Of course, our transportation and land use planners could go a step further themselves and move from planning for 'mobility' (the ability to move around the landscape) to planning for 'accessibility' (the ability to access goods and services). Putting things closer together reduces the need for mobility and allows more people to access more destinations at lower energy and environmental costs...

You are assuming that the American public perceives a need to change. Most Americans spend more time on TV shows than how to get around. They are all fine with what they have. Any attempt to "take away" or even "HMO" like a Transport Maintenance Organization TMO will be seen as a loss of control and thus a loss of perceived power. Since Americans have lost power over the political process and feel helpless, they must scramble to hold onto whatever control they have.

Best of luck to you on this idea, but you may have to pry their SUV out of their cold dead hands.

Americans are stupid. Very stupid. And stubborn. (As an American, I can attest to this first hand.)

If anything takes any extra effort, they won't do it. Their idea of mobility is "get in car. Drive. Honk at crazy person on bike." Anything that takes more effort than walking from their air conditioned house into their air conditioned car is never going to work, not matter how easy it is to use.

You will not get Americans to change based on an appeal to their fear or their sense of patriotism or their sense of morality. The only way to make them change is to make it painful to continue what they're doing. That's why gas prices increasing makes them suddenly start thinking about walking, and not hundreds of people dying from a category 5 hurricane.

Great idea, but the "seamless" part is what will require the most detail. Cars are wasteful, but they are "seamless." You get in, you drive to your destination, you get out. When you are dependent on multiple forms of transporation, you have the same problems as when you miss your connecting flight.

Another thing to keep in mind, is American's obsession with perceived wealth. In only a few cities, is it socially acceptable not to own a car. Everywhere else, car ownership also serves as a status symbol. So, when you ask someone to give up their car, you're asking them to give up whatever status they feel they've gained by having a car.

Communauto is a similar car-sharing service in Quebec that's proven very successful, and their fleet is mostly SULEVs like the Toyota Echo and Yaris.

I always think about car ownership in terms of amortized cost - what you're paying for is the ability to (in theory) go wherever you want, whenever you want. In reality, most people shuttle to and from work, school, pick up kids, get groceries on a pretty regular schedule. In a typical workday, your car is probably used total for less than a couple of hours, but then sits idle the rest of the time, essentially just taking up space. A taxi-bus service, just to give one example, gives the same point-to-point mobility but none of the hassles of managing, upkeep or storage, with a fixed monthly cost for a pass.

Public transportation is excellent in theory. People moving en masse from near their homes to near their work instead of alone in their cars using gas and space on just themselves.
If you have ever waited twenty minutes or a half an hour or a whole hour for your bus as I did today again, the second time this week you start to HATE public transportation and everything it stands for.
As the sweat starts to drip down my back I want to trade in my $50 a month bus pass for a $40 a month scooter financing.
I'm sick of public transportation, it's only getting worse as peoples expectations drop and their feeling of control over it has completely vanished.

Conrad Wagner's been preaching this approach for years.

link here

enough with the pointless american bashing, icelander. stupid might also be defined as living on a geologically unstable island that relies on nearly everything but energy to be shipped to it just to sustain it's people.

Public transportation in cities is a wonderful thing. But a large proportion of Americans live in areas where public transportation doesn't make economic sense. We were just up visiting my in-laws in northern Maine, where people are likely to own SUVs or pickup trucks because they need them, and possibly have snowmachines as well. There are school bus stops children are all brought in from the back 40 on snowmachines, and at the end of the day the school bus does not leave until the driver has seen that all the engines have started successfully. And needless to say, public transportation to my in-laws place does not exist. Life in most rural places is just about impossible without a car - and if you want to eat any of that lovely locally-grown food, you need people to continue to live in rural places.

The post wasn't just about public transportation - but linking together multiple means of mobility into an efficient whole. So the school bus is linked to the snowmachines is linked to the feet. But what if the snowmachines were a single vehicle, transporting all the kids back home from the bus stop? And as for life in rural places being impossible without a car - Hogwash! The Amish do fine without cars, even while interacting with the "English". Most rural societies are too poor to allow everyone to have a car - so people get around by bicycle, foot, donkey, scooter, whatever is available that will get them from Point A to Point B. Not that I am recommending poverty as a means of reducing our dependence on cars, but we really need to stop assuming that cars are the only answer.

Locally-grown food can be local even in urban areas: there are quite a few Community Supported Agriculture farms around Madison which are accessible by bike, there are garden plots owned by the city and leased out, there is the farmers' market. In State College, PA, I once saw planters on one of the downtown streets that were planted with tomatoes, peppers, herbs and other veggies - free for the picking!

Heard a hilarious comedy skit on the radio about how to make more people give up their cars...the comic was calling for women to consider people on the bus a better prospect than car drivers. With women heavily favouring bus'ers (instead of the usual status symbols...BWM's & SUVs), the guy population would shift.

It was tongue-in-cheek, but hilarious :)

Interesting proposition. Certainly a more integrated system of transportation options would be helpful for travellers. I would suggest that the only sustainable and people-friendly way to do it would be to have a non-profit organization run it.

For starters the organization could offer free participation to all car/bike/scooter/airplane/boat rental agencies, public transit companies/departments, tour companies, airports, pedestrian organizations, and taxi companies. They could assemble information on routes, estimated travel time, costs, carrying capacity, and energy efficiency, and allow the customers to input their priorities. Then the system (web-based, of course) would spit out a customized travel plan. For example, I often go to Maine on vacation (Hi Mom!). I would like to know what the most efficient way to travel there from Boston is. I know that there is a Peter Pan bus line that goes from Boston to Augusta, but then I'm stuck. Maybe there is a taxi service that could pick me up and take me the rest of the way? Or maybe there is a local bus that operates along the main road that could get me within a couple of miles of my destination, and then maybe I could rent a bike at the bus stop? Or perhaps a horse drawn carriage could pick me up (that would be very cool!). Right now, I would have to spend days researching all these possiblities and still I might easily miss one (I never thought to check and see if there was a horse drawn carriage taxi service in Palermo, Maine!). With an integrated Mobility service, my trip could be planned for me in a matter of minutes!

My local transit system has a trip planner aplication on their website and Google Maps has a route planner that includes distance and, in theory, trip times (though in practice the trip times aren't based on walking or biking, and aren't even accurate for driving a car, from my experience!).

So yeah. I like the idea. Just don't encourage the greed-based corporations to take it over. Ok?

enough with the pointless american bashing, icelander. stupid might also be defined as living on a geologically unstable island that relies on nearly everything but energy to be shipped to it just to sustain it's people.

I am an American, and I live in Pennsylvania.

And anyone who takes an honest look around in the US knows that I'm exactly right: We are stupid and stubborn and greedy and lazy. We just spin it so it looks good to us.

you already said where you live, icelander, but you apparently have some patriotism for iceland and i would assume you are capable of understanding my point. regardless, highly subjective blanket statements about the population of an entire country can only get you so far and certainly don't help the debate in the least.

Can someone explain the title to this article? I don't get it. Mobility isn't a verb.