page_title: Automotive city
section_title: 21st century
hierarchical_section_title: Automotive city / 21st century
caption_attribution_description: English: High Five Interchange at the intersection of I-635 and U.S. Route 75 in Dallas, Texas, looking towards the southwest
context_page_description: Automotive city or Auto City are cities that facilitate, and encourage, the movement of people via private transportation, through ‘physical planning’, e.g., built environment innovations and ‘soft programming’ e.g., social policy surrounding city street usage.
context_section_description: Twentieth century Western city planning has been characterised by academics such as Vanderbilt (2010) as an exercise in retrofitting the metropolis for the car. While the benefits of private transportation and the mobility it affords citizens in a dispersed metro is widely acknowledged, logistically, it is exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible, for planners to design a city which efficiently accommodates more than a fraction of its population in this manner. Unfortunately, current research points toward a transportation system which has caused as many problems as it has solved 
  As early as 1925, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, had estimated that urban congestion costs were exceeding $2 billion a year. In 2009, The Texas Transportation Institute issued the Urban Mobility Report (2009), in which the estimated current cost of traffic congestion (in wasted fuel and lost productivity)was $87.2 billion in the U.S.
  In Australia, through the twentieth century, Clapton makes the observation that the automobile has, "killed, injured and maimed more people than war has done to Australian soldiers" (Clapton, 2005, p. 313).
  In the 21st century Western automotive city, road engineers fight against the phenomenon of induced traffic (new infrastructure creating more congestion), road authorities strive for balance between traffic safety, the independence awarded to private transportation users and the rights of various road users in a democratic society, while land speculators continue to design dormitory commuter neighbourhoods, in cities where planning agencies facilitate (or do not regulate) car dependent sprawl.
caption: The High Five Interchange in Dallas, Texas
exif: {}