 |
| BUILT UP FABRIC VERSUS STREET SCAPE NOTE AMOUNT OF SPACE WASTED ON CAR INFRASTRUCTURE |
If you have tried to drive within or towards Beirut and ended up spending double or triple the amount of time, it should take, this blog entry is for you. The excuses are endless and include “well it’s raining”, “there is an accident”, “a car stopped”. But the reality is that the massive ‘generated traffic’ is enough evidence to question and propose an alternative transport system, which recognizes the problems brought by the mass use of privately-owned cars (Newman and Kenworthy, 1999)
 |
| A CALM SATURDAY IN HAMRA |
Unfortunately Lebanon’s transport culture has become exclusively American, which favors automobile transportation and disregards the establishment of any public transport system. This results in unsustainable economic, social, and environmental burdens in addition to the cost of health problems, accidents and excessive construction and maintenance on land resources that are rare and limited. Most importantly labor and productivity is diminished due to traffic jams and higher costs of living (Newman and Kenworthy, 1999; Kay, 1997).
Studies have shown, even in the United States, that building more highways resulted in more congestion due to a number of related causes that, according to Newman and Kenworthy (1999) amongst others, include more sprawl.
So if you campaign for bigger roads please read about the unsuccessful experiences of the United States, Turkey, and England amongst others in this regard.
Light Railway is clearly the answer and has achieved international consensus (Hass-Klau, 2000; Kenworthy and Laube 2001). Several Mediterranean cities have proposed or established rail transport systems, including Casablanca, Rabat, and most notably, Cairo (Lowe, 1993). The advantages of rail transit systems surpass any other form of mass ground transport in dependability, speed, comfort and safety. Such a system will reduce land consumption, congestion, as well as air and noise pollution (Lowe, 1993; Newman and Kenworthy, 1999). Electric train systems greatly reduce dependence on oil but with our continuous power outages in Lebanon, I can already see your smirks.
Even though the blog invites its readers to dream of other possibilities, most of which are extreme, this blog entry will not propose a light railway system as the solution to our problems due to limited government funding. Instead, this entry puts forth a simpler proposal in the hope that I will reach my destination one day in Beirut and during this lifetime without driving like a maniac, cursing my way through and paying a ridiculous amount of money for gas and parking fees.
SOME NUMBERS (references 6 to 10)
The future is grim if we do not stop to think .
A 1970 study estimated that motorized person trips in Beirut were split as follows:
52 % by private car;
9 % by bus;
39 % by shared ('service') and unshared taxis
It is known that during the war there was no other forms of public transportation other than the shared and private taxis, both of which were automobiles seating four passengers.
In 1994, buses, vans and similar vehicles, both public and private, transported a maximum of 1.3 percent of all person trips in the Beirut metropolitan area.
Some recent studies estimated that in 1999
83 to 90% commuted using private cars
7 to 10% by bus + shared and unshared taxis
Cars have therefore increased by 538% from 1974 to 1998
 |
| It is deceiving to look at Beiruts map with its streets empty ...Therefor the second map depicts the reality of the mass versus void of the city |
This implies that looking at Beirut's urban fabric in a map is deceiving because its streets are not empty instead they are always so full and congested producing tons of decibels of sounds and pollutants and hardly any pedestrian pathways.
The second map highlights this and depicts the reality of the city's street-scape. A large congested city with hardly any breathing space.
The proposal
 |
| REDESIGNING LAND RECLAIMED FROM CARS! |
Improving the bus services is the quickest and most effective way to increase publ
