汽车不再是未来城市的主角

    自从汽车进入美国大众市场以来，城市开发商们在规划城市布局时就会优先考虑车流。

    不过，在加州拉古纳尼古尔举行的《财富》杂志（Fortune）“头脑风暴绿色大会”（Brainstorm Green conference）上，一群讨论小组成员提出，城市建设支持高速公路并不一定能为居民带来最好的生活品质。

    城市设计与建筑公司卡尔索普联合公司（Calthorpe Associates）的合伙人彼得•卡尔索普称：“高速公路城市的时代已经过去了，我们已经无法继续承担这个代价，而且它也并不理想。”他还说，随着全球越来越多地区迈入城市化阶段——据他说，到2025年发展中国家将有35亿人居住在城市中——城市居民将会需要充满乐趣的宜居环境。他说，未来的城市设计可以围绕这些展开，不必总想着汽车。

    西门子公司（Siemens）总裁兼首席执行官埃里克•斯皮格尔表示，市长们已经在考虑降低交通拥堵的问题了。他说，从积极的方面说，减少拥堵并不需要突破性的技术，“人们总是在说创新，但实际上我们已经有很多技术可以减少路上的汽车” 。

    很多交通领域的创新来自发展中国家。比如，西方国家正在研究拉丁美洲目前已经投入使用的快速公交系统。

    小组成员杰•卡尔森是C40城市气候领导集团（C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group）的首席执行官。他特别提到了里约热内卢市长派希近期推出的一个项目。目前，这位市长正赶在2016年奥运会之前抓紧推行快速公交系统，以满足该市的交通需求。快速公交系统（BRT）避免了现行系统的一些弊端。采用BRT后，乘客在上车前就买好了票，不用浪费时间在站台等待乘客上车，最终也降低了整个系统的运营成本。为了保证这个系统的顺畅运行，城市管理者们还必须对那些侵占公交车专用道路的汽车予以严惩。

    不过，卡尔森表示，尽管能大幅减少碳排放，但派希并没有把自己的这番努力大吹大擂成什么意义重大的绿色行动。他倒是强调了这样一个事实，即更好的公交系统能从根本上改善居民的生活质量。在某种程度上，布局合理的交通系统能改善城市生活品质，因为它能把交通车辆对城市生活的总体影响降到最小。这类办法颇具讽刺意味的一点在于——最好的交通系统实际上反而能大幅减少往来穿梭、运送乘客的交通工具。

    卡尔索普称：“实际上是我提出了所谓的‘公交导向的发展’这个说法，我也很愿意推广它。解决目前问题的答案更多和步行及骑车有关——也就是多关注鞋子，而不是轮胎。”

    或至少不应该是汽车轮胎。这是个颇有意思的想法——城市的未来发展蓝图中汽车将不再是那么突兀的存在了。希望汽车业界的领袖们也能开始正视这种想法【当天晚些时候，通用汽车（General Motors）的首席执行官丹•阿克森也参加了我们的头脑风暴绿色大会】。如果我们想象未来的城市时，首先闯入脑海的不再是汽车，汽车厂商们应该怎么办？（财富中文网）

    译者：清远

    Ever since cars hit the mass market in the U.S., urban developers have prioritized the flow of automobiles as they plan cities.

    But building cities to support highway infrastructure does not necessarily provide the best quality of life for residents, according to a group of panelists at Fortune's Brainstorm Green conference in Laguna Niguel, Calif.

    "The age of the highway city is over, we can't afford it, and it's not desirable," says Peter Calthorpe, a principle at Calthorpe Associates, an urban design and architecture firm. Calthorpe argues that as more of the world moves into urban environments -- he says there will be 3.5 billion people living in developing world cities by 2025 -- they will want fun, livable urban places. Cities can be all those things, he says, without being designed with cars in mind.

    City mayors are already concerned about reducing traffic congestion, says Eric Spiegel, the president and CEO of Siemens (SI). On the upside, reducing traffic will not require a technological breakthrough, he says. "People talk about new innovations, but we already have a lot of the technology to get cars off the road."

    Many transit innovations are coming from the developing world. For example, Western nations are currently studying bus rapid transit models already in place in Latin America.

    Panelist Jay Carson, chief executive of C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, cited a recent project by the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Paes, who is implementing bus rapid transit to help cope with the city's transportation needs leading up to the 2016 Olympics. Bus rapid transit (BRT) dodges some of the pitfalls of the current systems. Using BRT, people pay for their tickets before the ride, saving time from idling at stops while passengers board and ultimately reducing the system's costs. For the system to work smoothly, leaders in cities must also work to strictly enforce penalties for cars that camp out in bus lanes.

    Though the carbon savings are significant, Paes is not billing his efforts as a big green initiative, Carson says. Instead, he's capitalizing on the fact that better public transit organically improves the quality of life for residents. In part, well-mapped transit improves quality of life in cities because it minimizes the overall impact of transit vehicles. That's the irony of this kind of approach -- the best transit systems actually cut down on the amount of machines shuttling people back and forth.

    "I actually coined the phrase transit-oriented development, and I'd like to shed it," Calthorpe said. "The answer has more to do with walking and biking -- shoes, not tires."

    Or at least, not car tires. It's an interesting thought -- that cars will be a much less obtrusive feature of the cities of the future. Hopefully, it's a point that leaders at car companies will address. (General Motors (GM) CEO Dan Akerson is joining us at Brainstorm Green later today.) How will automakers adjust when cars don't come first in how we think about cities?