Tag: driving

• What signage says about your city

  I woke up this morning in the City of London, Ontario, to a parking ticket. Apparently, I had committed an infraction by parking between the hours of 3:00 am – 5:00 am.

  Here’s what the sign looked like, directly in front of my car. There were no other signs nearby other than one at the end of the street telling me where the parking area stopped.

  

  Perhaps I’m missing something, but based on the signage provided, there’s absolutely no way for me to know that parking is not permitted between the precise hours of 3:00 am and 5:00 am. And truthfully, this seems like an odd set of hours to want to enforce. 

  If there were some feasible way for me to fight this ticket, I would. But since cities make this purposely difficult, I’m just going to pay it. Even though I feel like fighting it out of principle.

  But this post isn’t for me to complain about a parking ticket.

  When I got the ticket this morning, it reminded me of a “theory” that someone once told me at an Urban Land Institute conference a few years back in Washington D.C. I actually can’t remember who it was, but the idea was that you can tell how global a city is by the quality of its signage and wayfinding signage.

  I’m intrigued by this proposition because, if you think about it, a city unaccustomed to receiving outsiders has less of a need for quality signage. As a local, you begin to create your own mental map of the city and you intuitively start to understand what’s allowed, such as where you can park. The importance of good signage somewhat diminishes.

  But outsiders are coming with no understanding. They’re looking for directions and instructions. So you should make sure that your city is giving it to them. However, at the same time, there are lots of big global cities, such as New York, which are or were notorious for bad signage. So signage quality is probably not perfectly correlated with globalization.

  Regardless, signage matters. It’s one of the ways in which a city talks at you and others. How clearly does your city communicate?

  2014.01.18

• Why Norway loves Tesla Motors

  Norway imposes big levies on the sale of fuel burning vehicles. They can amount to more than 100% of the sale price—effectively doubling the price of a vehicle. It’s a supertax.

  Exempt from these taxes, however, are electric vehicles. This has not surprisingly made Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors an incredibly popular choice. In fact, Norway has become Tesla’s best overseas market with the highest per capita sales.

  And it’s because it makes economic sense, at least for some. Here’s how a Norwegian would save by buying the Tesla Model S: 

  “EV drivers enjoy breaks on levies the government imposes on vehicle purchases to the tune of about $135,000 for the Model S, which has a local starting base price of about $112,000. In other words, if the Model S had a gas engine, like comparable luxury cars, it would cost nearly $250,000 to own one in Norway.”

  But this approach has been criticized as a subsidy for the wealthy. People are buying a Tesla S instead of a Porsche. However, you could argue that the intent of the supertax is being fulfilled: more people are buying electric vehicles. Which is why the per capita fleet of plug-in electric vehicles as a whole in Norway is the largest in the world.

  So the lesson here is that if you want people to adopt sustainability, just make it cheaper.

  Credit to Evgeny of 500px for giving me the idea for this post.

  2014.01.06

• Cost of a car

  Every time I bring my car in for service, I’m reminded of how expensive it is to maintain one. Between car payments, insurance, gas, parking in the city and service, owning a car eats into a lot of disposable income.

  So for cities where the residents don’t need a car to get around, there’s potentially a lot of additional income that can get placed in other sectors of the economy.

  Richard Florida, and others, have argued that we’ve historically been overspending on housing and transportation, and that it restricts capital from flowing into other, more productive, areas of the economy.

  I’d be curious to see a study that compares transportation spending versus other local economic measures. How would a driving city compare to a public transit or biking city?

  2013.08.28