A CARFREE CITY
(Linear City + Vacuum Transit)
Author: Peter Rodes Robinson
Email: PRX555@gmail.com
Link: Rodes.pub/Carfree
Also: Rodes.pub/Urbanism
Original: 15 August 2022
Modified: 14 September 2024
Size: 1200 words
(The High Line linear park in NYC)
What happens when you take parts of two crazy ideas (Hyperloop and The Line), combine them with New Urbanism, and add lots of common sense? Good things.
DESIGN GOALS
! Every part of the city is reachable within 30 minutes without using a vehicle. This includes factories, farm lands, and nature preserves.
! Carbon emissions per resident are 10% of the US average.
! The design follows the principles discussed in Rodes.pub/Urbanism.
CARS OR LEGS?
“In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got nothing to do
Some machine doin’ that for you”
--Zager and Evans
A neutral observer would conclude that since 1885 the human race has been preparing for a future in which human legs are barely functional. The typical suburban plan puts a motorized vehicle within about 50 feet of every front door. This plan was not questioned for many decades of automotive development.
In 1824, Joseph Fourier calculated that an Earth-sized planet, at our distance from the Sun, ought to be much colder. He suggested something in the atmosphere must be acting like an insulating blanket. In 1856, Eunice Foote discovered that blanket, showing that carbon dioxide and water vapor in Earth's atmosphere trap escaping infrared (heat) radiation.
In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized Earth's natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.
In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases in Earth’s atmosphere to global warming. In 1941, Milutin Milankovic linked ice ages to Earth’s orbital characteristics. Gilbert Plass formulated the Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change in 1956.
See also: Two Centuries of Climate Science: part one - Fourier to Arrhenius, 1820-1930
https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?n=1397
So, slowly, in parallel with the development of the personal automobile, came the scientific knowledge that one and a half billion cars threaten our planet home. Using cars instead of our legs causes ten percent of CO2 emissions. With global temperatures off the chart in the year 2023, it's past time to reevaluate.
Melissa and Chris Bruntlett explain what everyone accepts without question: designing our cities for cars destroys them for people.
In the planning field, little attention is given to the effects that a “low-car” city can have on the human experience at a psychological and sociological level. Studies are beginning to surface that indicate the impact that external factors—such as sound—can have on our stress and anxiety levels. Or how the systematic dismantling of freedom and autonomy for children and the elderly to travel through their cities is causing isolation and dependency.
The urban automobile:
✱ Kills street life
✱ Isolates people
✱ Diminishes beauty
✱ Increases pollution
✱ Endangers pedestrians
✱ Fosters suburban sprawl
✱ Damages the social fabric
✱ Disturbs people with noise
✱ Reduces exercise & health
✱ Wastes energy & resources
✱ Uses 70% of city real estate
✱ Exacerbates global warming
✱ Slaughters 1000s every year
✱ Impoverishes people & nations
"The right to access every building in a city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city."
—Lewis Mumford
We belatedly grasp that the choice is not just between cars and legs: it comes down to the interesting choice to use our legs or lose our planet. This paper explains that the optimum choice is not a city with fewer cars, but a city with NO CARS and NO STREETS (in the urban core).
Our proposed linear city combines parallel strips of land for:
✱ A large nature preserve
✱ A narrow carfree urban core
✱ With a continuous central park
✱ Parking decks next to the core
✱ Fire, police, EMS, & medical
✱ A conventional highway
✱ Mixed types of residences
✱ Manufacturing & industry
✱ Farmlands
✱ River and lakes
[Diagram of possible city]
DESIGN FEATURES
City Design Features
✓ A long city core one block wide
✓ Two rows of highrise buildings
✓ Continuous park in between
✓ Bicycle and tricycle sharing
✓ Continuous covered linkways
✓ A city for walking: no vehicles
✓ Far reaching health benefits
✓ Mixed residential & commercial
✓ Option: large building on a block
✓ Option: park covers entire block
✓ Cars can be parked close by
✓ Adjacent farmland and industry
✓ Nature preserve on opposite side
Vactrain Design Features
✓ Linetran: maglev vacuum transit
✓ Linetran station every mile
✓ Centcom controls everything
✓ Passenger pod carries 36 persons
✓ Business-class type seating
✓ Six groups of 3 + 3 facing seats
✓ Six doors in the side of a pod
✓ Fast access to seating groups
✓ Freight pods and stations
✓ Pods cruise at 200 mph (300 kph)
✓ Convoys of 20 closely-spaced pods
✓ Convoys are several miles apart
✓ Pods can change lanes
✓ Three lanes in 2 vacuum tubes
✓ One pod stops at a station
✓ Airlocks cycle in seconds
✓ Waiting time of 5 minutes or less
✓ Passengers never change pods
✓ Every destination within 20 minutes
✓ Transportation terminals at ends
✓ Free to ride like an elevator
Alabama Model City Features
✓ Coosapolis: 60 km long (37 miles)
✓ A sixty kilometer park
✓ Parallels the Coosa River
✓ Birmingham to Montgomery
✓ City follows terrain and attractions
✓ End-to-end in 20 minutes
✓ Population of 400,000 persons
✓ 800,000 passenger trips per day
✓ Fully functional before completion
✓ An exquisite egalitarian metropolis
PRODUCING ELECTRICITY
HOW MUCH WILL IT COST
HOW TO PAY FOR IT
COMPUTER SIMULATION
WHEN IS THIS POSSIBLE
CONCLUSION
Many vacuum transit proposals have imagined a velocity of 700 mph. But passenger pods traveling at this speed create problems with human physiology. Making sharp turns at high speed is intolerable for the riders (“vomit comet”). This means for example, that a vacuum tube could not follow the course of an interstate highway. The bends of an interstate which are easily handled by a vehicle at 70 mph, are verboten for a 700 mph vactrain. Our proposal specifies 200 mph, but even at this "modest" speed, humans and pods like to travel in straight lines.
Well, linear cities are built in straight lines. There are many advantages to building a city in a line, but there is one glaring disadvantage: destinations are farther apart. The solution to distance is speed. If you can get from anywhere to anywhere in 5 to 30 minutes, no one need care about the distance involved.
So it seems that you can't build a line city without an intra-urban vactrain, and you can't build an intra-urban vactrain without a line city. A marriage made in heaven. Linetran would make the city run.
A linear city would be expensive, but it would be the best money ever spent, because it would provide a beautiful and ecological life for every resident.