Imagine the peaceful serenity of a city without cars. Think of downtowns you have known after midnight when you could hear the knock of footsteps and the distant rumble of a night truck. Recall holidays or weekends in a city when the usual roar of city traffic was replaced by the voices of children from a nearby park.

      Doesn't that scratch some fleeting memory?

      Humanity has almost forgotten how cities felt and sounded before the invasion of the iron dinosaurs. We've almost forgotten the joys of the city, forgotten why we built cities in the first place. For many of us today, especially for suburbanized Americans, the city is a place to flee ― in our cars, naturally.

      Specifically, the urban automobile kills street life, damages the social fabric of communities, isolates people, endangers other street users, spoils the city's beauty, upsets people with its noise, causes air pollution, wastes energy and natural resources, and impoverishes nations.

      But damn automobiles as you will, I suspect that most Americans faced with a choice between cars and cities would give up cities. In fact, isn't that what we have actually done with our flight to the suburbs?

      If the American rate of automobile ownership becomes the norm worldwide, we will someday have two or three billion cars. Can we find enough resources to build these cars? Can we find the gasoline to run them? Can we bear the stink, the noise, the danger and damage? Or is there a better way?

      The strongest argument, which applies to all of us, is not environmental. Rather, it is a hard fact. The current automobile age is coming to a rapid halt within the lifetime of most people under 50 today! Car-free cities are not a matter of choice to be debated. They are inevitable. The sooner we begin to face this truth and prepare for it, the less traumatic the change will be. In fact, the car as we know it is a doomed species. The petroleum-powered automobile cannot be sustained for more than a few more decades — if that long.

      The challenge is to remove cars and trucks from cities while at the same time improving mobility and reducing its total costs. But solution?

      The urban automobile can be replaced only if a better alternative is available. What would happen if we designed a city to work without any cars? Would anyone want to live in such a city? Does it make social and economic sense? Is it possible to be free of the automobile while keeping the rapid and convenient mobility it once offered? Public transport can become more attractive than the car for the average urban user if it addresses three issues: speed, comfort, and cost.

      The city that has never yielded is Venice. Venice is densely populated, yet still wonderfully quiet, open, and livable. Its canals and narrow bridges shielded it from the car. In Venice you can still taste a quality of European city life that could not be plundered by the 20th century barbarians of steel and petroleum.

      In the Third World, public transport is profit-making. Almost everybody uses it. Although it consumes a considerable amount of personal income (though still far less than a private automobile), public transport in these areas is demand-driven and works well up to the limits of road capacity.

      Somehow, through the smoke of the media dominated by the Auto Axis, we Americans should at least begin debating the inevitable death of our beloved automobiles. The advent of the Post-Petroleum Age is going to be massively disruptive if it comes upon us quickly and we are unprepared. In that worst-case scenario, most American cities and suburbs could quickly become virtually inoperable nightmares for a decade or longer.

      The post-automotive world is not something most Americans want, but the world cannot avoid it. When traffic finally dies here, many Americans will recall those "good old days" of traffic jams.

      Bottom line: few Americans will ever see this challenging message. This means that the Post-Petroleum Age is likely to arrive as a great surprise to us. The concept of car-free cities will still be foreign to Americans when cars begin sputtering to a halt. Not a pretty picture.

(704 words)

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