Chapter 21 Background: Five Strategies

British planner Mike Thomson, based on a survey of urban traffic problems around the world, has summed up the following five strategies for combining urban traffic and land development: The first one: fully develop the car.Representative cities include North American cities such as Los Angeles and Detroit. Such cities often have a uniform road network with a grid grid, and cars can pass to any corner of the city, but the land development density is very low, and there is hardly a decent city center and street.There are few buses, mainly maintained by government subsidies to meet the transportation needs of the poor.Because there is no urban center, there are few radial roads.

The second option: public transport priority.Typical cities include Bogota, Citiba, Montreal, etc., mainly building a large number of radial roads leading to the city center, and providing special lanes or other priority rights for public transportation, ensuring that public transportation has no or little government Can compete with small cars under subsidies.This strategy mainly uses existing roads, so the government's investment is relatively small. The third type: restrict the development of the city center.Typical cities include Boston, Copenhagen, Vienna, etc. These cities generally have small populations, but traditionally have a relatively small and active center.The strategy to solve traffic is to arrange a ring road on the periphery to arrange new development, while there are still some radial roads leading to the urban area, and a small number of railways or subways that transport workers to and from get off work to connect the city center and the suburbs to ensure that the central area vitality.The key to this strategy is to maintain a balance between small urban centers and suburban sub-centres through rational land development.Mishandled, the city center could decay or swell further, rendering this transportation strategy useless.

Fourth: maintain a strong downtown.Typical cities including New York, Tokyo, etc. have formed a powerful city center long before private individuals owned cars in large numbers.The main way for these cities to solve traffic problems is to build large-scale radial traffic networks (including expressways and large-capacity public transport, such as subways, urban railways, etc.).However, apart from being close to the downtown area, these cities do not build high-speed ring roads to connect these radial roads, so as to enhance the attractiveness of the central area, and at the same time ensure that the large-capacity buses can have enough people to maintain their operation.This transportation strategy is expensive due to the construction and maintenance of large-scale high-capacity public transportation, and the intensity and density of land development in the city center are too high.

Fifth: Restrict traffic in the city center.Typical cities include London, Singapore, Hong Kong, Stockholm, Amsterdam, etc.These cities are all facing the contradiction of high urban population density and small road area. Their main strategy is to reduce the impact on traffic (especially cars) through reasonable arrangements of land use and traffic (such as maintaining or increasing the urban residential density). At the same time, restricting or prohibiting cars from entering certain downtown areas, restricting parking in the city center, and even charging for cars entering the city to minimize the use of cars.