DATE: Thursday, June 19, 1997               TAG: 9706180004

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: OPINION 

SOURCE: Patrick Lackey

                                            LENGTH:   88 lines

AN ARCHITECT DREAMS OF CITIES WITHOUT PERSONAL CARS

North American suburbs are designed to accommodate the car. As a result, they cannot be lived in without one.

The rare pedestrian must cross desert-like parking lots to get anywhere. Residences and jobs are too dispersed for mass transit to carry most commuters and shoppers.

Although cars cost a fortune, North Americans own nearly 200 million of them. On average it costs $6,000 a year to buy, maintain, insure and regulate a car.

Twenty-five to 40 percent of a suburb is asphalt - not because people like asphalt but because cars do.

The greater the congestion of cars, the more people disperse to escape. The more people disperse, the more cars they need. We're getting nowhere.

The usual solution proposed to break our slavery to cars is for people to move closer together, so mass transit is more effective and people can bike and walk to destinations they now drive to.

But the cold fact is, North Americans like to disperse. Most want homes, yards and gardens. They want to be surrounded by people of similar means - but not closely surrounded. Many abhor concentration.

To ignore North Americans' desire to disperse is to engage in wishful thinking, says Moshe Safdie, an architect and urban planner, in his new book, ``The City after the Automobile.''

Similarly, he says, to ignore their love for the personal freedom that their cars afford them is to ignore reality.

Safdie has a plan for ending our over-reliance on the personal car while making commuting and shopping easier and dispersal possible.

He proposes ``utility cars,'' or ``U-cars.'' They would be electric, so air quality would improve. They would be owned, charged, maintained and stored by a regional utility company.

For storage, U-cars could be stacked on continuous belts, like luggage at airports. The belts could spiral up silo-like structures that would hold roughly four times as many vehicles as a parking lot of similar size.

Storage silos would be located at places of concentrated traffic, like malls, airports, the Oceanfront or downtown locations. To go shopping, you'd leave one U-car at a storage silo near the mall entrance. To go home, you'd pick up another.

Rushing to an airport, you'd park your U-car near the terminal entrance and never have a care what happened to it. When you arrived at another airport, you could pick up another U-car. The savings in space for long-term airport parking would be phenomenal.

Storage silos would be built near light-rail stops. A commuter might keep a U-car overnight. In the morning, he could drive it to a light-rail stop and ride the rail to work. At days end, he'd pick up another U-car when he got off the train.

Or a commuter might drive downtown and leave the U-car at a storage site. At the end of the day, he'd pick up another one.

Each person would have a U-car card. Computers could assess charges based on the amount a person drove U-cars.

No longer would time have to be found to refuel and service a car. No time would be wasted searching for the elusive parking space. No time would be blown trying to remember where you parked your car. No one would have to take risky walks across parking lots or down parking ramps. All U-cars on the road would be equally maintained, so the car behind you should have brakes that work. Car theft should end. You'd never have to buy another car.

There could be less asphalt in cities and more plants and public meeting places, partly because fewer street parking spots and garages would be required.

For trips from city to city, U-cars could be bunched into ``trains.''

Or they could be designed to travel on automatic pilot down new highways.

For downtowns, Safdie would have conveyors to move pedestrians horizontally. Some airports have them already.

``Mall planners have long recognized,'' Safdie writes, ``that there are natural limits on the distance a customer would stroll window-shopping or walk with purchases - and hence the length of a mall does not generally exceed 600 feet.''

But he said elevators and conveyors together would give a pedestrian full access to the downtown of a city. There might also be a system of high-speed compartments that would move like elevators only horizontally.

The combination of mass transit, U-cars, elevators, conveyors and horizontal compartments would make people more mobile than they are now.

I'm no car nut. If my car is me, I'm chopped liver. I'd love the U-cars that someone else took care of.

But Safdie is a realist. He writes, ``Only a crisis, a breakdown in the mobility offered by the car as we know it today, will shock us into considering new options. Why should we consider the U-car? Because this crisis of diminished mobility is upon us - and better, in this context, a U-car than no car at all.'' MEMO: Mr. Lackey is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.

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