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    Decongestion: Seven Steps for Mayors and Other City Leaders to Cut Traffic Congestion
    Decongestion: Seven Steps for Mayors and Other City Leaders to Cut Traffic Congestion
    Decongestion: Seven Steps for Mayors and Other City Leaders to Cut Traffic Congestion
    Ebook279 pages2 hours

    Decongestion: Seven Steps for Mayors and Other City Leaders to Cut Traffic Congestion

    By Rachel Smith

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Do you want to be the Mayor or City Leader who cut traffic congestion?
    Do you want to be remembered for solving a major problem that is costing everyone money and wasting people’s precious time?
    Do you want to be re-elected and leave a legacy where you live and work?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateFeb 19, 2015
    ISBN9780994218742
    Decongestion: Seven Steps for Mayors and Other City Leaders to Cut Traffic Congestion

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      Book preview

      Decongestion - Rachel Smith

      us.

      PART 1: THE PROBLEMS CAUSED BY TOO MANY CARS

      HOW OUR GREATEST DREAM BECAME OUR BIGGEST NIGHTMARE

      The Australian and American Dream has been for many decades – and maybe it still is – space: a big house, a big backyard, a swimming pool and space for two cars, or these days often five cars. This is what we were all told we should aspire to. Everyone copied everyone else, and so now Australia and America are full of big houses with big backyards and swimming pools and parking for lots of cars.

      Stuck on the roads

      But many people think our greatest dream has tuned into our biggest nightmare. Today our dream has become:

         Congestion: many people spend 15 hours a week sitting in their car stuck in traffic.

         Cost: car drivers on average have to work 1.3 minutes to pay for each kilometre driven, or 13 minutes for each 10 kilometres (tweeted @lennartnout @Canada_Bikes).

         Obesity: 63% of people living in Australia are seriously overweight or obese.

      Sydneysiders, for example, currently make 16 million trips on an average weekday and 15 million at the weekend. Almost 70% of weekday trips are taken by car during peak periods. This leads to increased pressure on the road network, and public transport.

      Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.

      Ellen Goodman

      Stuck at work

      But most of all, this dream has created a lack of time for people. For example, US workers rank first in hours worked (1,800 hours annually). The typical American middle-income family worked an average of 11 more hours a week in 2006 than they did in 1979.¹ And people are not happy about it:

         70% of employed Americans are disengaged from their work.

         18% of workers are actively disengaged – meaning they aren’t just unhappy, they are busy acting out their unhappiness.

         74% of employed people would consider a new job opportunity if one was presented to them.

         The 4-Hour Work Week has spent seven years on The New York Times bestseller list.

         Americans count down the years to retirement at age 65, and CNN defines early retirement as the ultimate American Dream.

      Many people struggle to find even one day of rest each week. We are so time poor that many of us pay to have everyday tasks done. These days people pay:

         to have their shirts ironed

         to have their houses cleaned

         to have their children cared for

         to have their dog walked

         to have their lawns mowed.

      Not much of a dream, is it?

      So if oil gets scarce, is the priority still to use it to drive down the road for a pack of smokes!?

      Warren Salomon via @GregVann

       I often ask people this:

      Is daily life time-consuming, or has the car and our car-orientated urban planning made daily life inconvenient and complicated?

       What do you think?

      THE PROBLEMS

      Our addiction to the car has made us crazy. We teach our children to fear the street and we fight wars to ensure we have reliable access to oil. Our obsession with the car controls just about every aspect of our urban lives. Like a drug however, it is destroying us from the inside out, not only is our atmosphere polluted and our streets congested, but every new road, car park and set of traffic lights makes our cities a little less liveable. We have once again forgotten that cities are human.

      Urban Times

      I’ll be blunt. We’re addicted to driving our cars and it’s driving us crazy. An average person spends 2 years of their life…in a car!

      @cyclehoop

      The biggest issues in Australia right now

      According to popular media sources, social media and technical publications, the biggest issues in Australia that need solving right now are:

         the cost of living

         traffic congestion

         adult and childhood obesity

         sedentary lifestyles.

      Each and every one of these problems is associated with, or caused by, our addiction to the car.

      It is essential to have an understanding and appreciation of why we have too many cars on our roads which create too many traffic jams, and why both factors create traffic congestion in our towns and cities. The fast facts

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