Automobili

1970: One more lane will fix it.
1980: One more lane will fix it.
1990: One more lane will fix it.
2000: One more lane will fix it.
2010: One more lane will fix it.
2020: ?pic.twitter.com/NjS1IPORG2
via @avelezig

— Urban Planning & Mobility (@urbanthoughts11) November 4, 2019

to ne može u beogradu.

http://www.copenhagenize.com/2009/11/social-ideology-of-motorcar.html

This essay by André Gorz, the French philosopher who pioneered ideas of political ecology, was first published in 1973 in Le Sauvage. Much of it is still applicable today and well worth a read.

The Social Ideology of the Motorcar
by André Gorz

The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don't have one. That is how in both conception and original purpose the car is a luxury good. And the essence of luxury is that it cannot be democratised. If everyone can have luxury, no one gets any advantages from it. On the contrary, everyone diddles, cheats, and frustrates everyone else, and is diddled, cheated, and frustrated in return.

This is pretty much common knowledge in the case of the seaside villas. No politico has yet dared to claim that to democratise the right to vacation would mean a villa with private beach for every family. Everyone understands that if each of 13 or 14 million families were to use only 10 meters of the coast, it would take 140,000km of beach in order for all of them to have their share! To give everyone his or her share would be to cut up the beaches in such little strips-or to squeeze the villas so tightly together-that their use value would be nil and their advantage over a hotel complex would disappear. In short, democratisation of access to the beaches point to only one solution-the collectivist one. And this solution is necessarily at war with the luxury of the private beach, which is a privilege that a small minority takes as their right at the expense of all.

Now, why is it that what is perfectly obvious in the case of the beaches is not generally acknowledged to be the case for transportation? Like the beach house, doesn't a car occupy scarce space? Doesn't it deprive the others who use the roads (pedestrians, cyclists, streetcar and bus drivers)? Doesn't it lose its use value when everyone uses his or her own? And yet there are plenty of politicians who insist that every family has the right to at least one car and that it's up to the "government" to make it possible for everyone to park conveniently, drive easily in the city, and go on holiday at the same time as everyone else, going 70 mph on the roads to vacation spots.

The monstrousness of this demagogic nonsense is immediately apparent, and yet even the left doesn't disdain resorting to it. Why is the car treated like a sacred cow? Why, unlike other "privative" goods, isn't it recognised as an antisocial luxury? The answer should be sought in the following two aspects of driving:

1. Mass motoring effects an absolute triumph of bourgeois ideology on the level of daily life. It gives and supports in everyone the illusion that each individual can seek his or her own benefit at the expense of everyone else. Take the cruel and aggressive selfishness of the driver who at any moment is figuratively killing the "others," who appear merely as physical obstacles to his or her own speed. This aggressive and competitive selfishness marks the arrival of universally bourgeois behaviour, and has come into being since driving has become commonplace. ("You'll never have socialism with that kind of people," an East German friend told me, upset by the spectacle of Paris traffic).

2. The automobile is the paradoxical example of a luxury object that has been devalued by its own spread. But this practical devaluation has not yet been followed by an ideological devaluation. The myth of the pleasure and benefit of the car persists, though if mass transportation were widespread its superiority would be striking. The persistence of this myth is easily explained. The spread of the private car has displaced mass transportation and altered city planning and housing in such a way that it transfers to the car functions which its own spread has made necessary. An ideological ("cultural") revolution would be needed to break this circle. Obviously this is not to be expected from the ruling class (either right or left).

Let us look more closely now at these two points.

...

The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 percent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 percent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of lifetime for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

The product of the transportation industry is the habitual passenger. He has been boosted out of the world in which people still move on their own, and he has lost the sense that he stands at the center of his world. The habitual passenger is conscious of the exasperating time scarcity that results from daily recourse to the cars, trains, buses, subways, and elevators that force him to cover an average of twenty miles each day, frequently criss-crossing his path within a radius of less than five miles. He has been lifted off his feet. No matter if he goes by subway or jet plane, he feels slower and poorer than someone else and resents the shortcuts taken by the privileged few who can escape the frustrations of traffic. If he is cramped by the timetable of his commuter train, he dreams of a car. If he drives, exhausted by the rush hour, he envies the speed capitalist who drives against the traffic. The habitual passenger is caught at the wrong end of growing inequality, time scarcity, and personal impotence, but he can see no way out of this bind except to demand more of the same: more traffic by transport. He stands in wait for technical changes in the design of vehicles, roads, and schedules; or else he expects a revolution to produce mass rapid transport under public control. In neither case does he calculate the price of being hauled into a better future. He forgets that he is the one who will pay the bill, either in fares or in taxes. He overlooks the hidden costs of replacing private cars with equally rapid public transport.

The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. To "gather" for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He takes freedom of movement to be the same as one's claim on propulsion. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.

http://ranprieur.com/readings/illichcars.html

https://www.axios.com/ride-hailing-sharing-services-uber-lyft-global-cities-traffic-26816575-fff8-44b0-a608-9dd86e8b5a10.html

Schaller's report aligns with an October study released by UC Davis. It found that, in U.S. cities, 49% to 61% of ride-hailing trips would have not been made at all — or by walking, biking, or public transit.

Regina Clewlow, a transportation research scientist and an author of the UC Davis study, told Axios that no one expected such consumer demand for the rides.
"Cities were blindsided by the dramatic growth of ride-sharing companies," she said.
Clewlow urged continued investment in public transportation. "There’s no way that ride hailing could move people around as efficiently as mass transit."

This outcome also repeats history. In his classic biography of Moses, The Power Broker, Robert Caro described the phenomenon as "traffic generation."

"The more highways were built to alleviate congestion, the more automobiles would pour onto them and congest them and thus force the building of more highways — which would generate more traffic and become congested in their turn in an inexorably widening spiral that contained the most awesome implications for the future of New York and of all urban areas."
— Robert Caro

Schaller disputed a broad consensus among mobility experts that autonomous cars will relieve urban congestion. He said that, instead, self-driving vehicles will create the same dynamic as seen today with ride-hailing. And to the degree the cities become more congested, people will increasingly avoid them, he said.

"It will be a disaster for cities and a disaster for these companies," he said.

bela maca wrote:to ne može u beogradu.

sve može, samo ako se dovoljno ljudi odluči da izbori za nešto

I većine već izgrađenih bici staza

ključna reč je dovoljno, dok god su ljudi zadovoljni svojim plovilima* i consume & obey životom ništa od promene

*

The ‘System’ of Automobility

ONE BILLION cars were manufactured during the last century. There are currently over 700 million cars roaming the world. World car travel is predicted to triple between 1990 and 2050 (Hawken et al., 1999). Country after country is developing an ‘automobility culture’ with the most significant currently being that of China. By 2030 there may be 1 billion cars worldwide (Motavalli, 2000: 20–1).

Yet strangely the car is rarely discussed in the ‘globalization literature’, although its specific character of domination is more systemic and awesome in its consequences than what are normally viewed as constitutive technologies of the global, such as the cinema, television and especially the computer (see Castells, 2001). In this article I examine what kind of system is automobility, how its character of domination has been exerted, and whether there are any ways in which we might envisage an ending to this systemic domination.

Kako su se pozabavili problemom u Cirihu.


If you see how cars, streetcars, bikes, and pedestrians use this Swiss street, you can better understand what’s wrong with so many other urban thoroughfares.

In the Rorschach Test, you get to rotate and analyze the image, so let us do that. This is a typical main thoroughfare in Zürich where, since at least 1980, space has been carved out to give transit its own right of way and in addition, transit has priority at all signalized intersections. This particular street, Universitätstrasse in the University District of Zürich, carries two tramlines—streetcars, for North Americans—and so it has trams passing on average every three to four minutes in each direction. This is also one of just four major roads carrying vehicular car traffic from the downtown to the freeway that runs out of the city to the north (the others also carry trams, with the exception of one, which is more highway-like).

Let us first deal with the American tourist who sees inefficiency. During the peak hour, the vehicle lanes carry about 400 cars and perhaps 500 people. (I counted!) The two tramlines carry about 3,500 people per hour. So, notwithstanding the fact that at first glance the tram lanes seem empty and remarkably inefficient, the numbers tell a different story—the tram lanes are doing yeoman’s work, carrying 7 times more people than the car lanes, and they could easily carry many more. And this is before we even start to consider the environmental and economic advantages of transit over cars. (People in Zürich have unlimited access to all transit in the city for just $1,000 per year, yet the subsidy from the city, state and the nation is modest, since the fare box returns, and other revenues, pay about two-thirds of the cost of operating the system.)

I kako je izgledao Bridgeport 1913 i 2013.

To give just one example, a few years ago a former student of mine, Kristin Floberg, studied old fire-insurance maps to inventory every structure in the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, then built a 3-D map showing what the city looked like in 1913, before it was “engineered” to address traffic congestion. Then she compared that to the land use pattern of the modern city. (Green buildings are residential, blue are commercial, purple are industrial, red is for transportation storage, and orange are tax-exempt municipal buildings; roads and highways are gray.)

Today’s auto-oriented downtown is unrecognizable. Only 19 percent of the land is occupied by buildings, while 62 percent is consumed for automobile uses like roads, highways, and parking. Almost all of the destruction that we see was done in the name of moving or parking traffic. In particular, planners made the fateful decision to build two major multi-lane automotive thoroughfares, Interstate 95 and Route 8, right through Bridgeport’s downtown during the great wave of “urban renewal” of the 1960s and ‘70s. But the process of reshaping the city to fit the automobile started earlier than that: In his book Fighting Traffic, the transportation historian Peter Norton documented how this kind of destruction was planned, designed, and executed as far back as the 1920s.

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/capitalisms-destructive-car-mania-detailed

Stop Signs: Cars & Capitalism ― On the Road to Economic, Social & Ecological Decay
By Bianca Mugenyi & Yves Engler
RED Publishing & Fernwood Publishing
2011, 259 pages,
$27.95 (pb)


The car, say Canadian authors Bianca Mugyenyi and Yves Engler, who took a bus ride across the United States, is a doomed jalopy going nowhere. It fails, especially in the “home of the car”, on every green count.

Cars are the single largest contributor to US noise pollution and 40,000 people in the US die from car accidents each year (one million across the globe).


Traffic congestion creates stress and induces aggression, particularly towards cyclists, pedestrians, traffic lights and speed limits ― anything that might slow the mighty car down.


Toxic pollutants from tailpipe and particulate matter from tyre rubber (treated with dozens of carcinogens, neurotoxins and heavy metals) create health havoc from respiratory disease to cancer. Cars also “make you fat”, with all the attendant diseases of obesity.


The car is a huge devourer of space ― roads, garages, petrol stations and parking make up between one-third and one-half of the total space in US cities.


The two million cars added to the US automotive fleet each year require asphalting space equivalent to 400,000 football fields, paving over prime farmland. Parking is an omnipresent visual blight on the urban landscape and the car promotes an ugly urban housing sprawl.

The car is economically wasteful, chewing up 20% of GDP in the US (compared with 9% in Japan with its mass transport system). The cost of running a car soaks up one third of the working life of the average US citizen.


Inefficiency is its byword ― only 30% of a car’s petrol is turned into actual motion to carry just 10% of its weight, so only “3% of the fuel’s energy actually moves what needs to be moved”, Mugyenyi and Engler write.


The ecological tyre-print of the car is huge even before it leaves the sales yard. Each car requires huge quantities of water, metal and rubber, while generating tonnes of solid and airborne, often toxic, waste.


The car’s life-blood, oil, is one of the most environmentally dirty industries globally. The transport sector in the US is the nation’s leading source of greenhouse gas emissions.


The petrol-driven, internal combustion engine guzzles 63% of the 20 million barrels of oil consumed each day in the US. “Peak oil” and rising petrol prices are spurring on the rise of even dirtier “unconventional” fuels such as tar sands, shale oil, genetically-modified ethanol, deep sea oil and liquefied coal.


Importantly, the authors puncture the desperate delusion that “alternative” fuels can solve “the ecological catastrophe that is the private car”.


Corn-based ethanol produces more CO2 than oil-based petrol “if all the energy used in the growth phase is properly accounted for”. Corn-as-fuel also takes up five times more land than corn-as-food.

Using hydrogen or electricity to power US cars would need more dirty coal as an energy source. Either that or an area as large as the state of Massachusetts for solar panels, or New York State for wind turbines, or 200 new nuclear energy plants.


“There is no such thing as a green car,” the authors conclude. “Unsustainable” would barely describe the car’s environmental failure if the rest of the world were to adopt US patterns of car ownership and driving behaviour.


So why is the car such a protected species, culturally celebrated and immune from radical policy review? Because, the authors say, the car is integral to the capitalist economy and thus any criticism of the car is taboo.


Since 1925, the automotive industry has been the leading sector of the US economy, and, of the world’s 10 largest corporations, three are car manufacturers and six are oil companies.


The logic of maximising corporate profit through the car, they write, is compelling to all manner of capitalist industries that sell vastly more glass, rubber, steel, aluminium, plastic, paint and other products for the car than they ever would for the puny bike or efficient train.


With this economic power of the “auto-industrial complex” comes political power and access to huge government welfare programs. This offloads the private costs of the car onto the public purse for roads, police, hospitals and environmental repair, while government tax concessions, grants, bailouts and other subsidies are freely on offer.


Public transport, denied the aura of corporate profit, is the sickly runt of the transport litter whose strongest offspring gorge on the teat of public welfare.


This need not be so, say the authors. Raising the costs of driving and restricting car space are necessary sticks to the necessary carrots of investments in pedestrian, cycling and public transport infrastructure and people-centric urban design.


Making public transport free is essential, they argue. They cite Belgium’s third biggest city (Hasselt), which enjoyed a 1300% increase in public transport use over 10 years of free mass transit, and Ockelbo in Sweden, which had a 260% rise with half the new public commuters being former drivers.


All that stands in the way of a green transport future is the “concentrated private power of corporations” in the oil and auto industries.


The car and capitalism stand together. They must fall together too.

to ne može u beogradu.

Тренутно не може, али доћи ће моменат када ће морати, а тада ће бити држи-не дај, фрка-паника.

https://www.scribd.com/document/20310492/Fromm-Erich-Anatomija-Ljudske-Destruktivnosti-2-Knjiga
str. 173

Veza između nekrofilije i obožavanje tehnike

Počnimo s razmatranjem najjednostavnijih i najočitijih karakteristika suvremenog industrijskog čovjeka: gušenje središnjeg zanimanja za ljude, prirodu i žive strukture zajedno sa sve većom sklonošću mehaničkim, neživim artefaktima. Postoji obilje primjera. Diljem cijelog industrijaliziranog svijeta postoje mnogi ljudi koji osjećaju više nježnosti prema svojim automobilima i više zanimanja za njih no za svoje žene. Ponosni su na svoj auto; njeguju ga; peru ga (čak i mnogi od onih koji bi pranje mogli platiti), a u nekim zemljama mu nadijevaju nadimke pune ljubavi; oni ga promatraju i postaju zabrinuti kod najmanjeg  simptoma disfunkcije. Auto, bez sumnje, nije seksualni objekt— no on je objekt ljubavi; nekima život bez auta izgleda nepodnošljiviji no život bez žene. Nije li ta sklonost prema automobilima donekle osebujna, ili čak perverzna?

Amsterdam children fighting cars in 1972

The TV documentary was made for a progressive broadcasting corporation and shows the Amsterdam neighbourhood “De Pijp” which was about 100 years old at the time. The homes were run down and small. The streets were never built, nor fit for all the cars brought in by the 40,000 people living in the small area and its many visitors. This led to an overpopulated neighbourhood with a lot of dirt and filth and especially the children suffered. The documentary is one of a series and this particular episode looks at the situation from a child’s perspective.

The original film was published on YouTube and it was found by the Amsterdam Cycling professor. It is 40 minutes long and of course in Dutch. I made a shorter version, cutting out most images of the housing situation and parts about the dog poo on the streets, to focus primarily on the public space and traffic situation. My excerpt is almost 10 minutes long and I subtitled it in English.

The documentary aired on 16th March 1972 a bit later at night (8:55pm). The following day newspaper commentators from the far corners of the country wrote how touched they were by the tough everyday life of these children.

“This film moved me deeply. The situation for the children living in this slowly decaying neighbourhood was portrayed in a beautiful way through their own eyes. Amsterdam alderman Han Lammers had a tough time with them although they just want to play like their parents could. It won’t be easy to close down streets to traffic as was revealed by the scene with the enraged driver who turned violent at the adults who helped the children with closing the street.” (From the Leeuwarder Courant 17th March 1972.)

Today this neighbourhood “De Pijp” is an area where people want to live. It is close to the city centre and the houses were renovated or renewed. In 2009 13,666 people lived in “Oude Pijp” compared to the 40,000 of 1972. The streets really have a very different feel today. Even though nothing changed about the widths of the streets, the carriage ways were narrowed dramatically, there are far fewer parking spaces for cars and that created room for trees, wider sidewalks and parking spots for many bicycles. With the closure of several streets and the one way system, rat running has been made impossible. But one thing remains very bad: the situation on the main streets that haven’t changed at all in the last 40 years. How necessary it is to update these streets was again brutally underlined just last Friday, when a 7 year old girl on a bicycle was gruesomely killed under the wheels of a garbage truck. She was riding on a cycle lane with her father walking besides her on the side walk. It led to unrest in the neighbourhood and residents now demand changes to especially the through streets.

blage veze nisam imao da multipla datira još iz 50ih godina, nije bila doduše gadna kao ona novija 

Hippi Rotası'nda ilerleyen ilginç bir araç İstanbul'da arabalı vapura binerken yakalanmış:
Bu Fiat 600 Multipla'nın rotası Hippi Rotası'ndan da uzun aslında: Taaa Avustralya’dan Londra’ya kadar sürmüş bu yolculuk.

İlkindekinden sonraki kareler yoldaki farklı lokasyonlardan... pic.twitter.com/4EqLZLjwu0

— Atakan Sevgi / TrakyaBalkan (@AtakanSevgi_) April 26, 2021

jeli neko vozio novijeg civica, jeli dobro auto?

Mislim da su Turci pravili fiće i kada smo mi prestali sa proizvodnjom.

Sad saznajem da ova pojava ima svoje ime - stroad.



i ostale epizode iz serijala su dobre

Kod ovih su i vožnja i putevi bolji. S.Amerika nije ni za kurac.