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The title line says "7 principles for building better cities." Because the transcript is in English, no translation is needed.
Let me add to the complexity of the situation we find ourselves in. At the same time that we're solving for climate change, we're going to be building cities for three billion people. That's a doubling of the urban environment. If we don't get that right, I'm not sure all the climate solutions in the world will save mankind, because so much depends on how we shape our cities: not just environmental impacts, but our social well-being, our economic vitality, our sense of community and connectedness. Fundamentally, the way we shape cities is a manifestation of the kind of humanity we bring to bear, and so getting it right is, I think, the order of the day. To a certain degree, getting it right can help us solve climate change, because in the end it's our behavior that seems to be driving the problem. The problem isn't free-floating, and it isn't just ExxonMobil and oil companies. It's us: how we live, how we live.
There's a villain in this story, and it's called sprawl, and I'll be upfront about that. But it's not just the kind of sprawl you think of, or many people think of, as low-density development out at the periphery of the metropolitan area. Actually, I think sprawl can happen anywhere, at any density. The key attribute is that it isolates people. It segregates people into economic enclaves and land-use enclaves. It separates them from nature. It doesn't allow the cross-fertilization and the interaction that make cities great places and that make society thrive. So the antidote to sprawl is really what we all need to be thinking about, especially when we're taking on this massive construction project.
Let me take you through one exercise we did. We developed a model for the state of California so they could get on with reducing carbon emissions. We did a whole series of scenarios for how the state could grow, and this is just one overly simplified one. We mixed different development prototypes and said they're going to carry us through the year 2050, with 10 million new people in our state of California. One would sprawl. It's just more of the same: shopping malls, subdivisions, office parks. The other one was dominated not by everybody moving to the city but by compact development, what we used to think of as streetcar suburbs: walkable neighborhoods, low-rise but integrated mixed-use environments. The results are astounding. They're astounding not just for the scale of the difference from this one shift in our city-making habits, but also because each one represents a special-interest group. Each group used to advocate for its concerns one at a time. They did not see what I call the co-benefits of urban form, and that allows them to join with others. Land-consumption environmentalists are really concerned about this. So are our farmers. There's a whole range of people, and of course neighborhood groups that want open space nearby.
The sprawl version of California almost doubles the urban physical footprint. The greenhouse gas savings are tremendous, because in California our biggest carbon emissions come from cars, and cities that don't depend on cars as much obviously create huge savings in vehicle miles traveled. That's what I was just talking about: reducing the average of about 10,000 miles per household per year, from somewhere in the mid-26,000s per household, has a huge impact, not just on air quality and carbon but also on the household pocketbook. It's very expensive to drive that much, and as we've seen, the middle class is struggling to hold on. Health care, you know, we were talking about how do you fix it once we broke it. Clean the air: why not just stop polluting? Why not just use our feet and bikes more? That's a function of the kinds of cities that we build, and they shave household costs.
2008 was a marker in time, not just of the financial industry running amok. It was that we were trying to sell too many of the wrong kind of housing: large-lot, single-family, distant, too expensive for the average middle-class family to afford, and, quite frankly, not a good fit for their lifestyle anymore. But in order to move inventory, you can discount the financing and get it sold. I think that's a lot of what happened. Reducing costs by ten thousand dollars, remember, in California where the median is fifty thousand, is a big element, and that's just cars and utility costs. So the affordable housing advocates, who often sit off in their silo separate from the environmentalists, separate from the politicians, everybody fighting with everyone, are now beginning to see common cause. I think the common cause is what really brings about the change.
Los Angeles, as a result of these efforts, has now decided to transform itself into a more transit-oriented environment. As a matter of fact, since then they voted in four hundred billion dollars of bonds for transit, as opposed to zero dollars for new highways. That's the transformation: LA becomes a city of walkers and transit, not a city of cars. How does it happen? You take the least desirable land, the strip, you add transit where there's space, and then you infill mixed-use development. You satisfy new housing demands, and you make the existing neighborhoods all around it more complex, more interesting, more walkable.
Okay, here's another kind of sprawl: China's high-density sprawl. It's what you might think of as an oxymoron, but it has the same problems: everything isolated in super-blocks. And of course there's this amazing smog that was just spoken to. Twelve percent of GDP in China is now spent on the health impacts of that. The history of Chinese cities, of course, is robust. It's like any other place: community was all about small local shops and local services, and walking and interacting with your neighbors. That may sound utopian, but it's not. It's actually what people really want. The new super-blocks are blocks that would have 5,000 units in them, and they're dated as well, because nobody knows anybody else. And of course there isn't even a sidewalk, no ground-floor shops, a very sterile environment. I found one case in one of the super-blocks where people had illicitly set up shops in their garages so that they could have that kind of local service economy. The desire of people to get it right is there. We just have to get the planners on board, and the politicians.
All right, some more technical planning stuff. Chongqing is a city of 30 million people. It's almost as big as California. This is a small growth area. They wanted us to test the alternative to sprawl in several cities across China. This is for four and a half million people. The takeaway from this image is that every one of those circles is a walking radius around a transit station: massive investment in metro and BRT, and a distribution that allows everybody to work within walking distance of that. The red area: this is a blow-up. All of a sudden our principles called for green space, preserving the important ecological features. And then those other streets in there are auto-free streets. So instead of bulldozing, leveling the site, and building right up to the river, this green edge was something that really wasn't normative in China until these sets of practices began experimentation there. The urban fabric has small blocks, maybe 500 families per block. They know each other. The street perimeter has shops, so there's local destinations, and the streets themselves become smaller because there are more of them. Very simple, straightforward urban design.
Now, here you have something I'd ideally love. Think of the logic: if only a third of the people have cars, why do we give 100 percent of our streets to cars? What if we gave 70 percent of the streets to be car-free, to everybody else, so the transit could move well, so they could walk, so they could bike? Why not have geographic equity in our circulation system? Quite frankly, cities would function better. No matter what they do, no matter how many ring roads they build in Beijing, they just can't overcome complete gridlock. So this is an auto-free street, mixed-use along the edge, with transit running down the middle. I'm happy to make that transit autonomous vehicles, but maybe I'll have a chance to talk about that later.
So there are seven principles that have now been adopted at the highest levels in the Chinese government, and they're moving to implement them. They're simple, and I think they are globally universal principles. One is to preserve the natural environment, the history, and the critical agriculture. Second is mix. Mixed use is popular, but when I say mix I mean mix incomes, mix age groups, as well as mixed land use. Walk: there's no great city that you don't enjoy walking in. You don't go to the places you go on vacation and then find they're places you can't walk. Why not make it everywhere? Bike is the most efficient means of transportation. We know China has now adopted policies that put six meters of bike lane on every street. They're serious about getting back to their biking history. Complicated planner-easier: connect it. It's a street network that allows many routes instead of singular routes, and provides many kinds of streets instead of just one. We have to invest more in transit. There's no silver bullet. Autonomous vehicles are not going to solve this for us. As a matter of fact, they're going to generate more traffic and more VMT than the alternative. And focus: we have a hierarchy of the city based on transit rather than the old armature of freeways. It's a big paradigm shift, but those two things have to get reconnected in ways that really shape the structure of the city.
So I'm very hopeful. In California, the United States, and China, these changes are well accepted. I'm hopeful for two reasons. One is that most people get it. They understand intrinsically what a great city can and should be. The second is that the kind of analysis we can bring to bear now allows people to connect the dots, allows people to shape political coalitions that didn't exist in the past, and allows them to bring into being the kinds of communities we all need. Thank you.
Okay, so, autonomous driving, self-driving cars. A lot of people here are very excited about them. What are your concerns or issues about them? Well, I think there's almost too much hype here. First, everybody says we're going to get rid of a lot of cars. What they don't say is that you're going to get a lot more vehicle miles, a lot more cars moving on streets, and there's going to be more congestion, because they're so appealing to people who would otherwise be driving, eating, or sleeping. A couple of reasons. One is that if they're privately owned, people will travel greater distances. It will be a new lease on life for sprawl. If you can work on your way to work, you can live in more remote locations. It'll revitalize sprawl in a way that I'm deeply frightened of. Taxis: about 50% of the surveys say that people won't share them. If they don't share them, you can end up with a 90% increase in vehicle miles traveled. If you share them, you're still at around a 30% increase in VMT. Sharing, the meaning of having multiple people riding at once: yes, in my view, it's like Uber Share, without a steering wheel. The reality is the efficiency of vehicles. You can do it with or without a steering wheel; it doesn't matter. They claim that they're the only ones that are going to be efficient, electric, but that's not true. But the real bottom line is that walking, biking, and transit are the way cities and communities thrive, and putting people in their private bubbles, whether they have a steering wheel or not, is the wrong direction. And quite frankly, the image of a car on its way to McDonald's to pick up a pack, without its owner, just being sent off on these kinds of random errands, is really frightening.
Well, thank you for that. I have to say, the images you showed of those mixed-use streets were really inspiring and really beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much.