Trams! New Town Utopias! And… A Two-Minute City?
Or, why the 21st-century new town might actually look a bit like 1920 (but with much better coffee and pastries)
“In Panorama you can do everything with your feet. Your whole life is in Panorama. It is not a 15-minute city, it is a two-minute city.” – Jean Didier Berger, former Mayor of Clamart
A bit of a placemaking swerve this week, with a look at a new report from Create Streets – Towns and Trams – a document that feels like someone might finally have turned the lights on in the planning department.
The team took a group of government movers and shakers to France – yes, France! – to take a look at what’s going on there: Chris Curtis MP (Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes; co-chair of the Labour Growth Group), David King (Head of Delivery, New Towns Implementation, Ministry of Housing, and Communities and Local Government, Toby Lloyd (Special Adviser to the Prime Minister, Transport and Infrastructure), James Small-Edwards (Member of the London Assembly for West Central; Chair of Planning and Regeneration Committee, Greater London Authority) and, Lucy Wilkins (Deputy Director, London & New Towns Implementation, Ministry of Housing, and Communities and Local Government).
Let’s face it, for years, we’ve been building nowheresvilles – car dependent sprawl that is only practical to traverse if you’re driving a tank. But following this visit, could we now start to hear a whisper of a “tramway renaissance” in the air? And, could this be an infrastructure first model for the UK’s twelve proposed new towns?
We often treat public transport as a functional afterthought – a bus that turns up every forty minutes if you’re lucky, assuming it turns up at all.
But the tram is different.
It tells all concerned in the planning process from the developer to the planners to the future residents that this place is permanent and worth some serious investment. It seems to me that the renaissance of the tram could be the secret sauce for the new towns.
You’ve got to have a heart of stone if you can look at historic maps and fail to mourn the removal of tramlines over the years. If only we’d left that infrastructure in place!
After all, trams don’t just move people; they define the street. They can encourage the gentle density to provide a critical mass of people in a human scale public realm. If you have a tram line, you have a natural spine for a walkable, mixed-use neighbourhood where people actually want to be out and about.
In France, “… many modern French tramways are explicitly designed to enable housing, by serving brownfield or greenfield sites suitable for development, enabling higher density with good connectivity.”
Can I please get an Amen?
From the get-go it was understood that excellent public transport the key. According to Jen Didier Berger, the former Mayor of Clamart:
“Public transport is essential. People need public transport to visit Paris for work or leisure. It would have been impossible to develop Panorama without public transportation. A bus would not have been sufficient. Each tram has the capacity of ten buses and the trams run every four minutes at peak times. That means that an hour’s tram capacity is equivalent of 200 buses in peak times.”
The trams in combination with mixed uses mean people can easily walk to the shops or school or a café in a few minutes. Cars are almost totally absent. Parking is hidden underground, not cluttering building frontages as you’d get here in the UK, where no-one can comfortably live more than 10cm away from their vehicle.
But, putting the parking out of sight means you can adjust street width to reflect “… the proportions of traditional French architecture” as well as free up land to build more homes. It seems like a no-brainer to me.
If you tried that here and moved a parking space out of sight you’d probably be lynched by those rambling on about their “right” to park, whatever that means.
The report’s “Key points on management of road space and traffic” (page 16) basically calls for a revolution in how we treat the public realm.
For too long, we’ve designed streets to accommodate refuse vehicles and carspreading SUVs first, and humans second. The new model? Bury the cars and leave the surface for trees, kids, and – dare I say it – people who aren’t in a hurry to kill someone with their truck.
Importantly:
“The allocation of roadspace to tramways was seen as a positive decision to provide a better transport service, not a negative decision to remove space from cars.”
This is the mindset we need to foster in the UK.
So, we have a choice, folks.
We can keep building the same car-dependent, “nowheresville” sprawl that blights the countryside.
Or, we can embrace the “renaissance”.
We can bury the cars, lay the tracks, and build towns where people can get about comfortably and affordably without having to rely on a car.
It’s not about reducing car ownership. It’s about creating an environment where reducing car journeys is the natural outcome.
And don’t let the cost of tramways put you off. In France, trams can be delivered at a cost of c£35 million per mile. Our cheapest example in the UK is the Nottingham tramway Phase 1, which came in at £50 million per mile… with schemes easily reaching £100 million per mile or even £200 million. We can’t print the cash fast enough.
The whole funding system in France is easier and more streamlined than in the UK (quelle surprise!) and the group recognised there are lessons to be learned from the French model that would enable our local leaders and mayors to “… assemble land, build roads, fund trams and create design codes.”
If they can do it there, why can’t we do it here?
Frankly, I’m in. But, despite the optimism of the study group that we’ll be able to get the highways-shaped elephant to move out of the way to enable the “Beautiful, wide boulevards with cycle lanes and underground parking… where you can integrate cars, trams and cycles effectively“, it remains to be seen if we can drum up the political will to put trams front and centre in our new town utopias.
Question: Would you trade your suburban driveway for a 5-minute walk to a high-speed tram and a street that doesn’t smell like exhaust fumes?
#createstreets #townsandtrams #placemaking #trams #tramwayrenaissance #newtowns
… and if you’re on board with the message…