Oli Davey, Urban Movement

I’ve often thought that my profession – traffic engineering – is the one with the most under-appreciated (and under-exploited) potential to do good. And a few years back I read a book which does a good job of helping to explain why this potential so often fails to be realised. It’s called The Shaping of Us and it’s written by Lily Bernheimer. But let’s start with an abridged version of my case for traffic engineering.
 
If you want to make people healthier, wealthier and happier, to reduce their environmental impact and to strengthen social cohesion, I believe that no other profession has the potential to do so to the extent that traffic engineering can. This is why I have no problem telling anyone that will listen that the job of designing our urban streets is the most important in the world. The big problem is – as you might have been about to point out – very few traffic engineers seem willing or able to realise this positive potential. In fact, we’re commonly painted as ‘the bad guys’ of street design.
 
A big part of the explanation for our profession’s seeming inability to consistently create public spaces that realise their full potential concerns another profession that almost never gets mentioned in connection with our streets. Whilst it has become increasingly common for traffic engineers to recognise and incorporate the contributions of urban designers and landscape architects in their work, the profession of Environmental Psychology remains a mystery to most. 
 
This specialism concerns itself with the relationship between people and the environments in which they live their lives – how these places impact our feelings, behaviour and identities, and how they shape the way we interact and communicate. The places we inhabit function like a secret script directing our actions. It’s a script we play a part in writing by choosing where to work, where to socialise and where we call home. But although humans have demonstrated huge power to manipulate our environment, too often we appear to have created towns and cities that work against our best interests.
 
The full potential of our streets will not be realised until we first understand that the design of every space in which we live our lives, including the street on which we live, the walk to the train station, our local high street and our kids journey to school, shapes us in ways that most of us seem unable or unprepared to grasp. And this (lack of) understanding applies just as much to other professions involved in street design as it does to traffic engineering.
 
Whether we like it or not, and whether we yet acknowledge it or not, we have the power to change ourselves by changing our streets. A greater appreciation of environmental psychology can enable us all make better choices.
 
So, rather than simply asking, ‘What can we do to our streets?’ us traffic engineers – and others – would do well to also ask, ‘What can our streets do to us?’.

The Good Life (and how to live it) by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz summarises the findings of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. This research has been going-on for a rather incredible eighty-four years (and counting) and has tracked the same individuals (over 700 in the first cohort), asking thousands of questions and taking hundreds of measurements to find out what really keeps people healthy and happy. Through all the years of studying these lives, one crucial factor stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health, and longevity. Contrary to what many people might think, it’s not career achievement, or exercise, or a healthy diet. While these things matter (a lot), one thing continuously demonstrates its broad and enduring importance: good relationships.
 
The study has found that relationships stand out for their power and consistency in being key to a flourishing life, keeping us healthier and happier. The evidence suggests that people who are more connected to family, to friends, and to community, are happier and physically healthier than people who are less well connected. Conversely, people who are more isolated than they want to be find their health declining sooner than people who feel connected to others. Lonely people also live shorter lives. In fact, those people who suggest that they are most satisfied with their relationships at age 50 were found to be the healthiest (mentally and physically) at age 80. Loneliness is also associated with being more sensitive to pain, suppression of the immune system, diminished brain function, and less effective sleep. The book also reports on other recent research that has shown that, for older people, loneliness is twice as unhealthy as obesity, and chronic loneliness increases a person’s odds of death in any given year by 26 percent.
 
Simply put, the frequency and quality of contact with other people are two major predictors of whether we are happy and healthy. We need love, connection and a feeling of belonging. And the basic benefits of human connection do not appear to change much from one neighbourhood to the next, from one city to the next, from one country to the next, or from one race to the next. The capacity of relationships to affect our well-being and health appears to be universal.
 
The question for us then becomes ‘how can we increase the frequency and quality of contact that people experience with everyone from their immediate family to their wider community through the design of our streets and spaces?’ How can we generate real social value by enabling people to create and nurture more and stronger relationships? If it has become the norm for many people to commute for over an hour each way every day in a car on their own then surely their relationships, and therefore their health and happiness will suffer? Equally, if the streets that people live on are so dominated by traffic that the opportunity to get to know their neighbours is all but lost then, again, we must be negatively impacting on people’s health and happiness. And if we are creating town centres with nothing but bleak and hostile streets that facilitate only the most basic functions of connecting buildings are we not limiting peoples opportunities to find connection and a feeling of belonging? If I needed any more proof that those who design our streets and public spaces had the most important job in the world (which I don’t!) then surely this is it?

A few months ago I listened to an interview with Nate Hagens who gave what I think is a really thought-provoking and unique perspective on the twin challenges of the climate and energy crisis’. I’ve attempted to summarise his thinking below (and hopefully done it justice), because of its obvious implications for both transport and the design of our urban streets.
 
He begins by noting that for the vast majority of humankinds existence, and even until relatively recently, the most a person could hope to achieve in a day was limited to their own strength and endurance. If they were lucky, they might be able to supplement this with the work of an obliging horse or ox. But humankinds output increased only marginally over the course of tens of thousands of years, with subsequent generations improving only imperceptibly in the amount of work they could get done in a single day.
 
However, Nate Hagens then points out how the industrial revolution changed all of this. The discovery of coal, oil and gas along with the development of technologies to harness their energy turbocharged humankind and helped to lift millions of people out of poverty. For the first time, a person could achieve far more in a day than they ever could before. Seen this way, he suggests that this period is probably more accurately referred to as the energy revolution. He likens fossil fuels to a golden handshake from the earth – a one-off consignment of condensed energy from the sun to kick-start a productivity revolution that has continued growing ever since. And all we had to do was simply find these fossil fuels – a free gift of ancient, concentrated sunlight that we didn’t have to make ourselves or even have to process a great deal. They were pretty much ready and waiting to start powering whatever machine we could dream up.
 
He suggests that the 7.8 billion people that currently live on this planet can now do the work of the equivalent of over 500 billion people. Whether it’s the speed at which we can travel, the scale of the structures that we can build or even the computing power of our laptops, they have all been made possible by our fossil fuel grant. But we are also using up this limited supply of the suns bottled-energy at a rate 10 million times quicker than it was created. And now the good times of simply digging up the energy that we require to power our growth are coming to an end. Now, we must stand on our own two feet and find ways of actually making our own energy. 
 
A big part of this shift is obviously being driven by the damage that the burning of these fossil fuels is doing to our delicately balanced planet. But even for those who are sceptical about the impact that humankinds’ actions are having on the ice caps there is another issue. In just a few short generations we will have run-out of fossil fuels in any real sense. They will no-longer be the go-to energy source because they will simply be too rare and too difficult to unearth. We will need to find new ways to power our productivity or accept that our monumental period of sustained growth is coming to an end.
 
Worryingly, he points out that potential replacements, such as wind, solar and hydro power, all suffer from intermittent generation, whilst nuclear has a similar issue to fossil fuels in that the planet only contains the equivalent of approximately 60 to 70 years’ worth of suitable uranium. Plus, all of the above alternatives are used to generate electricity – a power source that currently accounts for just 21% of our total usage. 
 
With domestic transport having the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions of any sector across the UK economy (at 23% in 2019) and the majority of these emissions (55%) coming from passenger cars, understanding how the energy landscape will change over the next few decades will be crucial. Furthermore, with the potential for transport emissions to need to fall by 34-45% by 2030 and 65-76% by 2035, despite having remained resolutely unchanged for the last four decades whilst other sectors of the economy (most notably Energy Supply and Business) have achieved significant reductions, starts to look like an even taller order than it may have already done. It is fair to say that the future is likely to look very different even if it continues to be one that is defined by the energy that we use. 
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UM partnered with ARUP to develop concept design proposals for the Main Street in Carrigaline, as part of the bigger Transport and Public Realm Enhancement Project for the whole town.

The project vision is to “provide the framework for an integrated transport network for Carrigaline with a focus on rejuvenating the town centre, creating a vibrant environment connecting with enhanced cycle and pedestrian amenities for residents and promoting connectivity with surrounding communities.”

The consented plans for Main Street will create a new town centre with a market square, improved access to the river, additional space outside cafes and bars for tables and chairs, new street trees and planting with additional social spaces - all enhanced by reduced vehicle flows and calmed traffic for better walking and cycling.

To create the new public spaces on the street, parking throughout the town was re-organised whilst retaining some strategic spaces for loading and disabled parking.

We are looking forward to working with Arup on the detailed designs for Main Street in the coming months.

​More information can be found on Cork County Council's website.