This month, Tel Aviv’s derelict Old Central Bus Station became history. The much-maligned New Central Bus Station may soon follow suit, while a New New Central Bus Station is still in the planning stages.

“I used to get off at the old bus station, and to me it was like another country…” goes the Tipex song (in free translation). Above: Tel Aviv’s Old Central Bus Station demolished. (Photo by Moran Beth Halachmi, via Flickr.)

It sometimes seems to me that there must be some kind of curse on all things transportation in Tel Aviv. The traffic jams are unbearable, the drivers obnoxious, the buses lousy and the bus station even lousier. And who even knows if the light rail/subway project will ever actually happen…

Recently, however, things have started to happen in Neveh Sha’anan, where the old and new bus stations lie on opposite sides of a busy pedestrian mall.

The old bus station, more or less abandoned (except for a couple of businesses and perhaps the occasional junkie) since the early 1990’s, was demolished last week. After the Egged bus company finally vacated the place, the city decided to redevelop it. The first new tenant will be the Minshar art school, which will build a brand new building on the site. Other educational institutions are expected to follow, and in the meantime the rest of the plot will be transformed into a temporary park.

Meanwhile, local newspapers have been abuzz lately with rumors that the New Central Bus Station, an almost universally detested structure credited with destroying the entire surrounding neighborhood, may soon be vacated as well. Billed as the world’s biggest bus station, the place has never functioned well, is almost impossible to navigate and much of its commercial space sits unused.

Bus companies Egged and Dan are reportedly fed up with the place, and are looking to transfer their activities elsewhere when their contracts with the station’s owners expire in a couple of years. The Ministry of Transportation and the Tel Aviv Municipality are said to support the move, according to local newspaper Ha’ir.

According to Ha’ir, a new transportation terminal is likely to be built at the Holon Interchange, south of the existing station. The current bus station, recently aquired by new owners, may be reincarnated as something different altogether, possibly a high-rise complex. Or, the new owners might be able to convince the bus companies to stay put. In either case, any change in the status quo is likely to take years to pan out.

But if a New New Central Bus Station is in the cards for Tel Aviv, let’s hope that this time they do it right.

Originally published at GreenProphet.com on August 9 2009.

US High Speed Rail Association opens its doors this month in Washington DC. 

A national high-speed rail network up and running by 2030. Yes we can? (image courtesy of USHSR)

President Obama strongly supports high-speed rail, environmentalists are behind it (well, at least some of them) and the Federal Railroad Administration is already reaching out to other countries that have had success with it. High-speed rail looks like it’s going to happen. The question now is what kind of system will be built – how extensive, how fast and how integrated?

Last week, a new organization was founded which aims to help answer those questions. The US High Speed Rail Association, based in Washington DC, plans to lobby for a state of the art rail system that covers the entire country and provides service on par with the most advanced systems in the world. It has already unveiled its vision for high-speed rail in America – a significantly more ambitious vision than what has been floated thus far by the Administration in Washington.

“Our main objective is to organize the industry and to build public and political support for a nationwide high-speed rail network, built within 20 years,” USHSR President and CEO Andy Kunz said. “We see this as the next industrial revolution in America and our chance to convert our country to true sustainability and prosperity.”

The organization’s first move was to unveil a map showing what a complete national system, built in 4 phases and completed by 2030, would look like (see map above; for the animated version, click here). The map bears a certain resemblance to the “Vision for High-Speed Rail in America” unveiled by the Obama Administration in April. Both are based on the same 10 regional corridors, but USHSR’s plan raises the bar significantly. Calling for 17,000 miles of track, multi-modal stations and travel speeds of 220mph, the proposal bears a resemblance to rail maps in Europe.

USHSR plans to generate support for the plan and help advance the rail industry in America by organizing a series of public events and conferences (the first one is scheduled for October 22-23 in Washington DC). A partnership with the International Union of Railways in Paris has also taken shape, and USHSR plans on hosting tours of European and Asian high-speed rail systems in the future.

Said Jean-Pierre Loubinoux, Director General of the International Union of Railways and a member of USHSR’s Advisory Board:

“The ambitious plan recently publicized by President Obama in the framework of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act announces a fascinating time for railway development in America. A competitive high performance railway system – including a large network of high speed links – will constitute one of the pillars of US policies for transportation and sustainable development.”

Originally published at TreeHugger.com on July 12 2009.

Who said luxury vehicles are only for the rich?

Rendering by Nigel Young/Foster + Partners, via Fast Company.

When taking the bus means riding in an Aston Martin vehicle, with leather seats, wooden floors and a sunroof, who wouldn’t want to take the bus?

Believe it or not, the bus in the rendering above may be zooming around London’s streets as soon as 2011. The proposed design, the result of a collaboration between architecture firm Foster + Partners and luxury sports car manufacturer Aston Martin, beat out 700 other entries to win a Transport for London contest to redesign the city’s famous double-decker Routemaster bus.

With improved maneuverability, easy access for the handicapped and an interior that feels “like a lounge or living room on wheels,” the new model is a huge improvement over the old. The new bus is also much more environmentally friendly. Both the leather seats and the wood floors will be made from reconstituted and/or recycled materials, and its engine can be easily replaced with a newer model as technologies improve. Photovoltaic panels in the roof will also contribute to powering the vehicle.

The design will serve as the basis for new models manufactured for Transport for London, and the prototypes could be on the road by 2011.

Via Fast Company.

Michael Moore: “Let’s be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority.”

Ford’s assembly line in Detroit, 1927. (photo via The Daily Beast)

Michael Moore, long a critic of the auto industry, reacts to General Motors declaring bankruptcy, and suggests that the American people, who now own 60% of the company, should have a say in converting Detroit into a hub for sustainable industry, and retooling the auto industry for the post-car age…

Goodbye GM by Michael Moore (via The Daily Beast)

I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the president of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.

As I sit here in GM’s birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?

It is with sad irony that the company which invented “planned obsolescence”-the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one-has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh-and that wouldn’t start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the “inferior” Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers.

And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to “improve” the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle-class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.

So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company’s body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with—dare I say it—joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.

But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know—who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let’s be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we’ve allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?

Thus, as GM is “reorganized” by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking President Obama to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. Twenty years ago when I made Roger & Me, I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:

1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the president must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass-transit vehicles and alternative-energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks, and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.

We are now in a different kind of war—a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford, and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call “cars” may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.

The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn’t give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true—that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.

President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.

2. Don’t put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce—and most of those who have been laid off—employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st-century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.

3. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high-speed trains for nearly five decades—and we don’t even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven’t used it, is criminal. Let’s hire the unemployed to build the new high-speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to D.C. in under seven hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.

4. Initiate a program to put light-rail mass-transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.

5. For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy-efficient clean buses.

6. For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we’re going to have automobiles, let’s have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories—that simply isn’t true).

7. Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels, and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.

8. Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.

9. To help pay for this, impose a $2 tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy-saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.

Well, that’s a start. Please, please, please don’t save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don’t throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.

One hundred years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long. We enjoyed the car hops at the A&W. We made out in the front—and the back—seat. We watched movies on large outdoor screens, went to the races at NASCAR tracks across the country, and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through the window down Highway One. And now it’s over. It’s a new day and a new century. The president—and the UAW—must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.

Yesterday, the last surviving person from the Titanic disaster passed away. She escaped certain death that night and went on to live another 97 years.

So can we survive our own Titanic in all the Flint, Michigans, of this country. Sixty percent of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.

No kidding: 7 blocks of Broadway have been closed to traffic, transforming Times Square into a pedestrian mall.

(Photo via Tri-State Transportation Campaign.)

Manhattan closed off seven blocks of Broadway to traffic over the weekend, creating a series of new pedestrian spaces where only last week traffic chaos reigned. Earning praise from pedestrians, tourists and even The New York Times’ architecture critic, the move drew plenty of flak from impatient taxi drivers, truck drivers and commuters.

Broadway before Memorial Day weekend (above) and after (below). (Photos via NYT.)

Aaron Naparstek of Streetsblog.org, a blog that has long advocated for urban improvements like pedestrian streets in New York, visited Times Square this week and liked what he saw. Check out his post entitled The Crossroads of the World Goes Car-Free.

Left: Sections of Broadway closed off to traffic in red (via NYT). 

Though officially defined as experimental pilot project at this point, the pedestrian street is rumored to be just the first step in a larger project to pedestrianize most or all of Broadway. The lawn chairs are expected to eventually be replaced by more permanent design elements, as planners closely observe the way New Yorkers react to and utilize the space. 

An excellent article in the New York Magazine shed some light recently on the thinking behind the project. The article profiles New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, the project’s mastermind, describing her as a “hipster bureaucrat” and a combination of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs (referring to the highway-loving official and author/activist whose rivalry shaped much of the city’s physical and theoretical development).

Says Sadik-Khan: “One of the good legacies of Robert Moses is that, because he paved so much, we’re able to reclaim it and reuse it. It’s sort of like Jane Jacobs’s revenge on Robert Moses.”

Sadik-Khan has spent much of the last two years as head of the DOT attempting to reclaim public space from cars, something NYT Magazine describes as a “peculiar new culture war – over the role of the automobile in New York.” So far, it’s been an uphill battle, as car-lovers and shop-owners lodge vehement objections to every change in the status quo and critics bash Sadik-Khan’s “elitism.”

However, as the article notes, such interventions are already common in European cities, where the convential wisdom is the opposite of what it is in the US: “Many transportation experts now recognize that adding more lanes to a traffic-clogged road is a poor long-term solution for gridlock, because over time more lanes just attract more cars.”

New “personal rapid transit” electric taxis will be in operation by the fall.

PRT car designed by Zagato, unveiled in January at the World Future Energy Summit.

The designers of Masdar City, Abu Dhabi’s new post-petroleum city, are not bound by the usual set of rules and constraints. Money is not really an issue, and the political leadership is always willing to try out innovative ideas that the rest of the world regards as unproven, unorthodox or just plain fantasy.

One of them is PRT, personal rapid transit, a system of transportation featuring compact, driver-less “podcars.” In Masdar, where the streets will be entirely free of automobiles, a network of these compact electric taxis will provide clean and quiet transportation to the city’s residents, as well as commuters. The first PRT cars are set to begin running later this year. Admittedly intrigued, TreeHugger sat down with one of the system’s designers recently at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi to hear more about the project.

Luca Guala is a transportation planner with Systematica, the firm that drew up the plans for Masdar’s PRT system. According to Guala, Systematica’s planners spent months working with Foster + Partners, the city’s architectural planners, to integrate sustainable transport solutions into the city’s design.

In addition to PRT, he says, a light rail line will snake through Masdar, most likely running between Abu Dhabi’s international airport and the city center, some 20 km away. Although no cars will be allowed into Masdar City, nine multi-story parking lots will be scattered along its perimeter. Residents, commuters, visitors and buses will all have dedicated parking spots there, allowing them to own and use cars outside the city walls.

Jesse Fox: Would it be fair to describe PRT as a system of transportation which combines the sustainability of a light rail with the convenience of the private car?

Luca Guala: The PRT system in Masdar City will be a complementary system to the light rail, which will cross the city. PRT is not a system that can move huge masses of people, for that you need a light rail or a metro. A metro can move 60,000 passengers per hour – that’s equal to about 20 lanes of highway.

One of the differences between car travel and public transportation is the experience of traveling at rush hour. On the highway, you may be stuck, but you’re sitting in the comfort and privacy of your car. Meanwhile, on the subway you’re in motion, be you’re packed in with hundreds of other people.

Masdar City’s PRT system will have no rush hour congestion. When the computer sees that the network is approaching capacity, it will simply not allow cars to leave stations. This will not happen frequently, and when it does happen, passengers will be asked to wait for a few minutes.

Generally we foresee no more than a three minutes wait for passengers at a station, but there may be special occasions when the wait time is longer. If the Rolling Stones have a concert in Masdar, an event like that is bound to create congestion, and you may have to wait for more than three minutes. But we do not expect anything like that on a normal workday morning. You won’t be late to work in Masdar City because of traffic.

The PRT vehicles will travel at speeds of approximately 7 meters per second, with the longest routes in the city being perhaps 2.5 km. So let’s say you reach a station, wait maybe 1.5 minutes for your car to arrive, travel for 5 minutes if your destination is relatively far away, and then exit the station, which will take around a minute. So the longest trips in the city will be around 7, perhaps 10 minutes long.

PRT cars will move along rights of way, approximately 6 meters under street level. [Masdar City’s streets will be raised off the ground, but buildings will be built at ground level, with the first couple of stories serving as basements and space for technical equipment.]

We decided not to build elevated tracks in Masdar. Elevated tracks would put the cars between the first and second floors of buildings, and no one wants to see cars, even silent ones, zooming past their window. Plus a spaghetti grid network might not be so nice to look at from below, and could become a real visual issue in the city’s narrow streets.

What will it be like to travel on the PRT system in Masdar?

Guala: Passengers would descend a flight of stairs or an elevator to the station – perhaps an escalator in larger stations, but we decided to use only a few escalators, since they are more energy intensive. Elevators are necessary for the mobility disabled.

You will swipe a smart card through a machine, and a welcome message will appear. One option is that the system will recognize you and greet you personally: “Good morning, where do you want to go today?” Perhaps the system will remember your usual path, and offer it to you as an option. After you click on your destination, the system will say something like, “Your car is arriving in 2 minutes at platform number 3.” You may have to stand on a line, and you will be able to identify your car by its number.

The second option is that you will enter your destination into the system when you are already sitting inside a car.

Initially, the system will be very simple, with only a couple of stations. During this period, the system will function kind of like an elevator – you press a button and go to the third floor. Think of it as a horizontal lift. Later on it will be more sophisticated, and passengers will be able to get within 100 meters of any destination.

The cars will not run on tracks, but will operate within a kind of grid network, and take the shortest paths to get where they need to be. The cars will have wheels, and will be battery powered.

What kind of history does PRT have in practice?

Guala: PRT systems have had problems with things like cost overruns in the past. Few systems have actually been fully built and implemented. The one in Morgantown, West Virginia is the only one currently in existence. There is also one under construction in Heathrow airport in London.

Morgantown was built some 30 years ago, and was extremely expensive. They had to invent many of the components of the system from scratch, including the computer system. It was a prototype in every sense. Today, the computerization aspect is almost trivial. If your laptop had been around back then, it would have been powerful enough to implement Morgantown’s control system.

The only pure PRT systems going up today are the ones in Masdar and Heathrow – different systems which work according to similar logic. One of the companies involved in developing the system here in Masdar, 2getthere, has developed a system for transporting freight containers in the Rotterdam port in the Netherlands that works exactly like PRT. In Masdar, cargo will also be transported by PRT, using special freight cars.

How was the system planned out?

Guala: We used the same “predict and provide” models that are used to plan new roads. We had rough data about things like population size, arrival times, etc. We ran a few models and found that a few areas came out congested, so we interacted with the town planners and tried to get the best placement for various land uses.

For example, something like a conference center, which attracts a lot of people all at once, could become a local generator of congestion. So we said: let’s move it slightly to the side. The end result is a large patchwork of land uses, with none of the city’s districts clearly defined by a single use, like offices, residential and so on. That is ideal from a transit perspective, because it diffuses demand [traffic.]

In Masdar, you will be able to live very close to where you work. The districts will be in use at all hours. There will be nodes of activity at the intersections of routes, but the trick is that each nodes does not serve people doing the same thing and traveling at the same time – thus no traffic is created.

How did the specific cultural context in Abu Dhabi affect the planning?

Guala: Well, I am Italian. I bring with me a certain cultural model – namely the good parts of the Italian city. I think it is possible to apply the Italian city model in Abu Dhabi to a certain extent. But you can’t just transplant something to another culture and make it work.

The classic Arabic city has many similarities to the Italian city. There was a common way of living in the Mediterranean Basin, in Christian as well as Muslim areas. From a town planner’s perspective, the classic Arabic “medina” [dense Middle Eastern city with narrow streets and interior courtyards] and Venice are similar. Masdar City takes its inspiration more from the Arabic medina than from the Italian city.

There are other cultural preferences involved here as well. People in Europe are used to taking public transport. It’s not necessarily like that here. Plus there is more sensitivity here to the privacy of the family, which led us to suggest a different kind of system, more suited to the local cultural context.

Is PRT cost-efficient?

Guala: This will be an expensive system. It has to be that way, because it’s a prototype. From an energy perspective it’s extremely cost-efficient, which is what Masdar [the Masdar Initiative is the corporate body that is building Masdar City] wants. The maintenance of a system like this is more expensive than that of a system based on buses, but the level of service is absolutely unreachable by other forms of public transportation.

The huge advantage of PRT is that it is “on demand,” including during off-peak hours. During peak hours, PRT is less efficient than public transport. But PRT is a 24-hour service, just as available during off-peak hours as it is during peak hours. This is much more efficient than running empty buses all night. There are advantages in terms of personal security as well – no long waits in the middle of the night, for example.

I don’t really know about the financial aspects in detail, it’s not really part of our job as planners. It is technically possible to cover costs with ticket fees. A fee roughly equivalent to the cost of a taxi ride would cover the costs of the system. There is a huge investment cost in a system like this, but after it is prototyped, the costs will come down. The actual cost of PRT is lower than the costs for a light rail of the same capacity.

What kind of prospects are there for PRT in other places?

Guala: There is a lot of interest in PRT right now, especially in new developments. In existing cities it’s a bit trickier to make it work. The optimum place for a system like PRT could be in smaller towns and in contained, controlled environments, like hospitals, universities, new business districts, places like that.

Originally published at TreeHugger.com on February 1, 2009. Photos by the author.