves, the systems they have set up and perpetuated, the funding mechanisms they rely on and the standards they have developed and, in doing so, become important leaders in restoring America’s competitive position.
     
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/opinion/sunday/now-coveted-a-walkable-convenient-place.html?_r=1
     
     
    Changes in community Calues: Quotes from the article…Until the 1990′s, exclusive suburban homes that we accessible only by car cost more, per square foot, than other kinds of American housing.  Especially in California with Proposition 13, these suburbs can’t pay for the government services provided in most communities from public safety to roadway maintenance. Per acre, Walmarts and suburbs are one of the lowest ongoing tax base for a community.  Now,  these suburbs have become overbuilt, and housing values have fallen. Creating a larger gap for local government to provide services. Today, the most valuable real estate lies in walkable urban locations. Many of these now pricey places were slums just 30 years ago.

    People are clearly willing to pay more for homes that allow them to walk rather than drive. Biking is part of the picture, too. Biking and walking are part of a “complete streets” strategy that public rights of way should be for all of society — not just cars.

    The average American spends between $8,000-$12,000 dollars per vehicle per year. The automobile for the most part is not an investment like realestate. Where could you live if you had an addition $1,000 a month? What could you experience? Where could you go on vacation?
     

  • Jlippes

    Here in buffalo we are currently adding vehicle driving lanes to our Main St. Pedestrian mall to the tune of $50 million. Go figure. Wouldn’t other, more progressive communities spend the tens of millions more intelligently?

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1300059895 Terry Hildebrand

    It is very encouraging to see a young entrepreneur like Mr. Gorton questioning and challenging the sacrosanct place of the automobile in our society.  I heartily agree with almost everything he expressed in the posted video.  The American “lifestyle” is extremely wasteful of resources and supremely inefficient.  He is correct in pointing out that our burdensome, automobile-oriented transportation infrastructure is a major factor in our country’s lack of competitiveness vis-a-vis the rest of the world.  If everyone in the world attempted to live the American “lifestyle” (which includes immensely sprawling development), it has been pointed out, we would need five planet Earths to supply all the necessary resources.

    As someone educated as an architect and city planner, I know that a very different pattern of urban development is possible and economically feasible to reconstruct within a 25 or 30-year time frame, which is the typical service life of most of the structures in our built environment.  As a planner working within a city government, I can also confirm that Mark’s criticism of the conservative inertia of government and the stubborn resistance to change of the engineering profession and other professions responsible for infrastructure design.  

    Consider for a moment the difficulty we had in getting the relatively modest improvement of curb ramps on our streets and sidewalks for handicapped accessibility.  For decades many municipalities and the engineers they employed bitterly resisted the implementation of these accessibility improvements, wasting many millions of tax-payer funds in the process, and simply to maintain the status quo and conventional street design standards with which they were most comfortable.  

    What Mark does not delve into much in the video are practical solutions and more explicitly detailed policies to make our communities much more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly and less automobile-centric.  I received my professional training in the 1970′s, but many of the more significant solutions for creating compatible circulation networks for automobiles, pedestrians, and bicycles were devised by planners like Clarence Stein, Raymond Unwin, and Ludwig Hilberseimer early in the 20th Century, and are exemplified by the Greenbelt cities of the depression era; by the Detroit redevelopment project, Lafayette Park; and the Village Homes development in Davis, California, by Michael and Judy Corbett in more recent times.      

    Unfortunately, there is in vogue at the moment the “Connectivity” advocates who are trying to resurrect the street grid from pre-automotible times, and implement it at the relatively close spacing of just a few hundred feet between street intersections.  Of course, nothing could be more wrong-headed, wasteful, and contrary to the purpose of creating a more walkable and livable environment, yet ironically that is precisely how their schemes are being promoted.  These “Connectivity” schemes are extremely wasteful of land; increase the hard-paved, impermeable surfaces that direct polluted storm waters into our waterways and the sea; and create many more dangerous intersections between pedestrian and vehicular circulation networks, and mostly just increase very  marginally the mobility of the already excessively mobile population traveling by automobile, even for short distances that could easily be walked if it were not for all the cars dangerously getting in the way. 

    We need to redesign our communities to make travel of 1/2-mile or less by foot or bicycle physically easier and more desirable than hopping in a car by creating long paths uninterrupted by streets carrying auto traffic.  And we need to lay out more compact developments that combine residential, commercial, industrial, and institutional areas in such a way that makes getting to them possible without recourse to driving an automobile, but which minimize inherent conflicts among the different land uses.  This should also include rail and bus public transportation where necessary to cover longer distance travel, such as to work, where pedestrian and bicycle transportation is not possible.  

    Although Mr. Gorton primarily focuses on our automobile-dominated built environment, the changes he urges will have far more beneficial impacts than those he identifies.  We live in a very interconnected world.  The vision of the new urban environment I see does not only improve the quality of our lives and health, but also has extremely positive impacts to the surrounding, non-urban environment.  Dramatically reducing the amount of our precious land paved over for streets and parking lots will simultaneously reduce the heat-island effect that contributes to local and regional climate change, as well as reducing storm water run-off with its sediments and pollutants being dumped into our streams, rivers, and oceans.  In place of the concrete and asphalt, we can plant more trees and lush vegetation to absorb the carbon dioxide gases we emit and replenish the air with more oxygen, and simultaneously hold more rain water to percolate into the soil, ultimately to be filtered for our drinking water needs.    

  • YerNeighbor

    Could we get his slides?

  • Larry keniston

    Yes, the talk would have been even better without the “sucks.” But even with the “sucks,” this is the most compelling and beautiful talk that I have ever heard on transportation. This includes talks from Fenton, Burden and Penalosa. Stay with us, Mark.

  • http://twitter.com/robertcubelo999 Robert Cubelo

    THANK YOU. I’ve been WAITING and looking for this video since the conference. SO happy its been put up. He blew me away.

    Robert Cueblo