Am I alone in thinking how strange it is that, in the midst of this frenzied debate about “saving the planet”, nobody is pointing the finger at the pernicious role of URBAN SPRAWL and its prime facilitator – millions of over-sized, over-powered, over-engineered, and yet ridiculously under-used MOTOR VEHICLES..!? 

The ecological and economic wastefulness of private cars is absurdly obvious, but the car ownership regime is so well established that it is now impossible to overthrow – short of an outright prohibition of private cars, which no democratic government could dare contemplate –   

If everyone had to use community shared cars, Car Density would be reduced dramatically

• • If all private cars were banned in favour of CSC, the car/people ratio would go from 1:2.5 (24 million cars) to approx 1:15 (4 million)
  • But in Obecities most car usage is for commuting, shopping, picking up kids, etc, none of which will apply in Δ.
  • The elimination of most short car journeys is therefore likely to further reduce this ratio to maybe 1:30 (2 million cars).
  • Δ residents will only need a car when they want to go beyond Δ environs, but that may not be very often

Why would Δ residents ever want to leave..?

Virtually all your work, education, shopping, and leisure activities will take place within Δ environs.

Δ will be attractive to vistors, therefore your outside friends/relatives would probably prefer to visit you..!

The superb Sanctuary will compensate for traditional car-clogged weekend country drives.

Δ will have excellent mass transport links with the outside via monorail, TGV, etc.

After considering all these additional factors, a car: people ratio as small as 1:50 may be sufficient. 

Most of our societal problems are caused by the scandalously wasteful cancerous sprawl of OB-cities.

Obecities are nurtured and sustained by OOT without which they can neither grow nor survive.

Given the typical West European car/people ratio of 1:2.5 (400 cars for every 1000 people), a community of 6000 people would need to provide 2400 parking spaces.   Although inner-city apartment dwellers tend to have somewhat fewer cars than the average, and (assuming PC’s were allowed) even if a city-satellite arcology (qv) were to have a ratio as ‘low’ as1:4 – this would still mean provision of 1500 car spaces.

20% of our cities given over to Vehicle Parking 

If we were to calculate the total ground space, or footprint, occupied by covered purpose-built parkades, open parking lots, service station forecourts, lock-up garages, concreted-over suburban gardens, and all roadside parking spaces, I would guess that it must amount to 20% of the land area of obecities.

Although an average European car occupies only about 7.5 m2, about 4 times as much space (ie, 30m2) needs to be provided to allow for occupant entry between cars and for maneuvering, plus entry roads and ramps, stairwells, concrete supports, etc, or 45,000m2 in total.

Surface car parks can be either vast tarmac fields or multi-storey parkades.   Sub-surface carparks need to be well ventilated and are expensive.

Given more flexibility in our work/leisure habits, CSC’s might reduce the necessary parking provision to 200 spaces (at 1/25) or even as few as 100 (1/50).

But 100 CSV’s would occupy only a fraction of the parking space of 100 PMV’s.  

How come?

When renting a self-drive car you might ask for the same TYPE or Model as on a previous occasion but, as you don’t own the car, you have no attachment to a specific one and usually don’t ask for the EXACT same vehicle.   CSC’s would work in a similar fashion, but the bureaucracy and form-filling of the conventional car-hiring process would be eliminated and you would be able to ‘rent’ cars by the hour and for as little as 1 hour.

In practice this means that the cars can be parked far more compactly than in a normal parkade, which must allow extra space for passengers to enter their cars as well as maneuvering space.   Thus, in a fully occupied parkade, only about 25% of the floor area is actually occupied by vehicles.   This wasted space can be eliminated by packing the cars on conveyer tracks, thus each car need occupy a floor space only slightly larger than the vehicle itself – eg, 4.5m length x 1.7m width.   Thus 100 cars of 5 different types (or categories), sufficient to serve the occasional car needs of 5000 people, could be lined up nose-to-tail and side-by-side on 5 adjacent tracks.

In this way, 2000 cars and 60,000 m2 (6 hectares) of paved parking could be replaced by 100 cars on 800m2.

After selecting his preferred category, the user takes the front car on that line.   On returning, it goes onto the back of the line where it gradually moves to the front again.

Suppose someone doesn’t want the first car in line..?

If a client requests a car in the middle of the line, and he doesn’t want to wait for his preference to move to the front, he would need to pay a fee for each car that needs to be moved to gain access to his choice.