CUANDO TU CANCELAS LO MALO ¿Sabes qué pasa en el mundo espiritual?

3.3.1 Copenhagen

Monocle, a British monthly about international affairs, business, culture and design, judged Copenhagen to offer the highest quality of life of any city in the world in 2008. This achievement is a culmination of careful planning, transport policies and land use for sixty years.

In 1947 Copenhagen’s urban planners decided that in the future the then compact city should look like a hand: the city centre would be a palm and smaller residential and mixed-use communities would extend away from it like fingers. Simultaneously the urban planners were linking “fingers” to the “palm” with a railway infrastructure, which now carries a modern train service, the S-tog. The average commuting distance is 13.9 km, which is the largest amongst Western European capitals, but the average commuting speed is also one of the highest (Schwanen, 2002).

After World War II the city was becoming easily accessible by public transport, but at the same time the car was becoming more popular. Copenhagen was committed to discouraging car use and even now reduces the number of parking spaces by three per cent every year (Newman and Kenworthy, 1996), often replacing them with public spaces and parks (an example is Nyhavn). It is now the only European capital which does not have a chronic problem of road traffic congestion (Vuk, 2005). Thus urban sprawl, which appeared inevitable forty years ago, was contained.

Copenhagen has excellent walking and cycling facilities, with 349 km of cycle tracks and lanes (Copenhagen City, 2006). Risk of serious casualty fell almost a fourfold between 1995 and 2006. Copenhagen’s mode share of cycling and walking is one of the highest in Europe at 32 per cent (Schwanen, 2002), cycling alone accounts for 26 per cent (Martens, 2004) and 36 per cent of people cycle to work (Copenhagen City, 2006). But more interestingly the extensive cycling rack network at S-tog stations means that a quarter of all S-tog passengers cycle to the station (Martens, 2004). There is a large bicycle-sharing network, which operates on a deposit.

The vast S-tog system is supplemented by the Copenhagen Metro, a fully-automated rapid transit system. Several S-tog stations have interchanges with the Metro and both networks use the same zone and ticketing systems. There is a proposed expansion of the Metro in the city centre. Vuk (2005) estimates that 70 per cent Metro passengers shifted from using the bus and between 8 per cent and 14 per cent shifted from a private vehicle, making it effective at tackling congestion.

Finally, urban planners designated the space between the “fingers” to become green “wedges”, recognising that green space is an important psychological factor in the inhabitants’ quality of life (Bolund and Hunhammar, 1999). In the Netherlands, for example, 83 per cent of residents can easily reach a green space by foot or bicycle (Capersen et al., 2006). They conclude that ‘land use has transformed from an agricultural to a primarily recreational landscape’ in the “wedges” (Capersen et al., 2006, p.7), but they insist that ‘future preservation and development of the green structure in Greater Copenhagen requires

regional planning measures to be incorporated into municipal plans’ (p.7). Copenhagen’s authorities are already taking steps towards this and have integrated 39 km of cycling tracks into a “green cycling route” (Copenhagen City, 2006) .

3.3.2 Hong Kong

Hong Kong is an example of a city whose remarkable success in achieving low car usage and a prominent public transport system is closely linked to land use characteristics. Between 1981 and 1991 the increase in car use per capita was only 146 km in Hong Kong (in contrast to 2,584 km in Los Angeles), while public transport use increased by 104 trips per capita (Newman and Kenworthy, 1996, p.12). City-wide planning has been central to this success. Public transit includes electric rail as well as buses and is complemented by a dense mixed-use urban environment which allows for high levels of walking and cycling. Newman and Kenworthy (1996) thus conclude that ‘central to the success of this model is high-density urban development that is closely integrated around the transit system’ (p.13). Supporting this conclusion, Zhang (2004) finds that in Hong Kong the role of land use has an independent impact on travel, controlling for travel time and monetary costs. His evidence suggests that the composite effect of land use on driving is of a comparable magnitude to the effect of driving cost on the same. He also notes that while Hong Kong’s land use plays a key role, this is supplemented by strong fiscal policy measures to restrain the demand for car use which make owning and running a car almost prohibitively expensive. These policies together complement each other as an effective combination in limiting the growth of car use in Hong Kong (Zhang, 2004). Finally, it is also possible to draw some policy recommendations for developing countries from the example of Hong Kong. Newman and Kenworthy (1996) note that ‘The high-density and in many cases pre-existing linear form of development in many Third World cities is more than adequate to enable good transit systems to be built’ (p.13), implying that congestion and environmental problems faced in cities such as Bangkok, Manila, and Jakarta could be addressed by implementing public transport based on the model of cities such as Hong Kong or Singapore.

3.3.3 Freiburg

Freiburg, a town with about 220,000 inhabitants in 2008 (Amt für Bürgerservice und Informationsverarbeitung Freiburg, 2008), is the economic, political and cultural centre of the Black Forest region in the south-west of Germany. Pucher (1998) presents the case of Freiburg as a success story of land use and transport policies complementing each other to provide models for urban transport without car-dependence. He notes that probably the most important land-use policy was undertaken in the aftermath of World War II, which almost completely destroyed the town’s central area. The decision to resurrect much of the town’s old urban structure, with its narrow, winding streets and monumental squares ensured that walking and cycling would be at the heart of transport in the town centre. This decision, reinforced by many other land-use policies, can be considered a reason ‘for the success of public transport, bicycling and walking in the succeeding decades’ (Pucher, 1998, p.294).

Pucher (1998) reports the modal split trends for Freiburg documenting its success story: the total share of the car in passengers’ total number of trips decreased between 1976 and 1994 from 39 to 36 per cent. Over the same period the shares of public transport and the bicycle increased from 14 to 21 and from 12

to 22 per cent respectively, reflecting a number of policies including a large increase in cycle lanes (Amt für Bürgerservice und Informationsverarbeitung Freiburg, 2007a), expansion of the light rail network and bus services, as well as measures such as integrated ticketing between different transport modes. Between 1974 and 2007 the number of passenger trips on public transport thus rose from 34,078,000 to 71,995,000 with a dramatic rise in the proportion of passengers using a regional travel card (37.8 per cent (12,874,000) in 1974 and 85.6 per cent (61,615,000) in 2007 (Amt für Bürgerservice und Informationsverarbeitung Freiburg, 2007b), indicating that public transport use has become established amongst the inhabitants of Freiburg. These measures have been complemented by the strict land-use policies in Germany, where development at the urban fringe is sharply restricted by state and local governments (Pucher, 1998). Limiting the supply of land available for development increases the price of land, encouraging density of development. Even in suburbs, development is thus compact, facilitating public transport with its reliance on focused travel corridors with high densities and volumes (Pucher, 1998). The combination of land use and transport policies has thus been at the core of sustainable transport development in Freiburg.

3.4 Concluding remarks

As we outlined in this section, the focus of land use policies should be on reducing travel demand by decreasing the physical separation of facilities and destinations. Medieval cities, especially in Europe, were built to be suitable for walking. They achieved this by using high-density and mixed-use developments (Greene and Wegener, 1997, p.182). However, simultaneous rapid urbanisation and advances in rail and road transport have led to sprawling cities with low population density and poor accessibility. This in turn has stimulated greater demand for transport. Containing that vicious circle through policies outlined in this section will be a high priority for urban planners who want to achieve transport sustainability in the near future.