More Carspreading! More Motonormativity! And… Cookie Monster?
Or, why our new town driveways are at risk of turning into a staging area for the Texas Rangers
“This boom in US-style pickup trucks is lifestyle over practicality in exchange for parking mayhem and dangerous roads. City leaders must act to discourage these menacing vehicles from our streets. How is it acceptable to have a vehicle so tall that children cannot be seen?“ – Oliver Lord, Clean Cities
Well, strap in, placemakers… or perhaps just dive for the nearest reinforced concrete bunker.
Last week we focused on women’s safety. This week, let’s see what a growing number of drivers in this green and pleasant land have in store for your children.
If you thought the Chelsea Tractor epidemic was the peak of our collective transport madness, this article in The Guardian suggests we’ve entered a new, even more ridiculous chapter of the UK’s carspreading saga.
US-style pickup trucks – behemoths designed for hauling hay bales across the Midwest – are now officially a “thing” on our narrow, congested British streets.
It seems that our quaint tradition of popping to the shops for a pint of milk now requires a vehicle capable of towing a small moon. Standard parking spaces? Soon to be a nostalgic relic of the past. Visibility? Purely optional. My question is: at what point do we admit that our love affair with the SUV has morphed into a full-blown hostage situation?
I’ve written before about the transport-shaped elephant in the room, but these trucks are less like elephants and more like reinforced concrete walls. An elephant would at least see you before stepping on you. A person driving one of these pickups probably would not as you disappeared under the bonnet. As I noted back in June, the average bonnet height of these vehicles is now frequently over 1 metre.
Let’s do the Urban Design 101 maths on that. If a vehicle’s bonnet is 1 metre high, a young child standing in front of it literally “disappears” from the driver’s view. We are actively importing lethal machines that make the most vulnerable members of our society invisible. According to research carried out by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London, children under 10 are 130% more likely to be killed if hit by an SUV or large truck compared to a standard car.
And yet, we call this a civilised society. We market these tanks as being “built to impress, known to intimidate“. In any other context, buying something specifically to “intimidate” your neighbours would get you a stern talking-to from the local constabulary. But here in the UK, it’s increasingly just another random Tuesday in a motonormative world.
Remember when I mentioned a while back that cars are getting 1cm wider every couple of years? These US-style pickups are the final boss of that trend. A standard UK parking space is roughly 2.4m wide. Many of these trucks are so wide that parking them in an average supermarket car park could effectively trap the occupants inside should inconsiderate drivers choose to occupy the adjacent spaces. Unless you’re well versed in exiting your vehicle through the boot – which, let’s face it, is never a good look – you’re effectively stuck.
While the government pushes for 1.5 million new homes and sunlit uplands in our new towns, I have to wonder: what kind of infrastructure are we actually intending to deliver in these 21st Century Utopias?
If our new towns are gonna be designed by the same people who think a 2-tonne Ford Ranger is an appropriate urban runabout, we aren’t building communities; we’re building little more than car parks with the odd house thrown in for good measure to keep the planners happy. Once again from the top: we need a return to the street-based urbanism of Jane Jacobs and do everything possible to encourage what she called the “attrition of automobiles”.
I mean, wouldn’t it be brilliant if new residential schemes were safe enough to enable enough children and young people to be out and about playing out on bikes, roller skates and space hoppers, or partaking in the odd game of street tennis, that the cars couldn’t get through! That a driver had to slow down and stop! That would be something.
As Jacobs said:
“Today everyone who values cities is disturbed by automobiles.”
And I am greatly disturbed by this trend towards behemoth vehicles, just as Jacobs was disturbed by Robert Moses’ plans for a ten-lane highway through Washington Square Park.
To that end, let’s be a bit more 5-minute neighbourhood like Sesame Street, where you can actually walk to the grocery store instead of being transported there in an armoured personnel carrier. Zoe and Cookie Monster can enjoy a buzzing, community vibe because, not being confined to a car, they can actually see and talk to each other. What a thought.
There’s nothing childish about designing to create community.
As Jan Gehl famously said: “you get what you invite”. Currently, we are inviting carspreading, motonormativity and a steady stream of Chelsea Tractors trundling through our city centres.
Paris has already shown us the way: they tripled parking fees for SUVs and saw a two-thirds reduction in these urban land-hogs using surface parking. Cardiff is starting to show real vision by doing the same.
Why are we waiting until 2035 to start a backlash of sorts against these vehicles by limiting bonnet heights? People – and children in particular – are being killed and seriously injured by these vehicles now. We can design all the continuous crossings and segregated cycle lanes we want, but if we continue to allow vehicles on our streets that are designed to prevent the driver from seeing you, we’re just rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
So, here’s a radical thought: if you can, just go for a stroll. It sparks your creativity by an average of 60% and you won’t be destroying the environment or causing a risk to fellow pedestrians. You could even stop for CAKE. Your city will thank you for it – and if you’d otherwise be trying to find a spot large enough to park a US-style pickup, so will your sanity and your wallet…
Amirite?
Question for the comments: Is Oliver Lord on to something? Should we be actively stoking the “war on the motorist” and banning these pickups from our towns and cities?
#carspreading #motonormativity #placemaking #SUV #roadsafety #janejacobs #walking #amirite #jangehl
… and if you’re as disturbed by me about these trucks on the streets…