Surface travel: as transport shrinks the world, we have a choice between increasing pollution and destruction and enriched urbanity. (Comment).

Modern civilization would be impossible without speedy and efficient transport. People travel more and more, though electronic communications improve exponentially. The optimistic proposition that travel (particularly commuting) might be reduced by the world wide web and massive computing power is about as realizable as the paperless office. Even in developing countries, huge numbers of people rush from rural poverty to the chance of betterment in urban centres, and in those, they often travel daily between city and affordable suburbs, demonstrated by trains literally covered with people that move in and out of the great cities of India every morning and evening, and massively crowded buses that do the same in every other metropolis of the third world. In the most prosperous countries, commuting is even more prevalent, particularly in cars, the most environmentally destructive form of travelling.

From the start, modern transport systems have been a severe threat to the environment. John Ruskin once snobbishly remarked that 'there was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell ... you might have seen the gods there ... [But] you enterprised a railroad ... you blasted its rocks away ... and now every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton'. (1) Destructive the railways certainly were, but at the same time, they offered everyone (except the very poorest) the possibility of safe movement at far greater speeds over much greater distances than ever before. They were the instruments by which the modern city has been made.

All modern cities are based on the railway-driven London that exploded with such astonishing force in the middle of the nineteenth century (though of course highways have wholly or partly taken over the role of rail tracks in many). Everywhere the pattern is the same.

City centres are for business and the residences of the very poor (and sometimes the very rich). Round them are irregular suburban rings of varying prosperity, now many with their own centres. As Ruskin was one of the first to point out, the surface of the planet is being consumed by cities and their transport systems and their suburbs at ever-increasing rates. The environmental costs in terms of pollution and global warming of all this travel are colossal, as are the social costs. Somehow, travel has got to be made less destructive.

Increase density

One way of reducing its impact is to reduce the need for it. In Europe at least, planning policies to increase urban density by using decayed and greyfield sites are perhaps having some impact. But such initiatives are at least partly offset by demographic changes, as households fragment and become ever smaller in prosperous societies, necessitating production of more and more dwellings, each of which takes up land. We need new geometries of suburban building that combine the advantages of existing ones: close contact with nature, a sense of privacy, and so on with much higher densities. If these can be adopted on a large scale, land-take will be reduced, the need for travel will be cut down, and all sorts of additional savings such as economies in heating and cooling loads will be possible. In the last two decades, experiments have been made, usually popular with users but, to have any serious impact, such ideas need strong government support and clear planning guidelines to persuade the mass housing develop ers to become involved.

One of the main ways of reducing the negative effects of travelling is to encourage people to use public transport rather than private cars. Experiments like the new congestion charge in London (2) may have some effect, but in London at least, it is too early to judge, particularly as large parts of the metro system are not working properly at the moment. In Oslo, a somewhat similar system does seem to work, but circumstances there are very different. The area covered is much larger, the population much smaller, and geography ensures that there is a limited number of entrances to the charge zone. Furthermore, a huge programme of infrastructural improvements in public transport and roads was put in place to complement the charge zone. Such schemes will take a long time to evaluate economically and environmentally.

Better tried proposals include the excellent transport and infrastructural schemes instituted in Curitiba, Brazil (AR May 1999), in which new kinds of vehicle and new forms of bus stop have made services more efficient and agreeable, and have demonstrated that public transport systems can increase their utility and popularity. Curitiba's scheme is being developed elsewhere, particularly in Colombia. Another tried proposal is rail freight. At long last, it may be that freight traffic is beginning to return to the railways. Even in Britain, where the rail system has been appallingly run down by decades of government under-investment, rail freight is beginning to grow (at least for heavy items such as minerals, metals and cars). One of the attractions is speed: the new trains can travel at 200kph, far faster and more steadily than lorries. (3) Behind most arguments for transferring from individual vehicles to communal ones are rails. In Europe, few would now think of travelling by air for short or even medium jo urneys, from for instance London to Paris, or Paris to Berlin, now that train journeys from city centre to city centre are quicker, more agreeable and sometimes cheaper than air travel.

New rails

New systems of urban rail transport are beginning to be implemented. From Sheffield to Strasbourg, new tramway systems are improving city movement; London has most ambitious plans for trams. (4) New light railway systems are being installed all over the world, even in the US, where for instance the BART in San Francisco (p60) goes from strength to strength. Vancouver's sky train (p56) looks as if it will begin to reduce road commuter traffic, and help to integrate the whole metropolis. Aerial railways have some advantages: they do not have to stop at road junctions for instance, so they can be faster than surface transport, but they can be hugely disruptive to the urban fabric, as shown for instance by the mighty Bangkok sky-rail system which tears apart a once delicate city. They can be as bad as urban motorways which have destroyed wonderful places from Cairo to Beijing.

The points where rail traffic links with other forms of transport, from shoe-leather to road vehicles, are immensely important in the structure of the city. Stations, big and small, have since their inception been places for celebration of arrival and departure, and for congregation, as well as being (at certain times of day) city vomitona. Some old ones retain all the dimensions -- think for instance of the Gare du Nord in Paris or the restored Grand Central in New York (AR May 1999). But in the second half of the last century, far too many stations were reduced to utilitarian machines for processing crowds. The fate of Pennsylvania Station, reduced from being one of the grandest public buildings in New York to a warren for troglodyte commuters, was emblematic.

But now, Pen is to be rebuilt as a grand station (AR September 1999), and a new generation of stations worldwide is again showing how rail can take its part in the human tapestry of the city, as is demonstrated for instance in the French TGV stations (p44), and the mighty Lehrter Bahnhof in Berlin by GMP, where the main east-west and north-south European railway lines cross (AR January 1999). These, and many other stations are counteracting the tendency of all transport systems to resemble the conditions of air travel. A few years ago, it was fashionable for a few moments in certain rather silly circles to suggest that airports were the new centres of civilization. Now, it seems much more sensible to make rail stations once again key parts of real city centres. As the new central station for Stuttgart by Ingenhoven Overdiek Architekten shows (p66), changes in rail technology give extraordinary possibilities for imaginatively transforming and adding to existing stations (and cities in their vicinity), as well as for making new ones. Cities can be immensely enhanced by transport, as well as destroyed by it. The choice is ours.

(1.) Ruskin John, Praeterita (1885-1889), III, iv. Ruskin, who had travelled all over Europe in private horse-drawn coaches, and was supposed to be the champion of the working man, was being more than usually Olympian.

(2.) A scheme whereby drivers have so pay a [pounds sterling]5 charge to enter the centre of the city. A highly complex and innovative system of video cameras linked to a vast central computer reads vehicle licence plates and automatically charges the owners.

(3.) The Guardian, 15 March 2003.

(4.) All British transport improvements take ages to implement and are often hugely distorted during gestation -- we shall see whether they are ever realized.