Auto-Free World

Pricing Pioneer
William Vickrey, emeritus professor at Columbia University and pioneer of peak-load pricing, died Friday, October 11, three days after winning the Nobel Prize in Economics. Vickrey, who was 82, suffered a heart attack while driving. His untimely death robs road-pricing advocates of an energetic ally with a powerful bully pulpit.

Vickrey's work helped persuade electric utilities in Britain and the US to charge premium fees for peak usage and to offer off-peak discounts, in order to allocate costs efficiently and defray costly new capacity. Highway congestion pricing in Singapore and Southern California also owes much to Vickrey.
-Mobilizing the Region

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Car-nage
The World Health Organization recommends that preventing traffic accidents become an international health priority. The reason? By 2020, the toll of life and limb on the road will rank as the third greatest cause of death and disability worldwide (in second place in developing countries). The report also says the situation will get worse before it improves, because mortality rates per vehicle tend to be greatest when motorization is proceeding most rapidly, as it is today in much of the world.
-New Scientist

Finally
In California, the Bank of America together with citizens' groups and a state agency, has called for an about face away from auto-dependent suburban development. "Unchecked sprawl," its report finds, "has shifted from an engine of California's growth to a force that threatens to inhibit growth and degrade our quality of life."
-Washington Post

The Asphalt Farm
Forty-five years ago, Los Angeles was the top-producing farm county in the United States. Today, 70 percent of its land is devoted to cars. The same fate is in store for California's Central Valley, the country's richest agricultural area, unless policies change, says the American Farmland Trust. It projects annual losses resulting from urban sprawl of $3 billion in agricultural sales and local government deficits of $1 billion. A more compact growth pattern would halve the losses and turn the deficits into small surpluses.
-Washington Post

The Mommy Lane
A study of British cities found that for reasons of both crime and infrastructure (not wholly unrelated), the number of children who could walk to school alone fell from 80 percent in 1970 to 8 percent last year. Meanwhile, National Travel Survey data indicate that nearly a fifth of rush-hour traffic is parents driving children to school.
-Local Transport Today

Oil Slicks
Automakers and gasoline producers topped the list of big spenders on Capitol Hill in the first six months of 1996. The Ford Motor Company, who doled out $3.48 million in the first half of the year to make them number one, has 15 lobbyists to sway Congress on legislation including the Clean Air Act. Next in line at the cash machine were Tenneco, Inc., an auto parts and gas pipelines manufacturer, followed by the Atlantic Richfield Company and Amoco.
-Roll Call

Traffic Calming Works
YORK, England: The city of York has implemented a powerful traffic calming plan. Here are the results, as measured by the difference between 1981-1985 and 1990-1994:

-Local Transport Today

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